Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

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Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

Postby savage86 » Sat Mar 08, 2014 10:05 pm

I looked and didn't see this question so I hope this is the right place to ask.

I'm a new member of the arch arm community but I have been using arch linux for quite some time. I would like to image my regular arch system and use it on my raspberry pi. Obviously arch linux doesn't support ARM, but I would like to just have one image for both of my computers.

I am trying to learn what all would be necessary to make this happen. I believe I would need to make a new kernel that supports both architectures and probably include the packages for both as well. What else would I need to include to support both my Intel PC and rasp pi? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!
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Re: Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

Postby WarheadsSE » Sun Mar 09, 2014 9:00 pm

No, you can not.

The CPU architectures are entirely different. You can however, probably get 99% of the functionality and configuration that you have in your desktop out of your pi, at a much lower performance level.
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Re: Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

Postby savage86 » Sun Mar 09, 2014 9:44 pm

Sad day. I was hoping that a kernel change and a few other things could make that happen. Thanks for your reply. I might have to check out arch assault since they support both x86_64 and arm architectures.
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Re: Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

Postby raumzeit » Sun Mar 09, 2014 10:16 pm

I think you got it all wrong. As WarheadsSE pointed out, you can not make one image to support both x86 and ARM architecture. Although I've never heard anything about ArchAssault I do not believe that they provide something like that. But you can prove us wrong ;) (I mean, OS X ships/shipped multi architecture binaries for PPC and x86 for some time)
Just to clarify again: The problem here is the difference in architecture. Binaries compiled for x86 do not run on ARM and vice versa!
You can, however, get a list of the packages you've installed on your x86 install of ArchLinux and use it as install target in ArchLinuxARM, for whatever reason one would like to do that. Keep in mind that the raspberry pi is a real performance killer. Still you have to copy and modify the config files of your packages...
Also the kernel and gpu drivers will most likely differ in their package names... So it will be a tedious task...

To sum the above up: See WardheadsSE post
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Re: Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

Postby savage86 » Mon Mar 10, 2014 10:23 pm

Thanks for both of your replies. I do realize the issue of having multiple architectures, I was just seeing if it would be easy to include support for both in one image. But, it sounds like its not really worth the trouble (if even possible). I mis-read ArchAssault's release. While they do support both ARM and x86, they are different images. Thanks again.
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Re: Can I image my regular arch system to install on arm?

Postby moonman » Mon Mar 10, 2014 11:29 pm

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('raumzeit', 'I') think you got it all wrong. As WarheadsSE pointed out, you can not make one image to support both x86 and ARM architecture. Although I've never heard anything about ArchAssault I do not believe that they provide something like that. But you can prove us wrong ;) (I mean, OS X ships/shipped multi architecture binaries for PPC and x86 for some time)
Just to clarify again: The problem here is the difference in architecture. Binaries compiled for x86 do not run on ARM and vice versa!
You can, however, get a list of the packages you've installed on your x86 install of ArchLinux and use it as install target in ArchLinuxARM, for whatever reason one would like to do that. Keep in mind that the raspberry pi is a real performance killer. Still you have to copy and modify the config files of your packages...
Also the kernel and gpu drivers will most likely differ in their package names... So it will be a tedious task...

To sum the above up: See WardheadsSE post

osx had a fast builtin emulator called rosetta upto 10.5, ppc support was completely dropped in 10.6. Here we are talking about completely 2 differen't architectures. While x86_64 is only backwards compatible with x86 becausee it is dereved from it, arm has never been.
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