Wookey (who I also previously interviewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XdgQ7AmWX0) has been bootstrapping ILP32 in Debian, the 32-bit ABI that will run on aarch64 core with no 32-bit instruction set support. He has been doing this using Helmut Grohne’s excellent ‘rebootstrap’, which uses the work Debian has done over the last few years to make it self-bootstrapping (multiarch, dependency-loop removal, build profiles, cross-building support, ‘botch’ dependency analysis tools) to automate the process of a bootstrap. This lets people doing bootstraps of new architectures concentrate on just the stuff that has actually changed due to the new arch, and allows repeatable builds.
He is attending Linaro connect in San Francisco this year using a Beam telepresence robot, in order to avoid the hefty couple of tonnes of emissions that flying across the Atlantic generates. That’s slightly more than one’s person’s annual sustainable allowance for _everything_: food, transport, heating, stuff, and he reckons eating is more important than geek conferences given that we really do have to choose…
