armutils will no longer be maintained

armutils

With chroot environments and QEMU it's possible to build Arch Linux packages for ARM architectures in a rather simple and convenient way. armutils provides the corresponding tools:

• mkarmchroot creates an Arch Linux chroot environment for an ARM architecture from an image file. Such image files can be downloaded from Arch Linux ARM
• arm-nspawn spawns a command in an ARM chroot environment, wrapping systemd-nspawn
• makearmpkg builds a package in an ARM chroot environment

These tools mimic the behaviour of their x86_64 counterparts mkarchroot, arch-nspawn and makechrootpkg. qemu-user-static and qemu-user-static-binfmt are used to "translate" between the ARM chroot and the x86_64 host.

mkarmchroot

mkarmchroot is an implementation of the approach described on nerdstuff.org. The tool must be called with:

• either an URL of an ARM image archive or the path of an image archive on the local file system. Such an image can be obtained from Arch Linux ARM for different ARM architectures.
• the desired path of the root directory of the new chroot environment
• a list of packages / package groups that shall be installed.

mkarmchroot creates the root folder for the chroot environment, extracts the image files into it, updates the environment and installs the packages.

arm-nspawn

arm-nspawn is a fork of arch-nspawn with major changes since arch-nspawn is made to be used for x86_64 chroot environments. The interfaces of both commands are almost equal - arm-nspawndoes not provide the -s option.

Using arch-chroot to execute commands in ARM chroots can lead to strange error messages, therefore I recommended to use arm-nspawninstead.

makearmpkg

makearmpkg is a fork of makechrootpkg with minor changes since makechrootpkg is made to be used for x86_64 chroot environments. The calls of arch-nspawn are replaced by calls of arm-nspawn. The interfaces and functionalities of makearmpkg and makechrootpkg are equal. It requires a chroot environment where the packages of base-devel are installed.

Example

The command

$ mkarmchroot -u http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz <YOUR-PATH>/aarch64/root base-devel

creates a chroot environment for ARMv8 / AArch64 under the folder <YOUR-PATH>/aarch64/root and installs the package group base-devel.

If the PKGBUILD file of an AUR package is stored in <YOUR-PATH>/pkg, the package can be built with:

$ cd <YOUR-PATH>/pkg
$ sudo makearmpkg -r ../aarch64 -- -c --syncdeps --noconfirm

The options -c, --syncdeps and --noconfirm are passed to makepkg. makapkg cleans the working directory after the build (-c), installs missing dependencies (--syncdeps) and suppresss user input (--noconfirm).