Collabora announce a preview of Holo Core, an AArch64 port of Arch Linux for Steam Frame

Open source firm Collabora who work with Valve (Steam), just announced a preview of Holo Core – the aarch64 port of Arch Linux for Steam Frame.

Valve’s SteamOS is based on a snapshot of Arch Linux along with a bunch of their own patches, and to get it all working on Arm it needed a fair amount of effort because Arch Linux doesn’t support it officially. Collabora revealed that they’ve now published the first bits of the aarch64 port including the prepared binaries, their sources, and the development containers – they said it will allow anyone to experiment with Arch Linux on aarch64.

“At this stage, we have not rebuilt the entire world (all the packages available in the Arch Linux repositories). Our initial goal is to provide the set of packages required for development and image creation for the Steam Frame. Even when limiting ourselves to this subset of Arch Linux packages, including these packages along with their runtime and build dependencies still results in several thousand packages.

The idea behind this port is much more complex than simply recompiling and installing selected packages for the aarch64 architecture. We are trying to solve two main problems:

• Build binaries from recent Arch package versions for a foreign architecture.
• Create a CI system capable of building binaries for a distribution that currently has no CI infrastructure of its own. As Arch Linux is a rolling-release distribution, enable this CI system to determine the correct dependencies to use as the distribution updates”

The Collabora blog post goes into a fair bit more detail on some of the challenges this involved, and they hope to be able to open it up more to bring it all to the upstream Arch Linux project for the benefit of the whole open source community.

We also just recently had a big update to the SteamVR UI, clearly in preparation for the Steam Frame. It’s all starting to come together now for Valve’s hardware.

Hopefully I’ll actually be able to get my hands on a Steam Frame to review, as I’m currently stuck in the waitlist for the Steam Machine – which means I might not get one for a long time as Valve didn’t reply for a unit. Fingers crossed.

🌐 External Sources: collabora.com
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.