[arch-general] Advice on bootstrapping Arch onto a new architecture?

[Uwe Sauter]

Am 26.04.21 um 10:37 schrieb Sijie Bu via arch-general:
> Hello,
> 
> Not sure if I am posting it to the right place, but this seems to be the mailing list to ask. I tried to send it to arch-dev-public list but was redirected by the system to this list.

I think the arch-ports [1] is the place you're looking for.

Regards,

	Uwe


[1] https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-ports


> I am about to start working as an intern at CIP United, a company focusing on MIPS chips, and I will be bootstrapping Arch Linux onto the MIPS64r6 architecture, in a fashion similar to Arch Linux ARM.
> 
> I have checked the Arch Linux MIPS project, but it seems to be inactive for years now. I have checked ArchWiki's DeveloperWiki section, but it seems to lack guidelines or suggestions on bootstrapping Arch onto a new architecture. Therefore I have a few questions:
> - Intuitively, I think I should cross-compile the packages of the "core" section (sans a few x64-specific packages) and build a bootable rootfs, but I was having some trouble finding how should I set makepkg to cross-compile. Do I just set up an Arch developer environment as usual, but substitute the toolchain with the cross ones?
> - Does adding a new architecture require modifications to the pacman source code? Or pacman itself should support new architectures? I have also tried looking at pacman source code, and it seems to not have hard-coded list of architectures, but I am not 100% sure about this (if I'll have to modify the source code of pacman, I will be emailing the pacman-dev mailing list regarding their policies on patches etc.).
> 
> Thank you for your time and have a nice day.
> Sincerely
>