Credit: Steam
Valve and Collabora have published the first pre-release of Holo Core—a dedicated port of Arch Linux for the aarch64 architecture, which will serve as the software foundation for the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset. The new build is now available to developers as ready-to-use binary packages, source code, and a container for creating applications for the new platform.
Holo Core is being created specifically for the Steam Frame, which will run on a Qualcomm ARM processor. The official Arch Linux distribution doesn’t support the aarch64 architecture, so the Collabora team developed tools and a continuous integration (CI) infrastructure from scratch. The new build is based on the Arch Linux “state” repository snapshot with commit 97c0a0b47d15 and includes patches for building on Arm64.
A public build container is now available. It provides a functional Arch environment with ported packages and can run on both aarch64 devices and regular x86 computers via QEMU emulation and Docker, Podman, or Distrobox.
Going forward, the Valve and Collabora teams plan to continue working on build automation and interacting with the Arch Linux community to improve support for the ARM64 architecture and bring it closer to full integration.
The Steam Frame release date and price have not yet been announced.
