openSUSE ARMs More Hardware, Gets More Build Power THE INTERNET, April 15, 2013 -- The openSUSE ARM team is proud to announce the immediate availability of openSUSE 12.3 based ARM images with support for the Calxeda Highbank ARM solution as well as a variety of other SoC's. Thanks to a deployment of Arndale boards with Samsung Exynos 5 Dualcore CPUs, the Open Build Service on build.openSUSE.org has gained a significant upgrade and development has been accellerated. openSUSE 12.3, released March 7 2013, introduced ARMv7 as a fully supported architecture. Due to the wide variety of hardware on the ARM platform, only installation images for a selection of devices can be provided by the openSUSE project and work on support more devices is an ongoing endeavor. Today, stable images for various ARMv7 SoCs have been made available on the openSUSE download servers. The most exciting are those for Highbank, the codename Caldexa’s ECX-1000 series SoC system which presents one of the most promising 32bit ARM boards for the server space. Aside from Highbank, images for 11 other devices are now available with SOC's including the TI OMAP 3 and 4 series, Samsung Exynos 4 and 5, the Raspberry Pi and the Freescale iMX51 and iMX53. The openSUSE ARM team is looking forward to feedback from users of these platforms. Technical collaboration with Samsung has resulted in additional build power for the Open Build Service thanks to a deployment of native ARM Arndale boards, providing dual core Samsung Exynos 5 CPUs. openSUSE employs the Open Build Service to provide a centralized, powerful set of hardware freely available for speeding up the building of packages and images by Open Source developers. The ARM boards replace QEMU emulation on x86 with KVM virtualization on native hardware and will provide swifter compile times for updates and faster development. The Open Build Service on build.opensuse.org now represents the first large production deployment of KVM virtualization on ARM that we are aware off. Seth Bernsen, Senior Director Ecosystem Development, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. said: "We're excited to see the realization of the Arndale development board platform as an enabler for innovative Open Source software development like the openSUSE project." The openSUSE ARM team has also been making steady progress on AArch64 support. Currently we provide over 5700 packages readily built for AArch64, which means openSUSE currently delivers the biggest software pool for AArch64, including Java, Python, Perl, PHP and related packages. Find more details and an update on the current state of openSUSE ARM in the Sneak Preview: https://news.opensuse.org/?p=15779 ### About openSUSE The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. For more information, visit http://www.opensuse.org.