We make use of
PlugBuild for our automated build farm. We built this system from the ground up since 2011, explicitly to be a
correct port of Arch Linux to a new platform, basing on, not forking from Arch "upstream".
The farm is made up of a cluster of ARM boards (XU4, C2, A1100, etc), which make then make use of
distcc to hand out the primary compilation (only) work to a few large x86_64 servers. All pre-parsing, linking, and packaging is done
natively on ARM hardware. We do this because emulation via QEMU has a simple caveat: it is emulation, not simulation. There be dragons. Even if 95% of all packages are unaffected, 5% if >4000 (
per platform) is still >200. As a very small team, that's a lot of churn to handle for the cost of "ease", and thus we made the decision very early on to do it correctly, and save everyone countless hours in the future. This has served the community, and the team especially, very well over the years.
>95% of all work on this distribution is handled by
1 person week to week. We can not thank that person enough for their years of effort, but we must also acknowledge the community who has actively engaged and supported the project in the nearly 9 years of the project.
If you wish to test & contribute, follow the
CONTRIBUTING documentation. You will need to build on ARM hardware, possibly making use of distcc via other ARM, or with x86_64 machines using the
provided toolchains, on as many architectures as possible (ARMv5-ARMv8).
ARMv5 (arm), ARMv6 (armv6h), ARMv7 (armv7h) are built in the cluster ODROID XU4's using
properly maintained clean chroots. ARMv8 are built on ODROID C2s and A1100, explicitly targeting the AArch64 instruction set (we don't package 32bit ARMv8, AArch32), in the same manner.