[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 : Project 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.

Prior to the development of the 64bit port, “Slackware ARM” also referred to the 32bit version of the Slackware Operating System.

“Slackware ARM” is the umbrella project name for all Slackware activities on the ARM platform.

Slackware AArch64 / ARM 64bit

“AArch64” is ARM's marketing name for their 64bit platform. In the user space the platform is 'aarch64' and 'arm64' within the Linux Kernel. The names are synonymous.

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

Category Enhancement More Owner ETA (+When it's ready)
Hardware Model Support Support HoneyComb LX2 Manufacturer page mralk3@slackware Q4 2022
Tutorial/Doc Complete document 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 and short video explaining how to use the Slackware ARM build system. There's a doc already in source/README.txt. 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

Complete

Category Enhancement More Date completed
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. May 2022

"Exploring" (Thinking About It)

Idea Priority Thoughts
have a/kernel-firmware package trigger an initrd rebuild. Low 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.
RK3399 U-Boot (SPI) flashing tool within the OS Low (it's not ancitipated that a new release of U-Boot for Slackware will be frequent). Productised version of this tool. 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.

Slackware ARM / 32bit

32bit Slackware ARM development ended with the release of Slackware 15.0.

Slackware ARM 32bit 15.0 is maintained with security fixes and other minor enhancements, however.

 slackwarearm:development-roadmap ()