The T2 System Development Environment or sometimes knows as
Meta Distribution, allows the fully automated creation of custom
OS distributions using state of the art, up-to-date packages and
integrated support for cross compilation.
From Glibc to Musl, from ARM, to x86-64. T2 supports all major
C librares, CPU architectures, window servers
and desktop environments as well as countless special purpose and embedded
firmware packages!
While T2 initially focused on the Linux kernel, we already have
initial, proof-of-concept support for building "home-brew" Other OS pkg ports
on BSDs, macOS and Haiku, too!
With support already wide and versatile, we do not plan to stop here,
and plan to improve T2's "home-brew" compilation as well as
bootstrapping alternative micro kernels, such as L4,
Fuchsia, or integrating building "AOSP" Android as well.
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 choosen 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 truely 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.
Te are really happy to announace 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 wer 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 mulitple parallel threads during compilation are to be expected.
The T2 core develoeprs updated a massive ammount 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 overwiew of what their hardware is
capable of, which you can find under "Perfomance 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!
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 perefctly on this older, or
embedded systems!
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 partions 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 partion
scheme unless doing a clean install: LVM inside LUKS.
As of today, we are proud to anounce 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
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!
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 relased 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.
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.
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
tremendeous infrasructure work most of the intenet, 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.
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.
We are proud to annouce 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 ;-)
Today T2 SDE Linux 21.7 was released. An interim update to ship
full support for the new HiFive SiHive Unmatched 64-bit quad-core RISC-V 64
board as well as a reference for the further refined smart optimizations
for 32- and 64-bit x86. Of course all the other architectures, including: alpha,
arm, arm64, hppa, ia64, m68k, mips64, mipsel, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv,
riscv64, s390x, sparc64, superh, x86, and x86-64 can be rolling release
upated thru the scripted build system.
The 21.7 release received updates across the board, with latest Linux
kernel 5.13.1, as well as a major GCC 11 C++ templated ctor bug was fixed.
There were 305 changesets and this is also the first release with our
AI bot "Data" contributing more revisions than human developers: Data: 164,
humans: 141!
Today the T2 System Development Environment Linux 21.5 was
released, with an even larger amount of supported, 18 pre- and
cross-compiled set of architectures ever: alpha, arm, arm64, hppa,
ia64, m68k, mips64, mipsel, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64,
s390x, sparc64, superh, x86, and x86-64.
Major performance improemvnts were implemented, including: not yet
upstream x86 concurrent TLB flushing, faster in-kernel zstd update as
well as smarter (profile guided Os vs O3) whole system
optimizations!
The 21.5 release received updates across the board, while a major
point of work was the GCC 11 update as well as re-basing and fixing
upstream regressions for our Sony PS3 support as well as various small
improvements, including an up to 15 seconds faster shutdown when using
sysvinit.
Today the T2 Project released version 21.4, with the largest amount of pre- and cross-compiled set of architectures so far!
A total of 15 architectures: x86-64, x86, arm64, arm, riscv64, riscv, ppc64le, ppc64-32, ppc sparc64, mips64, mipsel, hppa, m68k, alpha and ia64!
As usually most packages are up-to-date, with 1294 change-sets, 1179 updates, and 120 fixes, including Linux 5.11.16, GCC 10.3, LLVM/Clang 12, as well
as the latest version of Rust, X.org, Mesa, KDE and GNOME 40!
After the first in a decade 20.10 release, 20.12 was already
released with all the last weeks improvements, including Sgi Octane
support, improved network booting, and updated packages, including
the Linux kernel and Mesa3d.
A decade in the making, T2 version 20.10 was finally tagged and
shipped! Grab your favorite release ISO, e.g. highly optimized AMD64,
PPC64 for your PS3, MIPS64 for your Sgi Octane or any other of our
release builds for playing along at home!
After an initial proof-of-concept around 2004, when T2 founder René
Rebe needed a Subversion client for at the time relatively new PowerPC
Mac OS X, now in the same situation again with Apple's ARM macOS "Big Sur"
support for compiling and side-loading Open Source packages on other third-party systems using the vast and
universal T2 package repository data is officially becoming
mainline!
After being an early adopter of Link-Time-Ooptimizations when it
was initially implemented for GCC over a decade ago, support for LTO
was significantly improved to just work more often and more
extensively tested, too!
With decades of support for alternative compilers and c libraries
(uclibc, dietlibc, ...) support also added to support whole system
bootstrap and builds using just LLVM/Clang and their run-time as well
as Musl libc.
Initial support for the open-source RISC-V
architecture was added to T2! Initial or preliminary, because upstream
packages do not include support for all bit-widths, such as 32 vs. 64-bit, and
some low-level packages do not yet have upstream support, such as strace and
packages of similar low-level nature.
With switching to the new Zstandard compression we can greatly
decrease download bandwidth for you and our mirrors, as well as
uncompression time of big packages during development.
Support for the memory and cache optimized
x32 x86-64 ABI was added to the T2
trunk. Allowig for higher performance embedded,
desktop and server systems.
The first seven years of the T2 SDE were just the beginning: Welcome
to revision 40k, and over 3270 packages of
which about 50% do cross compile.
All of us wish you and your families a peaceful and recreative Christmas time.
May it be a time of peace and reflection for all of you, whatever religion you
believe in, whatever culture you are part of and wherever in the world you are.
After years of development we are proud to announce the availability
of the new T2 stable release 8.0.
The 8.0 release received updates across the board, while a major
working target was further improving cross compilation, and all official
ISO images are now fully cross build!
Over 10000 Subversion revisions indicate the magnitude of the release,
with over 200 new packages, new features and various other improvements
and fixes.
May Day! >36200 revisions, >3219 packages, ~50% cross, 6 years
We now have been working and polishing T2 for over 6 years! A massive
effort to maintain all the different architectures -
from ARM to x86,
operating system support - from Linux to
win32, packages - from
a2ps to zziplib,
and the cross compilation of it.
The T2 SVN tree now contains more than 36000 versioned revisions, with
over 3200 packages in tree, of which nearly
50% do cross compile.
The T2 team wishes you a happy public holiday! Enjoy!
Support for non-Linux kernels for the T2 System Development Environment was
on our agenda for quite a while, now. Last
weekend ExactCODE committed the
initial script adaptions and basic infrastructure. As a first step
T2 gained support to cross-compile MinGW
(Win32) Windows executables.
The T2 SDE project team is proud to announce the 30000's T2 SVN source
repository revision, with over 3100 packages in the T2
package repositories. Of those 3100
source based packages, 1462 (47%) do cross compile, now (as setup and
patched in T2).
T2 project will attend the europeans largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2008 in
Berlin.
The LinuxTag 2008 opens its doors from May 28 to May 31, 2008 at the Berlin
Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users, developers and deploying
companies to learn more about the potential of T2, Linux, Open Source, and
Free Software at Europe's leading conference and expo - where .COM meets .ORG.
Thanks to the T2 sponsor ExactCODE GmbH,
a new and dedicated master download server for source and binary releases,
as well as the upstream source mirror is now available:
The T2 SDE project team is proud to announce the first issue of
the T2 magazine, a magazine dedicated to T2 and other open
source related topics. Issue #1 covers
a recent filesystem benchmark.
The 7.0 series release candidate two features bugfixes and stability
improvements for the non-x86 architectures, mainly AVR32, PowerPC and
SPARC while quite some packages received updates and security fixes.
The major features of series 7 are
AVR32 and
Blackfin architecture support as well
as the brand new GCC 4.2 and
GlibC 2.6. Additionally
the T2 7.0 series comes with over 400 new
packages, while most of the existing packages received an update.
(more... - download...)
As part of the ongoing 7.0
finalization, a whole new bunch of packages got fixed to cross-compile
and thus where marked with the new T2 CROSS tag.
With the now 1333 T2 packages, including nearly all GPE, X.Org, XFCE and
most GNOME packages, known to cross compile, over >45% of the T2
packages are ready for embedded development.
(more...)
As the first FIC/Neo1973 prototype arrived, T2 support for this
first mostly free and open mobile phone platform was started. This T2
effort includes the creation of a dedicated
target for this
smartphone device.
As part of the ongoing 7.0
finalization a whole lot of packages got fixed to cross-compile and thus
where marked with the new T2 CROSS tag.
With the now 1000 T2 packages known to cross compile, over >33% of the
T2 packages are ready for embedded development.
(more...)
The release features the two newly supported CPU architectures
AVR32 and
Blackfin as well
as the brand new GCC 4.2 and
GlibC 2.6. Additionally
the T2 7.0 series comes with over 400 new
packages, while most of the existing packages received an update.
(more... - download...)
T2 will attend the europeans largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2007 in Berlin.
The LinuxTag 2007 opens its doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 at the Berlin
Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn more
about the potential of T2, Linux, Open Source, and Free Software at Europe's
leading conference and expo - where .COM meets .ORG.
With the usual care and a new maintenance release
of the popular T2 6.0 series was released today.
As stable series, the 6.0 series is maintained under strong API/ABI
compatibility aspects and receives bug fixes, security fixes and light,
compatible updates only.
The release primarily focuses to iron out all known LiveCD issues for smooth
building of custom T2-based LiveCD/DVD and USB sticks.
Prebuilt x86, x86-64, PowerPC and PowerPC64 ISOs images of the
minimal-X.org-livecd are available (SPARC64 to follow, soon).
In cooperation with Atmel
and ExactCODE the T2 SDE
project announces the immediate availability of T2 SDE support for
the new AVR32 CPU architecture designed by Atmel, Norway.
The AVR32 STK1000 reference implementation running the T2 SDE
Linux will be showcased on the CeBIT 2007, T2 SDE Project booth,
hall 5 booth G68/4. (more...)
The GPE Palmtop Environment is
a Gtk+ based user interface environment for palmtop/handheld computers
running the GNU/Linux or any other UNIX-like operating system.
Thanks go to Susanne Klaus from ExactCODE for the ungoing mobility effort
thru which the GPE packages are now included in T2.
T-Resc is a new target incorporated into
T2. It is meant for demonstration purposes and brings embedded features into
the hands of every day users and administrators.
T-Resc is uClibC based as well as size optimized by GCC thruout the whole
system to minimize the ISO size. With minimal, k-drive based Xvesa and Xfbdev
X servers as well as blackbox few bytes are dedicated to graphic functionality.
Included are open-source disk, network and virus scanning utilities.
(more...)
With the usual care and maintenance a new maintenance release
of the popular T2 6.0 series was released today.
As stable series, the 6.0 series is maintained under strong API/ABI
compatibility aspects and receives bug fixes, security fixes and light,
compatible updates only.
The release primarily focus to iron out all known sparc64 issues for smooth
support on Sun T1, Niagara CPU systems such as the T1000 and T2000 - but also
includes non SPARC security fixes, updates and improvements along the lines.
Prebuilt SPARC64, Niagara binary ISO images of the minimal target are
available.
With the usual care and maintenance the first maintenance release
of the popular T2 6.0 series was released today.
As stable series, the 6.0 series is maintained under strong API/ABI
compatibility aspects and receives bug fixes, security fixes and light,
compatible updates only. Package version updates include Linux
(2.6.17.9 -> 2.6.17.14) and KDE (3.5.4 -> 3.5.5).
The
OpenPCD is a free 13.56MHz RFID reader and writer hardware design.
This device is able to screen informations from Proximity Integrated Circuit
Cards (PICC) conforming to vendor-independent standards such as ISO 14443, ISO
15693 as well as proprietary protocols such as Mifare Classic.
Finally, after a lot of testing, security updates and work on details,
such as simplifing the installation we are proud to announce the immediate
availability of 6.0.0 final release code name: "Ready to Go".
The release features u/dev, early user-space, fully modular kernel, X11R7,
C++ cross compilation, PowerPC64 and MIPS64 support as well as a whole lot of
updates and refactoring under the hood. The x86 flavour already includes
support for latest Apple Macintosh Intel (Mactel) hardware and the associated
Grub fixes (A20 gate and keyboard) and we finally can ship the first
production ready SPARC64 T2 Linux even supporting the Sun T1 Niagara CPU!
T2 always was strong in being self-hosting and starting each build
bootstrapping a fresh cross compiler itself - even if the build
actually is a native build.
Due to popular demand, more and more packages have been fixed over
the past time and T2 is able to cross compile the modular X11R7, now!
Finally, the Release Candidate of the 2.2.0 series "Get the power back!" is
out. The series features u/dev, early user-space, fully modular kernel, X11R7,
C++ cross compilation, powerpc64 and mips64 support as well as a whole lot of
updates and refactoring under the hood. The x86 flavour already includes
support for latest Apple Macintosh Intel (Mactel) hardware and the associated
Grub fixes (A20 gate and keyboard).
The first maintenance release (2.1.1) for the stable 2.1 branch was finalized.
This release includes bug fixes, security fixes, updates and even some
improvement to the SDE. Most notable are: kaffe 1.1.6, kde 3.4.3, xfce 4.2.3.2,
wine 0.9.1, mono 1.1.10, eclipse 3.1.1, xpdf 3.01pl1, koffice 1.4.2,
samba 3.0.21a, OpenOffice.org (ooo) 2.0.0.1 and mplayer 1.0pre7try2.
A vastly improved Emerge-Pkg script, improved dietlibc as well as improved
x86-64 and PowerPC64 support, target inheritance and autoextraction of .zip
files was merged from the development trunk.
Finally, with 2.2.0-epsilon the necessary installer rewrite was done to include
support for u/dev. Additionally the 2.2 series includes a fully modular kernel,
support for C++ cross compilation, powerpc64 and mips64 support as well as a whole
lot of updates, including modular X.Org X11R7 and cleanups and refactoring under
the hood.
Finally 2.1.0 was release with some bugfixes and minor (but important) updates,
including: GCC 3.4.4, Abiword 2.2.11, Gnumeric 1.6.0, Samba 3.0.20b,
and Apache 2.0.55.
After the addition of the modular X.org - X11R7 - packages we are proud
to announce to pass the 2000 packages mark with over 2100 (!!!)
packages in the T2 package repositories!
The modularized X.org release candidate X11R7 got packaged for T2.
It is now the default X implementation in trunk and will be used
in the T2 2.2 release scheduled for November.
This, hopefully last, release candidate includes general bugfixes and minor
(but important) updates, most notably OpenOffice 1.9-m123, Mono 1.1.8.3,
bdb 4.3.28, KDE 3.4.2 and Gnome 2.10.2.
We are happy to announce the release of our second (and last?) candidate
for T2 2.1. The release includes major bugfix, and many harmless updates
where most notable are: linux 2.6.11.12, glibc 2.3.5, OpenOffice 1.9-m104,
wx 2.6.1.0, mono 1.1.8.2, XFCE 4.2.2, KDE 3.4.1 and Gnome 2.10.1.
Again AMD64/x86-64 as well as sparc64 support got improved again.
Of course the release ships with the latest stable release of KDE, GNOME,
XFCE and Enlightenment 17.
About 152 packages got updated, including Linux (2.4.31) and Linux (2.6.11.10)
and 146 issues fixed. The release includes enhanced Java support, including
Kaffee and Jikes. Automatic dependency and installed files detection was
improved. Other package updates include Subversion (1.2.0), nvidia (1.0-7174)
and Apache (2.0.54). Acroread (7.0) was added.
With a lot of improvements over the first alpha version, the state of the art
T2 live CD is coming along. An quite
impressive amount of hardware has already been
certified to be able to run the CD without problems.
Despite preparing the stable series for release, next generation
work is going on in the development trunk. Beside strong u/dev,
D-BUS and HAL integration a really sophisticated as well as state
of the art T2 live CD is coming along. Visit
the project page for details and download link
After an enormous amount of updates and additions we released
2.1.0-beta4 as last snapshot before the first release candidate
will be deployed in about one week.
The release includes support for the SuperH CPU family,
as well as enhanced AMD64 / x86-64 support, many improvements
for cross compiling - including a new embedded target as solid
base for industrial products and support for squashfs and
unionfs.
Of course, the latest stable release of KDE (3.4.0), GNOME (2.10.0),
XFCE (4.2.1) and Enlightenment 17 (2005-03-29).
After much last minute showstopper work in the 2.1.0-beta3 branch the tree
was frozen and released, finally.
The release includes: uclibc support (builds with far more packages than
dietlibc!), parallel build support for make and scons, builds on x86-64,
fixed ccache support to work reliable with recent ccache releases,
improved sparc64 support, bash3 was fixed significantly, various bootdisk
creation and file layout improvements, wide ncurses added, the nvidia binary
only driver really does get installed. The numerous package updates include
linux-2.6.10, linux-2.4.29 as well as migration to aspell-0.60 and development
tools for Atmel AVR chips got included.
The "T2" project tagged and released the internal milestone 2.1.0-beta2
("Your own sweet way").
The release includes more ROCK to T2 naming transitions, including the
rename of the internally used toolchain directory from ROCK to
TOOLCHAIN, fixes for findutils, enhanced X.org radeon support
(especially on PowerPC). The command wrapper code got a significant
restructuring so that ccache works more reliable now, as well as
general ccache fixes and basic distcc support. We now support marking
download URLs as "no mirror". And the many updates include gtk+-2.6.0
as well as freetype-2.1.7..
The "T2" project tagged and released the internal milestone 2.1.0-beta
("Today is gonna be the day").
The release includes updates to linux26 (2.6.8.1 -> 2.6.9), linux24
(2.4.28-pre4 -> 2.4.28),binutils (2.15.91.0.2 -> 2.15.92.0.2), gcc
(3.4.2 -> 3.4.3), uclibc (0.9.26 -> 0.9.27-20041106), binutils
(2.15.91.0.2 -> 2.15.94.0.1), KDE 3.3.2, Gnome 2.8.2 as well as many
other updates, fixes and improvements.
