2016-09-17

aarch64 support has landed!

Thanks to a lot of effort of Christian Neukirchen and the help of Duncan Overbruck getting the builder up and running the aarch64 target is now officially supported by Void, so you can now run Void on your 64-bit ARM computers without compiling everything yourself!

In March 2015, Chris bootstrapped the first aarch64 base-system — without any access to real hardware. Everything was cross-compiled or used a really slow QEMU when this wasn’t possible. Mid-2015, Void got access to a virtualized instance on a real aarch64 machine (thanks to DataCentred), an offer which unfortunately shut down in late 2015.

In May 2016, Chris bought an ODROID-C2 and resumed porting. Soon, the first installable image was prepared and ran on native hardware.

In September 2016, a virtual machine was dedicated to be the official aarch64 cross-builder, and now packages are officially provided (both for glibc and musl)—so far in the seperate repository: https://repo.voidlinux.eu/current/aarch64.

We are still looking for powerful native aarch64 hardware to avoid cross-compiling, and also to build 32-bit ARM packages natively.

We thank all contributors for making this port possible, especially Nick Jones from DataCentred and the folks from Arch Linux ARM.