I would like to announce the general availability of the following CentOS AltArch 7 Releases:

* CentOS AltArch 7 (1511) for i686
* CentOS AltArch UserLand 7 (1511) for Armhfp
* CentOS AltArch 7 (1511) for PowerPC64 (TechPreview)
* CentOS AltArch 7 (1511) for PowerPC8 LE (TechPreview)

We anticipate CentOS AltArch 7 (1511) for Aarch64 will be ready for release within the coming days, and will be announced independently.

The CentOS AltArch SIG is a group of people working to build alternative architecture support derived from CentOS Linux‘s sources. You can find more details about the AltArch group at https://wiki.CentOS.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch including details on how to get involved and ways to get help for architecture specific issues.

Releases under the AltArch SIG are hosted at http://mirror.CentOS.org/altarch/ and available from external mirrors via rsync, http, ftp as usual, however under the /altarch/ path. Yum configs shipped in the altarch builds points at mirror.CentOS.org instead of mirrorlist or the external mirrors, as we are still working through the mechanics to facilitate the wider mirrorlist process. We hope to have this in place within the next 2 months, and updates to the yum configs will be issued, when ready, via an updated CentOS-release rpm.

We are hosting a CentOS Dojo in Brussels, Belgium on the 29th Jan 2016. Lots of the key people working on the AltArch builds will be present there and it would be a great forum to engage with these groups. You can get the details for the event at https://wiki.CentOS.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2016 including the registration links.

In order to bootstrap these builds, we have turned on direct downloads of this content from mirror.CentOS.org. We do encourage people with the capacity to help seed with external mirrors. Details on howto run a CentOS Mirror are available at https://wiki.CentOS.org/HowTos/CreatePublicMirrors

A key part of our AltArch plans is to make resources available to all the other SIG’s in the CentOS environment, so they are able to build, test, deliver their content for these architectures. We are working on setting things up, and hope to start rolling out altarch support for https://cbs.CentOS.org/ in the first quarter of 2016. If you are engaged in any of the SIGs and would like to find out more details, please come along to our buildsystems meeting that takes place on Mondays in
#CentOS-devel on irc.freenode.net. Details on this meeting and the other SIG meetings can be found in our community meetings calendar published at https://www.CentOS.org/community/calendar/ .

Bug reports and feedback about specific packages should be filed at https://bugs.CentOS.org/ against the relevant package name, for project CentOS Linux 7, in the same manner as you would for x86_64. However, do mention the architecture as applicable.

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