Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core
Collabora and Valve detail Holo Core, an unofficial aarch64 port of Arch Linux for Steam Frame, and the CI tooling needed to replay its build history.
Collabora, working with Valve, is developing Holo Core — an aarch64 port of Arch Linux intended to underpin the OS for Valve's Steam Frame device. Since Arch Linux has no official aarch64 support, the team had to build custom tooling and CI infrastructure capable of rebuilding thousands of interdependent packages from a snapshot of Arch's rolling-release history.
The effort tackles hard problems unique to porting a rolling-release distro: correcting build ordering not reflected in the upstream state repository, managing SONAME transitions in core build tools like icu and gpgme, and coping with source rot, changing checksums, and anti-bot restrictions on upstream hosting as historical builds are replayed. The team's "build replay" system can reconstruct a full dependency chain from an initial bootstrap up to a specific point-in-time snapshot, executed reproducibly via GitLab CI.
As a first public step, Collabora has released preview binary packages, sources, and development containers, letting anyone experiment with Arch Linux on aarch64 today. The underlying tooling itself remains unpublished while the team works toward a continuously operating CI system that can track Arch Linux as it evolves, with plans to collaborate with the upstream Arch Linux project on its own aarch64 porting efforts.