Hi cross-distro readers,
the openSUSE on ARM team was quite busy the last few weeks with getting openSUSE 12.3 for AArch64 ready. At the time of this post, we have finished around 4000-4100 packages (out of ~ 6000) of the current state of the openSUSE 12.3 project for AArch64. With those successfully built packages, we’re also able to build a regular openSUSE image for you to try and run in the ARMv8 System emulator (ARMv8 Foundation Model).
This is a huge achievement and milestone for us, thanks to lots of helpful hands in openSUSE. Just to put this into context: This is not a minimal system with a couple of toolchain packages. It is also not an embedded variant of a Linux environment. No, this is the full featured, standard openSUSE distribution as you’re used to, ported to AArch64, up and running. We have built it based on (slightly newer versions of) standard openSUSE 12.3 packages, and the changes are mostly already merged back into openSUSE Factory. For all we know it’s also more successful package builds than any other Linux distribution has on AArch64! If you’d like to see the status yourself, please check out the OBS repository we created for this [1].
As an open distribution, it is important to make contributions easy and we worked hard to enable others to participate in our effort. We extended OBS (the Open Build Service) to automatically spawn a Foundation Model virtual machine when you want to build for aarch64. This works remotely on the OBS server as well as locally using osc build. Building for AArch64 is therefore as easy as building for any other architecture, and it feels native to all who are familiar with the OBS. More information on this is available on the respective wiki page [2].
So, dive right into it: Get the image and start with openSUSE on AArch64 by following our wiki page: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM/AArch64.
Please contact the openSUSE Team at opensuse-arm@opensuse.org
Greetings, Dirk (openSUSE ARM Team)
[1] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=devel:ARM:AArch64:12.3 [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM/AArch64