---
title: 'Additional stage downloads for amd64, ppc, x86, arm available'
---
Following some technical reorganization and the introduction of new hardware,
the [Gentoo Release Engineering team](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng) is happy to offer
a much-expanded set of [stage files for download](https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/). Highlights are
in particular the inclusion of [musl](https://musl.libc.org/)-based stages and of POWER9-optimized
ppc64 downloads, as well as additional [systemd](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/)-based
variants for many architectures.
For amd64, [Hardened](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened)/SELinux stages are now
available directly from the download page, as are stages based on the lightweight C standard library
[musl](https://musl.libc.org/). Note that [musl](https://musl.libc.org/) requires using the musl overlay,
as described on the [page of the Hardened musl project](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened_musl).
For ppc, little-endian stages optimized for the POWER9 CPU series have been added, as have
been big- and little-endian Hardened musl downloads.
Additionally, for all of amd64, ppc64, x86, and arm, stages are now
available in both an [OpenRC](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC) and a
[systemd](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/) init system / service manager variant
wherever that makes sense.
This all has become possible via the introduction of new build hosts. The amd64, x86
(natively), arm (via [QEMU](https://www.qemu.org/)), and riscv (via
[QEMU](https://www.qemu.org/)) archives are built on
an AMD Ryzen™ 7 3700X 8-core machine with 64GByte of RAM, located in [Hetzner](https://www.hetzner.com/)'s
Helsinki datacentre. The ppc, ppc64, and ppc64le / power9le builds are handled
by two 16-core POWER9 machines with 32GByte of RAM, provided by
[OSUOSL POWER Development Hosting](https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/).
Further, at the moment an arm64 (aka aarch64) machine with an 80-core Ampere Altra CPU and 256GByte of
RAM, provided by [Equinix](https://www.equinix.com/) through
the [Works On Arm program](https://www.worksonarm.com/), is being prepared for improved native arm64 and
arm support, so expect updates there soon!