Valve and Collabora preview Arch Linux for aarch64

Collabora has published the first public preview of Holo Core, a pure aarch64 port of Arch Linux being developed with Valve as the basis for the OS on Steam Frame, which uses an aarch64 CPU. Because Arch Linux does not officially support aarch64, the project required new tooling and CI infrastructure rather than a straightforward rebuild.

The release includes:

• Sources: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/holo-core-aarch64-preview
• Binary packages: https://holo-packages.steamos.cloud/holo-core-aarch64-preview/mash-20251118
• Docker container: registry.gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/holo-core-aarch64-preview/base-devel

These artifacts cover a subset of packages from an Arch Linux state repository snapshot at commit 97c0a0b47d15, plus any changes needed to build on aarch64. Collabora says the current goal is not to rebuild all of Arch Linux, but to provide the package set needed for development and image creation for Steam Frame. Even that limited target still involves several thousand packages once runtime and build dependencies are included.

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Replaying Arch Linux builds in CI

Collabora says the harder problem is not cross-compilation itself, but making the full process reproducible from scratch in CI for a rolling-release distro. That means calculating a valid build order, correcting package ordering when the state Git repository history is unsuitable for rebuilding, and handling dependency chains that move forward while the port is still catching up.

The company gives Rust as one example: rebuilding rust 1.91 may require 1.90, which requires 1.89, and so on back to the bootstrap version. It also points to SONAME transitions in libraries such as icu and gpgme, where both old and new versions may be needed during a build because pacman itself depends on them.

Collabora says its GitLab-based CI can now calculate the full build tree, resolve dependencies, and replay Arch package builds from an initial bootstrap to a specific snapshot, including intermediate rebuilds. The tooling itself has not yet been published, but the team says it is working toward a continuously operating CI system that can track Arch Linux development over time and contribute that work upstream.

How to test the preview

The preview is already usable for experimentation on aarch64 hardware, and it can also run on an x86_64 host with QEMU user-space emulation and proper binfmt setup. Collabora documents a test workflow using distrobox and the published base-devel container image, then building a package such as coreutils 9.9-1 with makepkg.

The preview container identifies itself as “Holo core Aarch64 port (preview)” with VERSION_ID=mash-20251118.1 and BUILD_ID=240949. For now, Collabora says the main objective is to keep the aarch64 port aligned with package revisions used for future amd64/x86_64 versions of SteamOS.