openSUSE FrontRunner Aims To Advance The Distro's Hardware Architecture Support

More information on openSUSE's FrontRunner initiative are now being shared as a rebuild of SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Open Build Service and allowing for staging changes to advance architecture enablment for future Leap releases.

The FrontRunner initiative is supported both by SUSE and openSUSE with a focus on new hardware architecture support moving forward and a staging area that will ultimately feed back into SUSE Linux Enterprise. FrontRunner is part of the overall openSUSE Step project.

While new hardware architectures aren't coming out so quickly, openSUSE FrontRunner also looks to fix rebuild failures in older openSUSE releases and make other community-driven improvements, such as for bettering the ARMv7 hardware support.

"FrontRunner aims to build all sources in a single layer, which includes patches that are meant to land in a service pack. This could then make it into a Leap point release or maintenance update. With FrontRunner’s rebuild of SLE sources and Step as an intermediate building block, the builds are expected to enable community distributions like openSUSE Leap or other community derivatives," reads today's announcement by Douglas DeMaio.

More details on openSUSE FrontRunner can be found via the openSUSE news and the project's build page which also mentions it will also focus on fixes/improvements around bit-wise reproducibility of builds too, just not cross-architecture changes.