Slackware on a pinebook pro
 

Greetings. Has anyone experience with getting slackware to work with the ARM powered pinebook pro now that it's been out for a while?

take the kernel from ayufan, everything else as always

bringing this thread to the top again
 

Hello,

I too recently got my hands on a Pinebook Pro, and would like to install Slackware on it.
Given that there is no official aarch64 Slackware port, I am faced with a dilemma.
Should I use slarm64 or try using Sarpi64 somehow?
In the meantime I also found the thread https://forum.pine64.org/showthread....8207&pid=52624 where the Pine64 people linked an up-to-date kernel source tree with all the necessary patches for the Pinebook pro. I believe that compiling that kernel with the manjaro kernel config could get me a kernel that could work reasonably well with the Pinebook Pro.

I just need to do a bit more reseaerch on how to create an installer image with this kernel to set Slackware up, whichever of the two userlands I choose.
I may be wrong though, it may turn out that the Sarpi64 userland won't work on the PbP.

Has anyone tried something similar?

Thanks,
János

for information added support laptop pinebook pro

Thanks for the link. May I ask a few questions?
Unfortunately the README files are pretty vague for both slarm64 and the slackware_arm_build_kit.
Do I understand correctly that the build kit is there to create the installer image for a wide range of devices.
Once git cloned, what scripts are necessary to build the image, and in which order are they supposed to be run?
I further have the impression that the installers built this way can use the package repositories of slarm64. Am I correct with this assumption?

Hi,

I can speak as a user.

slackware_arm_build_kit is used to create images as well as build the kernel and some tools.

Once cloned, try This launches a dialog based installer script.

Yes, the created images use the package repository for slarm64.

yes that's right, slackware_arm_build_kit is an assembly kit for creating the final image for different boards.
slackwarearm or slarm64 is selected depending on the SoC architecture.
main startup script ./build.sh, in it all scripts are executed sequentially.

i’ll create a basic image for testing, please check for operability

Okay, I will test the installer, and will report back to you. (It may take a few days.)

In the meantime I tried building the installer myself, but unfortunately it failed.
I installed a machine with slackware64-current to build the images on. Do I need any other preparations, like downloading/installing/compiling the cross compilation toolchain?
I'm just asking because I got an error message like this, and this leads me to believe that I need to get the toolchain too:

if we talk about slackware_arm_build_kit then everything automatically downloads there.
i will make a reservation that I have not tested x86 on a PC for a long time.
if at all you need a cross compiler gcc-arm-9.2-2019.12-x86_64-aarch64-none-linux-gnu.tar.xz more
make ARCH=$ARCH CROSS_COMPILE=$CROSS

Okay, I downloaded the compiler you recommended, however I don't completely understand the last part of your reply

Where am I supposed to put this? Should I modify one of your scripts to "make" (build) the packages differently (that is cross-compile them)?

Also, I found this article about building one's own toolchain for cross compilation: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:ha...cross-compiler
Maybe I can use this as a plan B, instead of the "official" compiler, if I encounter any problems that I can't overcome with that.

Cross compiler reference for plan B
slackware_arm_build_kit he downloads everything

There have been some developments since my last reply.

(-I managed to compile an aarch64 cross-compilation toolchain on my own.)

I tried setting the environment variables ARCH and CROSS_COMPILE

On my x86_64 based build VM, I set these to:

The build script will try to download a set of cross-compiling toolchains, but the compilation fails with u-boot, right at the beginning:

The end of the build log looks like this:


I also tried compiling the installer image on the Debian 9.12 that comes pre-installed on the Pinebook Pro.
This OS has an aarch64 kernel, while the userland seems to consist of regular 32 bit ARM hard-float binaries.
For this reason the build script also fails when I attempt to run it without CROSS and ARCH set.
The error messages in the build log were pretty similar to the ones on the x86_64 machine, they were complaining about the unknown register name x18. The build also failed when compiling u-boot.

After that I tried setting

on the Pinebook Pro, but then the build script failed when downloading the cross compilation toolchain, due to a HTTP 404 error:

So, now I'm kind of stuck again.

all variables ARCH,CROSS,CROSS64 defined in scripts

Okay, understood. So what should I do? Should I go ahead and modify them in those scripts?
Or if not, then what am I supposed to do? If I don't set them anywhere, and go with the script's defaults, the compilation will simply fail at uboot.
(If I simply don't set any of these environment variables, and go with the defaults in the script, it won't even bother downloading the cross compilation toolchains.)