There is an ongoing community project brewing right now to finally use official Arch Linux directly on ARM.

The project allows the upstream Arch Linux PKGBUILDs to be compiled and ran on ARM devices. This contrasts to fork projects which maintain their own modifications.

For years, ArchLinuxARM (alarm) has been the go-to distribution for running the project on ARM devices. While it has served the community well, it operates as a separate project and requires significant number of modifications compared to upstream Archlinux project. These differences may even manifested as packages being out-of-date or even broken packages, such as the infamous chromium package not building on alarm project.

On the other hand, the ongoing effort has been to run mostly unmodified Archlinux PKGBUILD files with minimal modifications. This is supported as part of a recent effort RFC!32 which allows non x86_64 architecture to also be targeted by the Archlinux packages.

The project is currently usable with around 99% projects able to be built from upstream Arch Linux project, because a lot of the ARM-specific modifications have been merged to upstream PKGBUILD, so at least there’s a “legitimacy” aspect of the project. That said, the binary distribution is still entirely community-maintained.

Discussions are being done to know which ARM architecture to (eventually) officially support. The concensus between the community maintainers is to support at least ARMv8-a architecture with no interest in ARMv7 or lower because of the need of aarch64 instruction set. One of the member and myself are working on ARMv8-a itself, but the main efforts are currently targetting ARMv8.2-a, mainly because of package build failure that happened in the past. That issue has been resolved and there doesn’t seem to be any blocker in targetting ARMv8-a, other than the fact that significant efforts have been made on ARMv8.2-a.

More information on the project can be found on #archlinux-ports on liberachat IRC with documents written on Arch Linux Ports: AArch64.