Happy to announce that Void now officially supports a number of aarch64 UEFI devices, including:
- Apple Silicon macs (using components from @AsahiLinux)
- Thinkpad X13s (Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3-based laptop)
- Pinebook Pro by @PINE64 (Rockchip RK3399-based laptop)
New installation images are available for all supported platforms (x86_64, i686, aarch64, armv7l, and armv6l): https://voidlinux.org/news/2025/02/new-images.html
@classabbyamp @AsahiLinux @PINE64 I may have to switch my PBP to this
@piggz
Adopting Void to run on any hardware that already runs some sort of linux is relatively easy, there is a script that facilitates building of base root filesystem, which you can decompress on the target machine and make the bootloader it uses load Void's kernel and initial ramdisk image.
I have once made it work on Toshiba AC100 — one of the earliest ARM netbooks: https://social.librem.one/@m0xee/110448217215369488
@piggz
The Tegra chip it uses lacks VFPv3 instructions so binary packages were all failing with SIGILL, but as this machine only has 512 Mb RAM, building software on it natively smells like a problem, right? Not at all — xbps-src makes cross-compilation really easy, you can do it on a more performant machine that you have even on one having a completely different CPU ISA!
It was a fun laptop for lightweight Gemini browsing until its display panel died 😢
