As stated here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...cs-4175711199/

It should be a fun recording. Stuart and I have some ideas already. Ultimately we record for the community. Any and all suggestions are welcome! This coming episode will be about Slackware in general and not just the ARM ports.

Thanks Brent, yes basically since people seem to enjoy watching the ARM Slackware podcast, going behind the wizards curtain (to to speak), myself and some of the Slackware core team thought we'd do a call and discuss some topics for which we'd ordinarily use our chat group for - talking perhaps about what's coming next and what's going on now.
I thought we could have part of it where we can try to answer some of the community's questions.

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Thanks for the heads up. I'll make sure to pop in, although I don't anticipate using ARM in the near future.

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I'm extremely new to ARM and after trying several distros on my new RockPro64 with 3 goals in mind - 1) Learn ARM in general. 2) Discover what distro can be best used on a PinePhone, and ultimately, 3) Setup a low power NAS.

I found out Slackware ARM has a lot more steps but they are easy steps and the end result is superb - a nearly Full Current Install, familiar and surprisingly adept and powerful. Some dedicated NAS distros, especially Arufan-based, would not recognize my PCIe SATA adapter card an, partly due to the SP1 flash I think, Slackware got everything right. I'm not adept at X11Forwarding yet to get a common NAS interface but NFS works great so I think I can make a true NAS format in time even though NFS is sufficient.

Slackware ARM makes it easy to continue to try out others without buying a bunch of eMMC or MicroSD cards thanks to being installed on an SATA SSD. At some point I may try an NVME card and drive.

In any case, Oh Yeah! I will be visiting your channel regularly. SBCs are a big part of the future. Will it be a horrendous mess to adapt to RISC-V? I'm getting excited about custom embedded systems.

Thanks, Guys. Once again, Slackware RULZ!

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Wheat about chewing up a bit about booting ARM architectures ? How to make boot sd cards, usb sticks and eventually
aut detecting the correct arm device ?

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Building for ARM targets.

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It's great to hear positive feedback! We have some great documentation on docs.slackware.com too about the installation process. Let either myself or Stuart know if there are any other issues. I feel the Aarch64 port was designed so well by Stuart that much of the documentation from other parts of the SlackDocs wiki applies to it.

Great ideas! The channel covers some of this in season 2, but a few dedicated episodes would be interesting to share. We have not done a full episode on how to add hardware support to a new board. Or how the sd card images and u-boot binaries are generated. Or what it looks like when booting a machine for the first time and finding out kernel modules are missing. Which results in various components not functioning correctly, or not at all.

I always enjoy hearing about the development environment and how the hardware is used in production. Or maybe not production but for entertainment purposes.

Does anyone else have some ideas?

As I stated I am Rank Noob at SBCs but I'm a many decade computing veteran (started building my own from parts, even supposedly dead parts, since around 1989). I am curious about the process and ability to compile, even SBOs on ARM Slackware. I tried a simple Slackbuild (libminizip) and was pleased it even began but after about 15 minutes I saw it was in a loop due to some missing lib. Are there guidelines for what can be built right on an ARM Slackware system or is it better to cross-platform build on a PC?

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It really depends what you are building and how many extra computers you have laying around. I think you should start a new thread and we can discuss it more there. Preferably in the Slackware ARM sub-forum.

Thanks for the ideas for more episodes on the ARM topic - we'll aim to cover some of these in the coming episodes.

The point of this particular post however, was to highlight that some of the other members of the Slackware development team will be there who don't work on ARM, so if there are any questions about Slackware in general we can cover them.

There is only me in the team who does a podcast so it'll be published under the Slackware ARM podcast channel rather than elsewhere.

Exactly! There seem to be two (maybe more?) philosophies for booting ARM. The most common seems to be Uboot, but to someone not "in the know", it appears to be very convoluted! Slarm64 also offers the prospect of booting the kernel directly, by-passing Uboot entirely. This seems to be much quicker, and also similar to the X86 world with which most of us are more familiar.

Some explanation of each and the reasons for selecting one over the other would be most welcome!

--
Pete

The ARM boot process really is unlike x86.

The Linux Kernel is booted from a secondary stage boot loader. You cannot be without a boot loader.
This explains it nicely.

If you're referring to why Slackware chainloads U-Boot on an RPi, this is explained within the installation documentation.
Other than that I'm not sure what you're referring to.

You can continue this thread on the ARM forum as it's not related to this post - I'm happy to explain it, although you'll find most answers within the source tree directly. Everything is fully commented in Slackware.

This sounds great :-)
I don't have any specific questions, although I would love to hear more about the process and discussion around the general direction/philosophy of Slackware and how it adapts to new trends and developments. I'm thinking of past things like pam, hal->udev, *kit->elogind, uefi, as well as things like wayland, pipewire and obviously systemd.
Slackware is sensibly conservative, but is inevitably constrained by choices made in the wider FOSS world, and I would love to hear more about how the team weighs up the pros and cons of what direction to take.
Looking forward to it!

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