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Conflicts

Reviewers, this pull request conflicts with the following ones:

• lint: run mypy over contrib/devtools #20451 (lint: run mypy over contrib/devtools by fanquake)
• contrib: Parse ELF directly for symbol and security checks #20434 (contrib: Parse ELF directly for symbol and security checks by laanwj)
• build: Link time garbage collection #18605 (build: Link time garbage collection by fanquake)

If you consider this pull request important, please also help to review the conflicting pull requests. Ideally, start with the one that should be merged first.

Concept ACK

Not convinced, though, that we need a set of both big and little-endian binaries. What is the default on this platform? If you can only test little-endian, I think it's better to leave it at that.
(looks like both Debian and Fedora support LE, or are moving to it)

Also (not for this PR): what would be really interesting is running the gitian build (for all platforms) on the secure workstation. This would remove the single point of failure of dependency Intel/AMD platforms for the build.

There is no default. Some older systems can only boot to big endian. Newer systems come in either BE and LE variant. Unfortunately, one cannot run even static BE binaries on LE or vice-versa (on Linux, anyway).

At least RHEL, SuSE, and Adélie ship big-endian images.

Big endian is simple to run in KVM paravirt on the little-endian systems with a performance hit of less than 1%. This should be very easy to test, especially with Gentoo, since Gentoo can make a cross-root somewhere and then you can just point KVM at that disk.

Any POWER7 or older system, including most workstations before the Talos (including IBM's post-RS and Apple's 970), are exclusively big endian.

Any system (of any generation) running openSuSE Tumbleweed or Adélie is exclusively big endian.

Any POWER7 or older system, including most workstations before the Talos (including IBM's post-RS and Apple's 970), are exclusively big endian.

Those are outside the scope of this PR, though, OP mentions this is POWER8+.

Rebased

Guix builds

Gitian builds

Now that #20434 is merged the symbol/security tooling-related changes should be able to be dropped here.

🐙 This pull request conflicts with the target branch and needs rebase.

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Would be good to get this in early in the 0.22 cycle. But it needs rebase; ping @luke-jr .

Closing in favor of #20963.