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October 07, 2026

Creating distro build tooling for a small community

A lot of people have been commenting on this over time so I figured I would put together a little post summarizing my thoughts on the matter and everything else.

The post is going to be quite large. Every section can be read more or less separately, but they are all connected to each other.

Catering to the community

Chimera is a small project. It exists primarily to serve its community and not any external entity.

Making sure the maintenance cost is as low as possible is crucial. Chimera and its tooling are designed to automate away most of the boring stuff and make sure the packager’s job is pleasant and not bothersome. In a way, we aim to empower every user to be a packager. The barrier of entry is meant to be very low.

Some things that implies (I will try really hard to make this reasonable to follow, unfortunately the years have left their mark and I might be taking some assumptions for granted, so please bear with me; this also applies in the later sections):

  1. Everyone uses the same tools. Inefficient UX patterns are identified, and either fixed, or cbuild is extended to mitigate them. Feedback is taken into account.
  2. Everything is cbuild. One tool does everything, in a streamlined way. Managing the repository, the build environment, the repo generation and signing, even parts of the VCS handling and common maintenance tasks. No external helper stuff.
  3. The remote build infrastructure just runs cbuild and not much else.
  4. The tooling does much of the bulk of making sure your packaging is correct and clean, most issues are hard errors. Heavy sandboxing, build environment consistency, unit tests by default, etc.
  5. You can run it on any Linux. If you run it on Chimera, you can immediately test your work. You can take the repo and bring it somewhere else. That also means the builder machines in the remote infra can run anything.
  6. Chimera is a collective effort. You are expected to share the stuff you make, and get it upstreamed to us. The tooling is not intended for local things that won’t get shared, and it provides no guarantees or obligations for such usage; cbuild is a developer tool, not a user tool. But every user can be a developer.
  7. The tooling should easy and straightforward to use, and fun. It should not make things hard for you. Every user can be a maintainer. It shouldn’t be unnceessarily intimidating. We don’t gatekeep here when possible. You should also be having fun using the system and being here.
  8. You can replicate the entire remote infrastructure of the project on your machine in an hour or something. You can replicate the heavy bulk of things in like 5 minutes.
  9. The way things work is supposed to steer you towards implicitly doing the right thing, and punish incorrect patterns by making them harder than the correct ones. E.g. it’s really difficult or impossible to manually patch files with regex, or to do internet-reaching stuff during the build, or to touch the build environment filesystem. It’s really easy to manage patches though, there are build styles for common build systems, there are fine grained utility modules for doing all sorts of common annoying things, etc.; the tooling also automatically checks your stuff for correct formatting and other lint issues, validates your dependencies, validates your metadata including minor things like whether your build dependencies are sorted correctly and whether the SPDX license expression is correct and lost of other nits, and so on.
  10. Extensive documentation for the build system and packaging.

A common workflow setting up everything from scratch would look like so:

$ # set up environment with your cports fork
$ git clone https://github.com/my-user/cports
$ cd cports
$ # prepare a signing key
$ ./cbuild keygen
$ # prepare a build environment
$ ./cbuild bootstrap
$ # write your template here; then build it
$ ./cbuild pkg user/my-cool-program
$ # make a branch for submission
$ git checkout -b my-cool-program
$ # automatically makes a commit with the correct message and all files included
$ ./cbuild commit user/my-cool-program
$ # push and publish PR with the link
$ git push origin my-cool-program

An update would be done like this:

$ ./cbuild bump-pkgver user/my-program 4.20.69
$ ./cbuild prepare-upgrade user/my-program
$ ./cbuild pkg user/my-program
$ ./cbuild commit user/my-program
$ git push

The tooling provides common utilities for keeping your local repository clean, e.g. pruning packages and so on; it provides maintenance tools for bumping versions and revisions, checking dependency graphs, checking for new versions via update-check (which for most things distributed e.g. via common git forges requires no extra effort or specialized code), checking if your local repository can be unstaged against the remote one (verifying if you really rebuilt everything that needs it), updating sha256 checksums in templates. It even supports custom template-specific actions, such as building bootstrap tarballs for compilers. It supports aliases for less typing.

Checking for if a package has an update:

$ ./cbuild update-check main/firefox
main/firefox: 157.0 -> 157.0.1

It supports fun things when it comes to packaging bulk batches. For instance, it integrates git:

$ # build everything changed in your local commits
$ ./cbuild bulk-pkg git:origin/master..HEAD
$ # build a specific commit
$ ./cbuild bulk-pkg git:commithash
$ # build a range of commits but skipping stuff that has "test" in commit message
$ ./cbuild bulk-pkg git:from..to+!test

It supports common stuff, like

$ # build everything you have in your local repo that has a newer cports version
$ ./cbuild bulk-pkg status:outdated

There is a lot more that I could mention. I also wanted to talk about how we got here, how we started, and how our infra works.

Personal history

I started using Linux in 2006/7 and soon ended up on Debian as my long-term operating system. Around the same time I started to seriously get into programming and the intersection of that ended up being packaging for Debian. Debian has a large bunch of tooling to deal with packaging and particularly the community-driven approach really appealed to me so I maintained a bunch of packages for a while. That lasted for some time until I drifted away towards other things and eventually settled on FreeBSD.

During that time I didn’t do any work for the FreeBSD project itself but I did experiment with various things that were adjacent, none of them going anywhere in the end, but I did gain a lot of helpful experience on the way.

In 2016 I started messing around with Void Linux (particularly as I had to use Linux on work computers) and around 2018 I ended up using the ppc64le (POWER) platform for my workstation, which FreeBSD did not support at all at the time. I was already familiar with Void and decided to start a ppc64le port, which I maintained downstream until 2023 and gradually it expanded to support the big endian ppc64 as well as the classic PowerPC. Doing the downstream work led to me becoming an upstream Void maintainer as well and I took care of the compiler toolchains among other things for several years and became interested in improving the build tooling.

In 2021 I started the Chimera Linux project, which gradually got better and more usable, and that led to me shifting entirely to that, deprecating the POWER port of Void and resigning from the Void team in 2023.

Void Linux

When I started using Void in 2016, it mainly caught my attention as a system with a fairly low barrier of entry that did not get in my way, while still being “normal” enough to act as a regular Linux system. Initially I found the way e.g. runit worked in there interesting and in many ways fresh over classic distros particularly in the pre-systemd era, while I found the post-systemd era rather unfun and daunting in general.

This was also why I ended up picking Void for the ppc64le port, as it felt small scope and approachable enough to give me a chance to reasonably maintain it by myself, while also having a compact and easily reachable community that wasn’t aligned with any particular commercial entity.

When I started the ppc64le port, I was already marginally familiar with the build tooling of Void but only really properly picked it up for the port.

Getting started with xbps-src

For someone coming from most other Unix-like systems, xbps-src is really nice. In Void, all the packaging of the distro, along with the build tools, exists in a singular Git repository (void-packages). In a way, this mirrors the ports systems as they exist on the BSDs. However, the ports systems are based around Makefiles and you interact with ports individually using make (with various external ports management tools existing to simplify that, working on top of that).

In Void, software is packaged using “templates”. Every piece of software consists of a template containing metadata fields (you know, package name, version, dependencies, source URLs, etc.) plus (optionally) functions that define the logic of how a template is built, along with extra files that are necessary for the build (not always) and patches (not always). The tooling for building templates (xbps-src itself) also exists in this tree.

Unlike most other systems, when you build a package, the build process does not run in the system you are running the build on. Instead, xbps-src constructs a small container (using Linux namespaces) that represents a minimized Void system, puts stuff in it according to the template metadata (build dependencies and whatnot) and then runs the build. At the end, you get a local repository of xbps packages that you can install from.

The general workflow looks like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages
$ cd void-packages
$ # create the build container
$ ./xbps-src binary-bootstrap
...
$ # build the thing you want
$ ./xbps-src pkg some-program
...

The templates are similar to e.g. PKGBUILD format of Arch Linux or APKBUILD format of Alpine, but those do not use the containerized approach (at least not always).

The xbps-src system is a collection of Bash scripts, and technically the templates are also just Bash scripts, but with a set of expectations so they in general do not utilize the full extent of the syntax and features.

When working as a packager, you basically just create a new directory in the srcpkgs, put your template in it along with other stuff, build it, and then you have a repo you can install it from. If you wish to submit it upstream, you create a branch, commit it, and create a pull request. Someone will take a look at it, and if it gets merged, the central build infrastructure picks it up and shortly it becomes available in the central repository.

The system neatly decouples build dependencies and runtime dependencies, with runtime dependencies typically scanned automatically from ELF files and their metadata as well as other file types, so the template specifies whatever it needs in the build environment but the runtime dependency list is largely automatic.

The system supports “build styles” so you can e.g. declare that a template uses the GNU Autotools, or Meson, or Cargo, or whatever, and it takes care of most of the groundwork, allowing for templates that are often declarative without any build logic, lowering that barrier of entry.

It also supports cross-compiling really well, letting you cross-build most of the repository to any other architecture. That’s neat, but often sloppy, and cross-built packages end up with subtle brokenness that native packages would not have, due to build systems subtly not passing certain checks and so on. You also can’t run unit tests for projects when cross compiling them, in most cases.

The system also has a really handy update-check mechanism which will scrape upstream URLs and find version infos in them, then present you with any updates that may have happened since the last template version update. The project has a nightly job which generates a summary once per day, letting packagers stay on top of things.

Upstream build infrastructure of Void

The build infrastructure of Void consists of several computers (each handling a different architecture port) that are plugged as workers into the central orchestrator, using the Buildbot software. It will receive updates from the Git repository (void-packages), collect a batch from the changes, figure out the correct order, and use xbps-src to build the packages.

It will also sign the packages with the right keys. This is a separate step that xbps-src does not handle (the output is unsigned). Eventually, things make it in the upstream repository and get mirrored.

The way the Buildbot is managed I can’t tell you much because I never saw much into it. The admins have an infrastructure that is based on Ansible, Terraform, and a bunch of other pieces that are put together in ways unfamiliar to me. Additionally, xbps-src does not do the batch sorting for you, so other pieces of the process have to do it. Things outside the void-packages repository itself are relatively opaque.

When I maintained the POWER port, I had my own set of scripts to keep things going and did not reuse any of the Void infrastructure at all. This was likewise opaque and purpose-built for my port.

Starting Chimera

In early summer of 2021, I started Chimera. The initial push for me was that I wanted to experiment with a different userland setup, as well as have a more personal project to work on without having to deal with others’ efforts and pre-existing work, but also I wanted to try out my own take on the build system.

There were some initial points I was unhappy with in xbps-src while maintaining the POWER port.

  1. The shell-based system was way too slow. Parsing the complete collection of templates in the repository would take potentially as much as half an hour, and there weren’t other ways to introspect the templates. Therefore, my tooling would call into xbps-src and employ various caching tricks to make things manageable.
  2. The shell-based system was very often fairly sloppy, letting various wrong behaviors through. For instance, network access is permitted through the whole build, there is nothing ensuring consistency of the build container after the build is done (the entire thing is read-write and the template can do whatever it wants), the correctness lints for the resulting packages are fairly slim, the ELF scan step and other things would take an eternity due to slow shell code, and limited opportunities for doing more due to shell being excessively slow.
  3. A lot of useful tooling is separate from the main system and maintained in the xtools repository, including extra lints and so on. This is not mandatory or anyhow verified however.
  4. Lots of sloppy templates resulting from the prior points. E.g. the templates are often littered from manual in-place sed calls and similar rather than using proper patches (which leaves in calls that eventually no longer do anything due to upstreams changing), patches are applied very fuzzily which occasionally results in subtly mispatched things, and so on.
  5. The Void project does not run per-template unit tests (typically the test suite of the software being packaged) on builders, which would catch a lot of errors, particularly on musl targets and so on. It does run them in pull request CI, but I do not see this as enough. Often the check runs of templates are poorly maintained and broken.
  6. The Void project cross-compiles all architectures other than x86_64 and i686, resulting in the other-arch ports being notably lower quality.
  7. Void has a wonky staging system. When large batch changes are being done, the repos may end up in a strange state for a while and users are advised to avoid upgrading until everything is finished. It has a rudimentary staging system which prevents the repos from being changed while a big batch is being rebuilt for changes shared library SONAMEs, this works only for shared libraries however, which means packagers will often forcibly stage the repo for a batch rebuild, then do stuff in several commits, wait for everything to clear, then unstage the repos. Various parts of the related infrastructure are also lacking, such as clearing obsolete and removed packages from the repos, which is/was done manually.

There are others but these were my main gripes.

Chimera started with its build system. Many experiments were done. Initially, cbuild was a ground-up rewrite of xbps-src, using Python. In cbuild, the templates are also Python scripts, but through low-level bits that Python allows, don’t always look as such. It came with a very minimal set of initial packages that was basically a basic Void-like chroot, using xbps as its package manager. Thus cports was born.

There were two initial goals:

  1. Make it fast. I should be able to parse several thousands of build templates and dump all their metadata in under a second, rather than many minutes. Chimera currently achieves this.
  2. Make it strict. No network starting with configure step. Read-write access only in the build directory (and destination directory for install step) and full consistency of the build container guaranteed at all times. Heavy linting and straight up denying various misbehaviors at all times. Sandboxing done with namespaces only, using Bubblewrap (bwrap). The cbuild system runs outside the sandbox (in your host environment) while any calls to the build system of the project being built are sandboxed.
  3. Make it highly portable, with Python (no external modules), Bubblewrap, and Git, along with the package manager binary, being the only dependencies. You can use cports on any Linux system with the basic dependencies.
  4. Make it able to do everything xbps-src can do, but better.

Chimera started with the ppc64le target only, being developed on a POWER workstation. Over time, as things cleared up more, more targets were added, along with additional goals and other changes.

Over the next months, the core packaging started to become more defined, settling on the userland tooling and other things, as well as transitioning from xbps to apk. The original idea was to use pkg from FreeBSD, but this proved to not be ready for our style of use at the time, and upstream suggested that we’re best off using something else.

Fundamentally, using cbuild in the basic sense feels similar to xbps-src. The big difference is that cbuild signs everything, not needing a separate step, and no unsigned packages are allowed. Therefore, initial setup looks more like

$ # generate your signing key
$ ./cbuild keygen
$ # bring up the container
$ ./cbuild bootstrap
$ # package whatever you want
$ ./cbuild pkg main/firefox

Settling on apk

We didn’t stay on xbps for very long. Soon, the switch happened to apk.

Using apk brought over various benefits.

  1. Unlike xbps which is driven by ad-hoc logic, apk has a real dependency solver. This means way fewer surprising behaviors and way fewer workarounds and less effort needed from packagers to make sure that users’ systems do not break in surprising ways.
  2. Handling of stuff like shared libraries is way nicer in apk. In xbps, dependencies are driven purely by name, and shared library providers and requires have separate metadata fields. These will get checked and xbps will not permit things to proceed if unmatched, but dependencies are done by name. When a package is being built, the system will consult this massive central file (common/shlibs) matching SONAMEs to package names to generate dependencies on top of the shlib metadata. This results in poor UX (you cannot match the shlib providers etc. in the same way as names when e.g. installing) and is inflexible as it’s limited to shared libraries. In apk, virtual packages are used instead, so you e.g. provide so:libfoo.so.1=1 as a virtual package name. You can then search by this name, install by this name, etc. and it can be used for other types as well, e.g. cmd:foo (apk add cmd:i-know-command-name-but-not-package-name) and others. That also means more things can participate in the staging system on the build system side. And no central mappings, as the build system can easily query things from the repository.
  3. Unlike xbps, apk has real support for triggers. Triggers in xbps-src are emulated with package scripts. As an example, consider e.g. updating fonts cache. The fontconfig package has a trigger (which is a script) and metadata to run the cache update when /usr/share/fonts is modified in any way. Then when something modifies the directory, the trigger will run at the end of the transaction, after all filesystem changes are done. In xbps, you can only have scripts that run before or after a package changes and are owned by the package; xbps-src emulates triggers by checking if the package contains a directory that would drive the trigger and if it does, insert a call in its package script; that means if several packages change the fonts, each of them contains a cache update script, which will run several times (and not at the end). This means things become quite slow for large triggers and the transaction breaks atomicity (because the shell script run in the middle of the transaction, rather than at the end, needs all prior things committed to the final filesystem location).

There were others, but these are notable.

Building an infrastructure and a new core tenet

Building the infrastructure was interesting. We ended up using Buildbot again, after some deliberation and original intent to build a new orchestrator from scratch. There is an important distinction in our buildbot, however.

I wasn’t happy with the opaqueness of Void’s infrastructure, and with the way it does so much work beyond xbps-src. I declared an entire new rule that goes:

What the packager runs exactly matches what the remote build machine runs.

The build steps of Chimera’s infrastructure go approximately like this:

  1. Central orchestrator is poked by a webhook that a change in cports has happened. It does not matter what change.
  2. Central orchestrator tells worker machines in the fleet (one per arch) that cports has changed. It does not tell them what.
  3. Worker machines pull their copy of cports. It does not matter what has changed.
  4. Worker machines update the build container (./cbuild bootstrap-update). This updates the core packages of the container to match the repository.
  5. Worker machines run ./cbuild bulk-print-ver status:unbuilt. This generates a list of all packages along with their versions that are present in cports, can be built, and are not already built in the repository. This step is separate only for the purpose of presenting it to packagers in the Buildbot UI, so that you can have a separate view for each package being built and so on. This list is correctly sorted. Each entry is saved in a Buildbot variable, again for the purpose of presentation mainly.
  6. Each entry in the list from the prior step is built. The result is already signed and ready to be used, but for now remains in stage area.
  7. An unstage step is attempted. If any provider is removed in the new packages (e.g. something rebuilds and stage provides so:libfoo.so.2 while the original provider was so:libfoo.so.1) and there is still any package depending on the old name, the unstage will fail. That ensures that all reverse dependencies are always rebuilt as necessary before publishing. On successful unstage, the staging area is merged into the repository.
  8. Repository is pruned for outdated stuff.
  9. Repository syncs to the final primary mirror. First, changed packages get uploaded in one step, then indexes are replaced, and only then old packages are deleted. This is to ensure that users don’t end up with any index that contains packages not present yet.

Steps 4, 5, 6 can be condensed together into a single cbuild command:

$ ./cbuild bulk-pkg status:unbuilt

The main tricky part with batch builds like that is correct sorting. Imagine having packages A and B in the bulk that you want to build. There is a package C, which A depends on, and which depends on B. Since that makes B in the dependency tree of A (through A->C->B), B needs to be built first. You do not know this by knowing only A and B, since C is not in the batch.

Since cbuild is very fast and can parse the entire collection very quickly without caching, it can consider all the intermediates and do a proper sorted graph trivially. It can also simply parse every template to consider whether it’s buildable, and match it against the repo state. Therefore, on every build, it can always do that from scratch and the orchestrator has to do nothing, with each step being largely independent of the other.

The build fleet doesn’t do anything else. There is other auxiliary infra, such as our IRC commit bot (which announces changes driven by a webhook) and our nightly update-check equivalent to Void, letting packagers stay on top of things.

In general, everything that any piece of our infrastructure does can be easily done locally.

Our fleet is self-hosted. The orchestrator and most builders run on Chimera host systems, but they don’t have to. Currently these are:

  1. The x86_64 machine, which is a 16-core EPYC root server at Netcup, running Chimera.
  2. The aarch64 machine, which is an 80-core Ampere Altra, running Chimera, owned by me.
  3. The ppc64le machine, which is an 18-core/72-thread POWER9, running Chimera, owned by me.
  4. The loongarch64 machine, which is a Loongson 3A6000 4-core/8-thread, likewise running Chimera, owned by me.
  5. The riscv64 machine, which is a Milk-V Pioneer 64-core machine kindly provided to us by Zach van Rijn of Adélie Linux, running Fedora.

The builders do not publicly face the Internet, the orchestrator does, on its own machine. The primary repository is also on its own separate machine. Each architecture has its own signing key.

Final words

All of this may possibly even be a bit too long and too much to take in. Therefore, I will end it here and hope that I have not forgotten anything. I hope this was interesting to read and I didn’t bore you to death, and that it wasn’t unnecessarily difficult to follow.

As always, you can ask anything on our IRC.

March 13, 2026

Plans to possibly retire the big-endian PowerPC/POWER platforms

Unless circumstances change, we are planning to retire support for the big-endian 32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit POWER platforms. Read below for when and why and how you can potentially change this.

Note that this is not about ppc64le, which is not affected by this.

Reasons

We’ve been supporting these platforms in Chimera since a while back, with ppc64 being suppported in repos since the middle of 2023 and 32-bit ppc a while later.

We brought up the platform support to give people interested in the platform a base to bring the platform towards greater usability and fix the long-standing bugs that plague it. This has not happened, and so far things have been getting very slowly worse instead.

Occasionally users come in looking to test it and often expect a fully working platform but generally quickly lose interest when faced with various issues and in the end nothing gets fixed.

For instance, it has not been possible to run a working GPU either platform for several years, due to unfixed regressions in Mesa, requiring use of the old Amber branch to get these working (which most people opt for and which also ends up counter-productive for fixing things upstream).

Likewise, there has not been an up to date web browser, and things are looking to regress further e.g. with WebKit having adopted Skia for rendering (WebKit was the sole web engine left where rendering didn’t have broken colors).

We don’t have a dedicated maintainer for the platform and so far I (q66) have been working on keeping things at least building but I don’t have the resources or motivation or real interest in keeping this going.

Our build infrastructure for this is also lacking, with both platforms being built on a single virtual machine hosted at OSUOSL. The performance is for most part acceptable but e.g. we’re frequently running out of disk space as the repos grow as the machine is barely capable of hosting two sets of repos.

I have some POWER9 hardware that could be set up as a build machine to fix this but I’m not sure if this is worth running if I’m going to be the only person giving this attention, so for now this is not going to happen.

Timeframe

Therefore, in order to lighten my workload I plan to retire the repositories and builders by July 2026.

In the meantime, if someone steps up and is willing to dedicate time and resources to maintaining things well, actually using it, and fixing the issues that make it unusable for most people, I am willing to retract this decision and set up a better builder, but only if it actually seems like there is a future for the platform in the distro.

If not, the repositories will be removed after the middle of the year, along with packaging only relevant for these platforms (such as mesa-amber).

December 20, 2025

New images

The 20251220 set of images is now published.

This is an incremental refresh.

Changes

This set has been overdue for a while so it mainly comes as an update with new versions.

This set is based on kernel 6.18 and comes with latest versions of desktop environments and most other software.

Newly, the live images will not automatically import LVMs and ZFS pools, as that was found to be unintuitive and sometimes system-breaking (with ZFS-on-root setups).

Additionally, the images now come with an experimental TUI installer. It can be invoked as chimera-installer from the command line.

The installer supports the following:

It does not support the following:

You are expected to partition, format, and mount your filesystem layout beforehand and then point the installer to the mounted root. This is by design and will remain that way, however a separate tool for simplified disk setup may be provided later on.

However, it does validate your mounted filesystem tree for baseline correctness, performs detection of system-specific things (like ESP) and automatically generates crypttab for encrypted setups (this is rudimentary so if you use keyfiles or other advanced things you need to tweak it afterwards).

Next images

The next set will come early next year with some more major changes.

April 20, 2025

New images

The 20250420 set of images is now published.

This is an incremental refresh with some major changes.

Changes

There are some major changes in how the images are set up.

One is that EFI/BIOS images now use the Limine bootloader for the image itself, instead of GRUB. This does not affect what bootloader is used for the installed system (that is the user’s choice) but it’s the first step towards moving GRUB to the user repository eventually.

The PowerPC/POWER images still use GRUB. For installed systems, the recommended choice is systemd-boot on EFI and GRUB elsewhere, Limine does not yet have distro integration.

The x86 images newly use MBR for best compatibility with all hardware.

Architecture support has been expanded. On top of the existing archs from before (AArch64, PowerPC, POWER LE/BE, RISC-V, x86_64) we now ship images for the LoongArch64 architecture.

The AArch64 image list has been expanded, with Rock64 and QuartzPro64 being added.

Various fixes have been made; notably, issues with cross-device links and local installs with separate /boot should be gone, and apk will no longer segfault when network connection is unavailable.

Everything has been updated and the images come with kernel 6.14, GNOME 48, Plasma 6.3.4, and a variety of updated software.

Planned changes

For the next image set we plan to provide images for mobile phones and generally more mobile packaging.

Additionally, the ARMv7 architecture will be introduced to the builders and then to release images.

Device SD images will automatically grow their root partition and filesystem on first boot from next time but this has not yet been deployed.

Additionally, Limine will get distro integration and will become a convenient option for installation.

March 20, 2025

Not dropping RISC-V support after all (maybe)

As circumstances have changed, we are not dropping RISC-V repos for the time being. Instead, newly rebuilt repositories are introduced, built on hardware, with tests.

This support is provisional for now, with the new builder still being evaluated to see how it holds up in the long term.

The situation now

Shortly after announcing the drop, we were offered remote access to a Milk-V Pioneer machine by Zach van Rijn of Adélie Linux. This machine was originally intended for another purpose which never ended up materializing.

I proceeded to do a full world rebuild on this machine, after some environment setup to allow our infra bits to run. This world rebuild is now finished, and makes up the new repository.

For most part, it was relatively stable during the build (we had to build our own kernel to prevent the draft RVV 0.7 in the CPU from interfering, and there were two crashes but it was also under total continuous load the whole time).

The performance is fairly acceptable, though nowhere near my original idea of being similar to Cortex-A72; the cores are more comparable to Cortex-A55 in practical performance, especially since we have to disable vectors. As there is still 64 of them, most of the large projects build fairly fast (anything written in Rust builds very slowly, however).

By now, the original repositories have been replaced, and the new machine is plugged into the infrastructure. Do keep this in mind when upgrading existing installations, and use the --available flag with apk (every package in your system will be reinstalled).

Either way, we will continue to monitor the builds and see how the new machine holds up. If it works well, it will stay; if significant issues arise, we might end up dropping the architecture after all, at least until something significantly better is available.

The current repository is in the same tier as the LoongArch64 repo. The specifics are very similar - i.e. no LTO, tests on and enforced. The overall coverage is also fairly equivalent.

March 12, 2025

Dropping RISC-V support

UPDATE March 20 2025: The architecture is not being dropped for now after all. See the newer article for details.

The next set of images will drop RISC-V support. The builder is currently still going but within the next few days it will stop, and the repositories will stay in place but frozen.

Nothing will change in packaging (the build profile will remain, template support where present will remain, cross-toolchains will remain) but there will be no more updates to the repo for the foreseeable future.

The situation

The initial plumbing for RISC-V was added in the distro in July 2021 and repos later in the year, i.e. it has been there almost from the start. During all this time, the builds have been supported by doing so on an x86_64 machine with qemu-user binfmt emulation coupled with transparent cbuild support for this.

The reason for doing it this way was that there wasn’t any hardware we could use for performance reasons; I had obtained a SiFive HiFive Unmatched board in October 2021 and this proved to be useless for builds as the performance of this board is similar to Raspberry Pi 3. Other boards came later, but none of them improved on that front significantly enough.

This was expected to be a temporary state that would resolve itself within 2-3 year time; it is Q1 2025, and the options are the following:

The promising option (Milk-V Oasis with 16 SiFive P670 cores) that was first announced in 2023 ultimately ended up being canned due to issues the SoC vendor has, and nobody has ever seen a single production chip, let alone a board. As far as I can tell, no other options are coming up.

It is unsustainable to stick with the current situation with the emulator. Doing so has numerous problems:

At this point, to have a relatively sustainable base, we’d need a board that is at least as powerful as Raspberry Pi 5. This would still make the slowest builder in the fleet, but it would likely be faster than the current emulation arrangement while also being more reliable.

However, the industry does not seem to be interested in producing such machines and for most part focuses on embedded (low-end) as well as things entirely irrelevant to a distro (AI/NPU etc.) that do not help at all; at this point I don’t think we can wait any longer, especially as no remedy has been announced.

We have no such problem with the other architectures; obviously x86 and ARM are at this point mainstream and this does not surprise anyone, but even the likes of LoongArch have perfectly acceptable hardware (not the fastest, but also not a bottleneck) that performs reliably.

Will RISC-V support be reintroduced?

If acceptable build hardware is released and is reasonably available to us, the architecture will be reintroduced.

If that happens, the repositories will be rebuilt from scratch, as if a new architecture, with a process similar to how it was recently done with LoongArch64. It will be a tier-2 architecture with enforced tests and without LTO just like LoongArch64.

However, whether or when that will happen is currently a big unknown due to such hardware not existing and nothing being even announced.

Nothing will change in the other architecture support. The new tier list will be:

There is also some chance of ARMv7 and ARMv6 32-bit repositories being introduced in the next few months’ timeframe, as we may be moving to an oversized Ampere Altra machine for all ARM builds (right now AArch64 is served by a Hetzner Cloud VM and can’t take any more load). This is yet not set in stone, however.

February 14, 2025

New images

The 20250214 set of images is now published.

This took longer than originally expected but there have been major changes that warranted waiting a bit longer for it.

Changes

The images come with a fresh version of apk-tools. This version finally supports several features that we began using, particularly variable expansion and being able to migrate most of its files into a system-wide /usr location.

That means you finally have a way to properly change your mirror of choice without having to mess with the repository definitions. The process of doing that is in the relevant documentation section.

The repository definitions have been updated to use the new v3-style index naming, though backwards compatibility is also provided.

Kernel 6.13 is used in the new images. That means updated hardware support and other things.

Both the GNOME and Plasma images (the latter is still experimental) come with the latest versions of their respective desktop environments.

Various fixes have been made to allow the live system to work better and more seamlessly on more machines.

Additionally, 32-bit PowerPC images are now a standard release architecture and included in the batch. We have some plans to also introduce support for the LoongArch64 ISA, which may join them next time.

Due to all of these changes as well as updates in the infrastructure, this new set is the recommended baseline for installation. Older images have an out of date package manager and installation scripts, which may be problematic with the current layout.

December 27, 2024

Entering beta

Today we have updated apk-tools to an rc tag. With this, the project is now entering beta phase, after around a year and a half.

What actually changes?

In general, this does not actually mean much, as the project is rolling release and updates will simply keep coming. It is more of an acknowledgement of current status, though new images will be released in the coming days.

Changes since alpha

At the point of entering alpha, the cports tree had roughly 1000 templates, most of them in main. There was a single large desktop (GNOME) and a single major web browser (Firefox) and an assortment of other software.

At this point, the tree contains ~2800 templates, i.e. almost 3x more. We have all major desktop environments, all major browsers, and overall much larger collection of both small and large programs.

The repo was also at ~6000 commits at the time, by 11 authors; now it’s almost 20000 commits, by over 100 authors.

Significant under-the-hood improvements have been made in service management, our build infrastructure, the cbuild build system which is now significantly more powerful and has much better UX, global switch to the mimalloc allocator, stateless /var and progress towards stateless /etc, improvements in core userland, introduction of libdinitctl, introduction of sd-tools, and a lot more.

Infrastructure situation and sponsorship

Currently, we support 5 architectures (aarch64, ppc64le, ppc64, riscv64, x86_64), 3 being tier-1 (aarch64, ppc64le, x86_64).

This list will likely remain stable in 2025. The infrastructure is self-funded and we control all of it. Besides the unsatisfactory RISC-V situation, all of the machines are sufficient.

It would be nice to introduce CI for more architectures during next year, particularly AArch64.

Chimera is a FOSS project and therefore does not and will not take donations, and is driven by its community. However, for the past half a year, I (q66) have been working on the project through my employment at Igalia, thanks to a contract with Rubicon Communications, LLC (aka Netgate). This collaboration will continue during 2025 and is a significant help and a boost for the project’s progress, as it lets me dedicate much more time.

Therefore, huge thanks to Netgate for giving me this opportunity.

Plans for 2025

During 2025, some notable things will be coming too:

And likely much more than that. On the infrastructure side, we plan to automate more things, and introduce better build hardware for the RISC-V architecture if possible, as right now it is a major bottleneck.

Upcoming images

A new image set will be released before end of the year to match this announcement. They will come with various fixes and a new version of apk-tools.

December 04, 2024

New images and welcoming new committers

As of 04 December 2024 new images have been published.

While there weren’t originally supposed to be any more images before reaching the beta phase, a new apk feature proved to be necessary.

Other than that, it’s an incremental refresh with software updates.

New committers

We have two new committers, Jami Kettunen (deathmist) and Isaac Freund (ifreund). Both have been a part of our community for a long time and are active contributors; congratulations :)

Unfortunately, another of our contributors, nekopsykose, has left the project recently. We thank her for being a part of the community and all of the work over the years and wish her the best.

Changes

The apk-tools package manager has been updated again, ahead of implementing a new kernel backup system. New static binaries, new OCI images, and other things have also been updated to use this new version of apk.

That means this image set is now the minimum that can be used to perform new installations, unless you update apk-tools in the live environment beforehand.

Various software has been updated. Linux kernel 6.12 is now the default, most notably.

The ISOs now have a bootable partition in the protective MBR. That means compatibility with certain x86 BIOS machines should be better.

Upcoming changes

This is likely the last update before entering the beta phase, for real this time.

October 27, 2024

New images

As of 27 October 2024 new images have been published.

These are an incremental refresh with new software, as well as new image types. They bring various minor changes.

Changes

The most notable change is a major update of apk-tools. From now on, we will start requiring changes that were made to it, so using older images to install is no longer supported.

Experimentally, KDE Plasma ISO images are now available alongside the GNOME images. The GNOME images are based on GNOME 47, while the KDE images use Plasma 6.2.

Additionally, the ISO images now use EROFS for its root file system instead of SquashFS. This brings increased compatibility and increased performance while in the live environment, in exchange for a minor increase in image size.

Last but not least, the “force console” GRUB options are now gone in the graphical ISOs, but the functionality is not. Adding nogui to kernel command line in GRUB’s editor will achieve the same.

Upcoming changes

This is likely the last update before entering the beta phase.