Julia 1.14-DEV ppc64le

Julia 1.14-DEV ppc64le

(release notes by Claude Code)
First snapshot of the ppc64le-tier1 branch — Julia source-built for
PowerPC ppc64le-linux-gnu with two downstream patches needed to get
the standard test suite to a clean baseline on Power9.

Build provenance

• Branch: ppc64le-tier1 at commit f962829baa
• Julia version: 1.14.0-DEV
• Bundled LLVM: 20.1.8 (with one downstream patch, see below)
• Host: Power9, Fedora CoreOS 43, Ubuntu 24.04 reference container
  (contrib/ppc64le/Containerfile)

Tarball

julia-f962829baa-linuxppc64le.tar.gz is the standard Julia binary
layout — extract and run julia-f962829baa/bin/julia. Relocatable;
should run on any glibc ppc64le Linux that has the usual runtime
(libstdc++, libgcc, libpthread).

Patches over upstream Julia 1.14-DEV

1. aotcompile: skip cross-package PLT thunk on PowerPC
   (commit 3357ee3918) — works around the long-standing LLVM PPC
   musttail bug (llvm/llvm-project#108014, #63214, #56679) by
   routing the cross-package SPECSIG call site through the existing
   boxed-args fallback on PPC instead of emit_pkg_plt_thunk's
   varargs-musttail trampoline. Cost: one box/unbox per cross-package
   call. Without this, stdlib AOT precompile fails during the first
   make release.

2. deps: backport LLVM PR #131844 (Promote FREEZE for f16) to bundled 20.1.8 (commit f962829baa) — verbatim subset of
   upstream commit 5b6b4fdb. Adds the missing case ISD::FREEZE
   in DAGTypeLegalizer::PromoteFloatResult. Without this, any IR
   with freeze half (which GVN/InstCombine inject at -O2+ to
   discharge poison) aborts in JIT/AOT codegen with
   "LLVM ERROR: Do not know how to promote this operator's result!".
   Surfaces in stdlib Random (Float16 in rand! type list), in
   Statistics (Float16 in middle), in SparseArrays' Float16
   linalg / cholmod paths, and as Distributed-worker hangs in
   JuliaLowering_stdlibs, Test, and cmdlineargs. Already in
   upstream release/21.x and release/22.x; LLVM release/20.x
   was closed at 20.1.8 without backport. Drop this patch when
   bundled LLVM is bumped to ≥21.

Test status (make test-<name> inside the reference container)

Suite	Result
Random	223353 / 223353 pass (3m59s)
Statistics	935 / 935 pass (2m59s)
JuliaLowering_stdlibs	clean (5m56s, 110 dep configs precompiled)
Profile	19565 pass, 2 broken
Tar	3865 pass, 11 broken
Test	742 pass, 17 broken (2m45s)
cmdlineargs	508 pass, 5 broken (12m16s)
SparseArrays	30924 / 30930 pass, 1 stdlib-version-skew error*
Pkg	passes apart from 2 .cov instrumentation tests**

* SparseArrays/test/linalg.jl:826 constructs SymTridiagonal with
a deliberately mismatched ev length, expecting it to succeed. The
current LinearAlgebra/src/tridiag.jl:12 constructor throws
DimensionMismatch. This is a stdlib version skew, identical
failure expected on x86, not a PPC issue.

** Pkg/test/extensions.jl:21,41 run Pkg.test(...; coverage=true)
and expect .cov files in the test package directory. None are
written — likely an interaction between the rootless-podman :Z
SELinux mount and the spawned subprocess's coverage output, not PPC
codegen.

Known limitations

• Built with USE_BINARYBUILDER_LLVM=0; LLVM is patched and statically
  linked in.

Acknowledgements

LLVM FREEZE fix authored upstream by Matt Arsenault
(llvm/llvm-project#131844, merged 2025-03-19). This release is just
the downstream backport for LLVM release/20.x. Backport analysis
and packaging assisted by Anthropic Claude.

v1.9.0-DEV

Merge branch 'JuliaLang:master' into master