one distribution to support all CPU architectures
The T2 System Development Environment, allows the fully
automated creation of custom Operating Systems using state of the art,
up-to-date packages, integrated support for cross compilation for
reproducible builds.
From ARM, M68K, MIPS, HPPA, PowerPC, RISCV, SPARC to X86-64, Glibc
to Musl, T2 supports all major CPU architectures, C libraries, GUI systems and
desktop environments as well as countless of special purpose and
embedded firmware packages!
While initially focused on the Linux kernel, T2 already has
proof-of-concept support for building "homebrew" pkg ports for Other
OS, including: BSDs, macOS and Haiku.
With support already wide and versatile, we do not intend to stop
here, and plan to improve T2's "home-brew" support, as well as
bootstrapping alternative micro kernels, such
as L4, Fuchsia, RedoxOS or integrating building "AOSP" Android as
well.
News
T2 24.8 "Pkg Once, Runs Everywhere!"
2024-07-30
We are pleased to announce T2 24.8 for a major update with
vastly improved musl libc, clang as default compiler and
other out-of-the-box convenience improvements for the 15 most
popular CPU, libc and compiler configurations: ARM(64),
HPPA64, IA64, MIPS64, PowerPC(64), RISCV64, SPARC64, i686 and
x86-64 now also shipping cross-compiled OpenJDK Java™ by
default for an just-working cooperate business needs and
Ghidra reverse engineering experience.
The release contains of a total of 933 changesets, including
approximately 1442 packages updates, 148 issues fixed, 101
packages or features added, 36 removed and 15
improvements. More details can be found on the release page
Oh, and one more thing: the MIPS64 build is now shipping
with five architectural Linux kernel variants, for Sgi IP27,
IP30, IP32-r5k, IP32-r10k and generic Malta board for use with
Qemu: MIPS64
Don't delay and try highly
optimized T2/Linux today!
T2 24.6 "Radical Optimism"
2024-06-03
We are pleased to announce T2 24.6 for major out-of-the-box
convenience improvements for the most pouplar CPU
architectures ARM64, x86-64, PowerPC64 and i686 with desktop
builds now also shipping with cross-compiled LibreOffice, Wine and Thunderbird by
default for an just-working business or home Desktop and
Linux gaming experience.
The release contains a total of 606 changesets, including
approximately 750 package updates, 67 issues fixed, 80
packages or features added, 21 removed and about 9 other
improvements. More details can be found on the release page
Oh, and one more thing: while at it we also updated the
sophisticated, professional and Open Source FlightGear simulator to the
last version (and fixed it to build), too. ;-)
Don't delay and try highly
optimized T2/Linux today!
T2 24.5 "Future Nostalgia"
2024-04-28
T2 24.5 was released as a major milestone release not only
including the latest and greatest Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM /
Clang, Glibc, Musl, uClibc, X.org, Mesa3D, but also the KDE
and GNOME desktop packages updated and fixed to finally mostly
cross compile. While at it, we also undeleted IA-64 Itanium
support! ;-)
A total of 36 pre-compiled base install ISOs for
various Glibc, Musl and uClibc combinations are available for for 25
CPU ISAs: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64,
Loongarch64, M68k, Microblaze, MIPS(64), Nios2, OpenRISC,
PowerPC(64), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), SuperH, i486, i686,
x86-64 and x32. On most architectures the release still
boots with 512MB of RAM or even less, and are on average just
one GB in size. Most vintage Xorg drivers were fixed to
actually work again. The rolling release is updated using the
scripted source build system and thus optimized for the native
system CPU.
The release contains a total of 5140 changesets, including
approximately 5314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317
packages or features added and 163 removed. Around 53
improvements. More details can be found on the release page
Don't delay and try highly
optimized T2/Linux today!
Doubling down on IA-64 Itanium support
2023-12-05
With the recently announced removal of support for IA-64
from the upstream Linux kernel, we would like to stress that
the reports of death of this EPIC architecture are greatly
exaggerated.
Due to the ease of T2's cross compiling, as well as support
and interest by the OpenSource community, we are committed to
support IA-64 for at least another decade or two.
If anything, the upstream removal only sparked increased
interest in T2 on Itanium support and brought an influx of new
developers with IA-64 based machines. If you have highly
reliable, explicit parallel IA-64 computers in production,
don't delay and try and support highly optimized T2 Linux
today!
Dark theme and more
2023-08-28
Once a hacker niche now mainstream, and we could not escape it anymore: the Dark Theme!
Accompanied by our new glowing T2 logo!!
Keeping this pace, we did a long awaited refactor on the website's backend that will allow us keep making incremental changes to it with ease in the future. Who knows, maybe a complete design overhaul some day?
Article titles on the main page can now be clicked to highlight the article itself, which also gives you a nice link to share links directly pointing to the chosen article. For example the one you are currently reading https://t2sde.org/#news-2023-08-28
While at it, we finally added an RSS feed for the main page, too! Which truly helps to keep an eye on what is going in the open T2 world without having to constantly open a web browser daily to check for news.
Build time estimation
2023-07-31
Te are really happy to announce that, as of revision 64292, the T2 build scripts estimate and display how time time a package will likely require to build!
Of course if works for Emerge-Pkg as well as Build-Target.
This is a game changer for many users with different, especially older systems and especially when testing on multiple different, exotic, vintage and retro RISC machines with varying levels of performance and allows us to better organize around long builds!
This feature is based on binutils reference time units which were gathered for a
really, really long time in T2 package's .cache.
We tried to make it as accurate as possible, but of course some variations, especially for packages not utilizing multiple parallel threads during compilation are to be expected.
The T2 core developers updated a massive amount of .cache files to make this as accurate as possible.
And last but not least, we did benchmarks on multiple boards to give people an overview of what their hardware is
capable of, which you can find under "Performance Index" on individual hardware reference page.
See for example the Mango Pi MQ-Pro D1 T2 hardware page.
We hope you like this new feature, because we for sure do!
Intel hardware decoding
2023-07-06
We are happy to announce that T2, as of r63868, officially supports hardware video
encoding and decoding with Intel discrete GPUs (aka ARC/DG2).
TL;DR: ./scripts/Emerge-Pkg -force intel-onevpl ffmpeg mpv
It required 40 hours of mostly nighttime work to put everything together but we finally did it.
Here are all the packages you need to operate your hardware en/decoder:
Example command:
ffmpeg -hwaccel qsv -c:v vp9_qsv -i input.webm -c:v av1_qsv -b:v 5M -look_ahead 1 output.webm
As an added bonus you also get H264, HEVC and VP9 hardware support!
As usual, patches welcome!
Let us know if it actually works for your DG1 or Xe graphics too!
32-bit Rustc and more big-endian
2023-05-05
The last couple of days we spent fixing rustc support for sparc32,
notably the elf format which isn't working upstream as well as more
RISCV(32) as well as big-endian ARM fixes!
Next release will then come with rustc, cargo and hopefully firefox
which requires a more fixes at the time of writing.
As usual, patches welcome if
you found something not yet working perfectly on this older, or
embedded systems!
Complete system encryption
2023-02-18
In the past few weeks, we've been hard at work to improve user
convenience when setting a fully encrypted T2 installation.
Our installer already supported full-disk encryption, including
encrypted boot partitions which you unlock with Grub at boot time since
2020 (r50723).
But until now we were missing a crucial feature
for easier data management without being locked with one partition
scheme unless doing a clean install: LVM inside LUKS.
As of today, we are proud to announce that we integrated support for
booting LUKS+LVM! We even added support for encrypted
swap/suspend-to-disk to complete the security chain so that you
can shutdown you PC without closing everything you were working on and
worry about someone running out with your drive and dumping the
content of your swap partition in case your computer is stored in a
public space.
Everything is integrated in Stone which you will be able to
experiment by yourself when we release 23.2 ISO images.
Rebooting from the installed to the new system is now faster than
ever, courtesy of the kexec mechanism that was added in r60600
(r59937, 60059, 60458, 60468, and more that fixed
cross-compiling!). Meaning you can now deploy T2 on your server
without having time to make coffee before it reboots!
Of course everything is already available in the current subversion
repository!
If you have an already existing T2 install
make sure to upgrade the following packages before testing anything:
grub2, linux, mkinitrd, stone, util-linux.
A typical LUKS+LVM+suspend-to-disk setup would look like so:
NAME FSTYPE TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda disk
├─sda1 vfat part /boot/efi
└─sda2 crypto_LUKS part
└─toor crypt
├─qvo-swap whatever lvm [SWAP]
├─qvo-root whatever lvm /
├─qvo-boot whatever lvm /boot
└─qvo-home whatever lvm /home
You can watch parts of that work on youtube:
Next steps for us will be to have sensible defaults suggestions at
partition time for user convenience and then rewrite (hopefully soon)
a graphical version of the installer.
As always, patches welcome! Come chat with us on the interwebs!
T2 22.9 "TOP SECRET"
2022-09-02
Today T2 SDE Linux 22.9 was released. Another major milestone
update with latest and greatest GCC, LLVM / Clang, X.org, Mesa3D, Glibc
and more. Improved security, as well as SMART and whole-program LTO
optimizations.
As technology snapshot a pre-built binary ISO is released
for high-performance x86-64-v3, and of course all other
architectures, including: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32,
hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32,
ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc, sparc64, superh, x86,
x86-64 and x32 can be rolling release updated thru the
scripted build system from source – optimized for the native
system.
There were 1450 changesets with 2378 lines of commit messages.
Approximately 1918 packages got updates, 122 issues fixed, 1918
packages or features added and 47 removed. Around 15 improvements
have been committed.
T2 22.6 "Résistance"
2022-07-17
Today T2 SDE Linux 22.6 was released. A major milestone update to ship full
support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries.
Of course all the architectures, including: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa,
ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x,
sparc, sparc64, superh, x86, x86-64 and x32 can be rolling release updated thru the
scripted build system from source – optimized to the native system.
The 22.6 release received updates across the board, with latest stable Linux
kernel 5.17.15, GCC12, LLVM/Clang 14 and the latest of KDE, GNOME and much more.
There were 5014 change-sets with 6334 lines of commit messages. Approximately 4947
packages got updates, 331 issues fixed, 4947 packages or features added and 148 removed.
Around 49 improvements have been committed.
T2 feature patch bounty program
2021-11-28
The T2 SDE project is thrilled to announce
ExactCODE GmbH sponsoring features bounties for selected feature
requests. We believe OpenSource developers should be fairly paid for their
tremendous infrastructure work that most of the Internet, mobile and embedded platforms
are based on nowadays. We are happy to set a good example and T2 being one of the
first project that gives back and pays their contributors.
T2 ported Firefox to RISCV64
2021-11-05
Today the T2 System Development Environment team is happy to share the latest
Firefox working on
RISCV64 Linux desktop! While this is a huge step for general RISCV desktop
and mobile usability more work remain, e.g. to port the JavaScript JIT to RISCV,
too.
53220 revisions, 4004 packages, and 20+ years of history
2021-09-19
We are proud to announce that T2 SDE Linux reached over 4000, largely
cross-compiling packages for over 20
architectures. As an added bonus,
you can nowadays often follow the development
live on YouTube!
Enjoy playing along on your devices at home and we hope you learn something ;-)
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