Parabola GNU/Linux-libre supports ARMv7

2015-10-03 - Parabola community

Today we're announcing that Parabola GNU/Linux-libre has support for ARMv7 architecture,

In December 2014 Parabola started discussing options to support this architecture to give support for more devices as single-board computers and in August 2015 we begun our plan to sync and liberate packages from Arch ARM, also port all x86 packages from our repos.

Our first kernel for ARMv7 has been created since 20th August, but in the developing progress, we cancelled it because were found blobs inside the RCN patch and we thought that it could avoid start up our distro on those devices.

However, after some days under discussion about it, we paid attention those blobs aren't needed, therefore we did the RCN patch deblobbing. Then, after many testing days, we checked our patched kernel worked well without issues and instabilities.

Meanwhile, we received a proposal by coadde (one of our hackers) to port GRUB for ARMv7 to use 2 or more kernels in the same system, so our kernels were renamed to custom names (eg. vmlinuz-linux-libre-grsec). Now, grub package has been developed and available from our repos, but uboot4grub packages are needed to start up the ARMv7 devices for GRUB usage. Therefore, we let you know when it's done.

At the moment, Parabola supports U-Boot like Arch ARM does, therefore it works well on many single-board computers such as the Beagleboard and the BeagleBone.

On the higher end, there is support for:

  • ARMv7 first generation Cortex-A8 platforms, such as the BeagleBoard or Cubieboard
  • ARMv7 second generation Cortex-A9 and Tegra platforms, such as the PandaBoard or TrimSlice
  • ARMv7 third generation Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 platforms, such as the Cubieboard2, Samsung Chromebook (series 3) or Samsung Chromebook 2

However, our ARM version can run on any device that works without running a nonfree program and supports ARMv7 instruction sets.

Currently, we have a article how to migrate from the GNU/Linux distribution of Arch ARM, but Installation Guide and the tarballs to start install Parabola from scratch are under developing yet, therefore, we let you know when it done.

Happy hacking \o/