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by Charon77 9 days ago
Archlinuxarm is a fork. The name is confusing because it's a fork with the same name and logo, but they have got permission to do so

Arch linux aarch64 port is not a fork, it uses the same upstream PKGBUILD which contains minimal aarch64 specific conditional compilation and config

https://ports.archlinux.page/

I think even this project was not being mentioned so maybe they are not aware of each other
2 comments
yjftsjthsd-h 9 days ago
> Arch linux aarch64 port is not a fork, it uses the same upstream PKGBUILD which contains minimal aarch64

I was under the impression that that's what ALARM was. And that seems supported by https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/master/core/R... (and the small number of packages in that repo). Was I mistaken?

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Charon77 9 days ago
I posted about this here https://charon.konekopi.com/posts/archlinux_on_arm/

But to answer your question:

A lot of ALARM core repositories are out of date, their extra repositories are even worse. chromium has been broken for like 1.5 year or so (I think it's fixed recently). Can't really blame them, they need to support older armv7 hardwares. Their packages are also for armv7 instead of the aarch64 architectures used by a lot of tablets/PC nowadays, so there's a huge performance/compatibility tradeoff they're making.

Arch linux aarch64 port is as the name says, aarch64 only, the people don't really care for older RPi. And because their work lives on the official arch linux repo, the pkgbuilds by definition won't be out of date. However package building are still community maintained, and will be out of date in that regards.

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KetoManx64 8 days ago
Very interesting! I'm going to have to test if I can switch my Asahi ALARM M1 Macbook to official repos. I know when I use the AUR for packages, they typically have both x86 and aarch64 paclage instructions, maybe 10% or so don't and then I just clone the file and add it in manually.
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Charon77 8 days ago
You can start by changing only the extra package url to the aarch64 arch linux. Do keep in mind that while the aarch64 pkgbuilds are official arch, the package building and distribution is community. they're currently compiling for armv8.2, while some are maintaining armv8, and these mismatch can cause program to crash with illegal instructions and what not.
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sastraxi 9 days ago
Cool! More digging to do. I used ALARM to build some rpi images, it worked really well but alas we ended up going back to the base rpi os (Debian) due to the rolling release schedule making reproducible builds more difficult. I’m still thinking through the conceptual correct solution for an appliance…
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Charon77 9 days ago
As much as I am an avid arch linux fanboy, I don't think it's a good choice for "an appliance", the frequent update might cause unnecessary wear and tear for the storage chips if they use flash memory/sd card.

Lazy me would often update pacman database and upgrade just a few packages. Living dangerously but often times it doesn't really matter

If reproducible build is important maybe consider NixOS?

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