Collabora's Holo Core port lays the groundwork for running SteamOS 3 natively on the headset
Valve and Collabora are building an Arm64 port of Arch Linux for the Steam Frame VR gaming platform, with hopes that the work will eventually feed into the upstream distro.Arch Linux has spawned a whole family of derivatives, but the official upstream distro targets 64-bit x86 and nothing else. As the homepage says: "Currently we have official packages optimized for the x86-64 architecture."Valve and Collabora would like to change that. The pair are developing an Arm64 port called Holo Core, initially as the foundation of the Steam Frame's operating system.
Other Arch derivatives exist, including ArchLinux32 for x86-32 machines and the systemd-free Artix Linux. There is also an Arm flavor called Arch Linux ARM, sometimes known as ALARM for short. ALARM supports an impressive list of platforms – we count 61 different Arm devices, including the Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4, and Zero 2. However, this is not an official variant but an independent downstream port.
Its main GitHub repo demonstrates the difference: it has a PKGBUILDs repository, which contains specially modified PKGBUILD scripts to build Arm versions of the upstream Arch packages. As the Arch wiki explains, the PKGBUILD system constitutes the Arch Linux build scripts.The new Arm port was rumored back in May and the longer-term ambition is to build Arm64 support right into the original PKGBUILD scripts so that they can build for both x86-64 and Arm64.The reason for the port is the forthcoming Steam Frame VR headset, as we reported back in November. Now that the company is taking orders for the Steam Machine, the other new hardware platform for SteamOS 3 is getting closer.SteamOS 3 is the modern version of Valve's Linux OS, as opposed to the original Debian-based SteamOS, which The Reg reported on back in 2013. Version 3 was a total rebuild, based on Arch Linux, and its internal codename was "Holo" – for example, as seen in the unofficial Holo ISO rebuild.The existing Steam Deck and forthcoming Steam Machine use AMD CPUs, but the new Steam Frame won't, although for now the specs only say that it will use a "4 nm Snapdragon® 8 Gen 3." It's built for streaming games and media from other devices, but it will be able to play them locally as well, and Valve has been funding development of the FEX emulation engine for running x86 binaries on Arm – as we mentioned in connection with Steam on Arm64 Ubuntu recently.
