[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

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Slackware ARM Road Map

This road map represents intentions rather than commitments, but gives you some insight into some of the ARM-specific enhancements in the pipeline.

Enhancements are for the AArch64 (64bit ARM) platform. 32bit Slackware ARM is no longer developed.

"Committed" / Definitley-going-to-be-done

Category Enhancement More Owner ETA (+When it's ready)
Boot - OS Initial RAM disk os-initrd-mgr: Package only the Kernel modules required for the local environment. The generic OS InitRD contains the vast majority of Kernel modules in order to be able to support new Hardware Models. This inflates the InitRD by hundreds of MBs, delaying the booting of the OS. The kernel package will continue to ship a full-fat OS InitRD, and os-initrd-mgr will slim it down during the package post installation. If unable to collect the Kernel modules, os-initrd-mgr will preserve the previous set of Kernel modules. os-initrd-mgr will also be called from within the Installer, so the new OS has a trimmed initrd. mozes@slackware July 2022
Hardware Model Support Support HoneyComb LX2 Manufacturer page mralk3@slackware Q4 2022
Tutorial/Doc The Direct integration guide needs to be completed to enable the community to understand how to contribute Hardware Model support. A video will also be made to walk through it mozes@slackware July/August 2022
Tutorial/Doc Create a wiki doc explaining how to use the Slackware ARM build system (there's a doc already in source/README.txt), plus a short video tutorial. This enables people to easily modify the Slackware Kernel and any packages required for their Hardware Model mozes@slackware, mralk3@slackware August 2022
Video support VC4 Video support for RPi4 Package rpi-userland, switch to different RPI boot loader settings (config.txt) to enable VC4. May need Kernel patches mralk3, mozes June 2022

"Exploring" (Thinking About It)

Idea Thoughts
have a/kernel-firmware package trigger an initrd rebuild. This is to capture any new firmware for their Hardware Model. However, the HWM firmware changes rarely, and if anybody really wants the OS InitRD to receive new firmware, they can run os-initrd-mgr.
SPI flasher tool within the OS Add a new package a/hwm-bw-rk3399, have it ship new and previous fw in /usr/share with command line options to flash either one. Wanted to couple this with slackpkg so that an 'update your spi flash' message could be delivered. I don't think this is an appropriate candidate for automation - it always needs user confirmation.
 slackwarearm:development-roadmap ()