petsc builds successfully on a kfreebsd porterbox (falla.debian.org, kfreebsd-amd64). Perhaps the past failure on buildds is related to PIE settings, which were recently fixed in dpkg/gcc. So please give back petsc on kfreebsd gb petsc_3.7.5+dfsg1-4 . kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386 Thanks, Drew