Donations being accepted for 32bit hard float port
 

Hello

The 32-bit hard float port is almost complete. I'll probably push it out to the FTP site in September unless the auto builder completes within the next couple of weeks, and I'm satisfied with the tests.

The plan is to maintain in the same fashion as the soft float port: a small set of "officially supported" devices (currently it's what the soft float port had, minus kirkwood (so Trimslice, Banana Pi and QEMU)), and the community will continue to support "Device du jour".

OS maintenance will be the same as the soft float port: the last stable release plus between 4-6 months support for the previous stable release (so for example 14.1 would be maintained for 4-6 months after 14.2 is released), ad infinitum.

I'll probably add support for new devices that look like nice toys as time and money permits: I have Orange PI One (Allwinner A20 - same SoC as the Banana Pi) and Orange Pi H3 versions that the OrangePi company sent as samples. I started playing with the A20 version today, and once the H3 support hits the mainstream kernel, I'll look in to that.

I have some plans to further automate the build and maintenance process so that I can continue to maintain it, but more efficiently than with the soft float port.

The OS is built for armv7 minimum target. The main C flags are:
Development consists of a couple of machines that act as "-current" (lead builder and the "oh s*it!" builder), plus a couple of machines to maintain stable releases; so I need to buy a few more machines to do that.

If you would like to donate to this project, please sponsor it.

Hi Stuart!

I'm assuming that this will be compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3?

Yes it will, and although the RPI3 is 64bit it will run 32bit code.
It will not support the RPI1 though - that will need to remain on the soft float port because it uses armv6.

The support for the RPIs (installer, kernels, images, etc.) will remain within the domain of the community although at some point once the support for that stuff is upstream'd, the kernel provided by Slackware would support it.

How hard would it be to port to 64 bit on Pi3? Financially, what would you need? Or would it be a time management situation?

The hardware is cheap. Time is the hard part. 10 mins here, 15 there, 5 here, 2 hours there. It all starts to add up.
So far I estimate that it's taken me about 50 hours to get the hard float port where it is (final passes of all packages apart from KDE and XFCE which are always built atop the OS, they're not really integrated apart from a couple of packages like subversion that links to kwallet). However, that's built atop the 1000s of hours getting the original soft float port to where it is.

Would it still be Slackwarearm without KDE? I've often wondered if anyone runs KDE on Slackwarearm. I usually login via SSH and work CLI but have run XFCE sessions via SSH and it seemed reasonably responsive when doing a few trivial things but I've always thought things would bog down in a KDE session and have never installed it.

KDE works on the soft float port but as you'd expect, it's slow. In KDE 3 (I think) you had easy options available to turn down the amount of fancy effects which made it KDE still usable on ARM, but I found those more difficult to find and implement on later KDE versions (although I suspect they're still there, just as individual tuning options).
I doubt it'll be much if any faster built as hard float.

I recommend WindowMaker personally as it's very light weight.
Unless there's a good reason not to provide it (i.e. it'll never work or won't build) or is pointless (such as syslinux, although that's debatable to a degree - I don't recall if it builds on ARM) then it'll be provided. Giving the user choice is key.

Understood. I figured that time management would be the key issue. Thank you very much for your time spent on this. :)

I believe the RPi0 is armv6 as well so the new Slackware Arm that is not the old Slackware Arm wouldn't run on the zero also, correct me if I'm wrong?

According to what I have read, yes. It'll need the soft float port.