Collabora has publicly announced the launch of the Holo Core project, an initiative developed in close collaboration with Valve. The central objective of this project is to natively port the Arch Linux distribution (the foundation on which SteamOS is built) to the AArc64 architecture.
This titanic task It was born out of necessity: Valve's new hardware, Known internally as Steam Frame (a hybrid device that merges the capabilities of a personal computer, a virtual reality viewer, and three-dimensional controllers), it is powered by a Snapdragon 8 chip, leaving behind the traditional x86_64 processors that until now powered the Steam Deck.
Given the lack of official support for Arch Linux For ARM64 processors, the team of Collabora had to build a continuous integration infrastructure (CI) from scratch. Today, this effort has borne its first public fruit with the release of a set of test resources.
The hell of dependency and the reconstruction of history
Collabora mentions that the Developing Holo Core was a challenge of epic proportions which forced engineers to confront the chaotic nature of rolling release distributions. The problem wasn't limited to simply compiling code for a new processor, but rather The real challenge was to create an automated robot capable of reading the Arch Linux history and reconstructing its entire tree. software from scratch.
In this ecosystem, the packages are chained together temporarily, In other words, if the system needs to compile the current version of a program, it cannot do so all at once. For example, if it is version 2.0, it first needs the previous version (1.9), which in turn requires (1.8), forcing the system to go back in time to compile older versions that allow it to build the new ones.
This puzzle became even more complex when dealing with libraries. of the system, such as those used by the pacman package manager. To update these base libraries, the system needed to keep both the old version and the new one alive. (to run the current manager) like the new (to compile the update).
This was compounded by the structure of the Arch Linux Git repository, where the Packages were often introduced without a logical sequential orderthwarting attempts at automated reconstruction. And if that weren't enough, To recover old code, CI servers ran into broken links.projects that had changed hosting platforms or modern anti-bot security systems that blocked massive code downloads.
A bulletproof infrastructure ready for the future
After overcoming these immense obstacles, the The Holo Core team managed to develop a set of tools continuous integration capable of calculating the labyrinthine dependency tree and reproducing the Arch Linux build history from its initial state to the present, performing all intermediate reconstructions without human intervention.
The publicly released test version captures a snapshot of the Arch Linux repository's state dated November 18, 2025, serving as irrefutable proof that the infrastructure is mature and ready to support the development of the final Steam Frame operating system.
Once the system reaches its optimal stability pointCollaborates with Valve They intend to perfectly synchronize it with the software versions that will be used. in future releases of SteamOS for traditional PCs.
Even more importart, All the code for the sophisticated continuous integration system will be released under an open license and offered as a gift. to the original developers of Arch Linux, a project that has historically lacked an automated CI infrastructure. Finally, the The Holo Core team will join forces with the community to turn this port into an official version and maintained by Arch Linux for AArch64 processors, thus closing the development circle.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that developers and researchers can now access the source code of the packages Adapted, download pre-compiled binaries and use a Docker container image to experiment with this preview version of the operating system running natively under the rules of ARM64.
Source: https://www.collabora.com