arm64 on apt.postgresql.org
Christoph Berg
The apt.postgresql.org repository has been extended to cover the arm64 architecture.
We had occasionally received user request to add “arm” in the past, but it was never really clear which kind of “arm” made sense to target for PostgreSQL. In terms of Debian architectures, there’s (at least) armel, armhf, and arm64. Furthermore, Raspberry Pis are very popular (and indeed what most users seemed to were asking about), but the raspbian “armhf” port is incompatible with the Debian “armhf” port.
Now that most hardware has moved to 64-bit, it was becoming clear that “arm64” was the way to go. Amit Khandekar made it happen that HUAWEI Cloud Services donated a arm64 build host with enough resources to build the arm64 packages at the same speed as the existing amd64, i386, and ppc64el architectures. A few days later, all the build jobs were done, including passing all test-suites. Very few arm-specific issues were encountered which makes me confident that arm64 is a solid architecture to run PostgreSQL on.
We are targeting Debian buster (stable), bullseye (testing), and sid (unstable), and Ubuntu bionic (18.04) and focal (20.04). To use the arm64 archive, just add the normal sources.list entry:
deb https://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt buster-pgdg main
Ubuntu focal
At the same time, I’ve added the next Ubuntu LTS release to apt.postgresql.org: focal (20.04). It ships amd64, arm64, and ppc64el binaries.
deb https://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt focal-pgdg main
Old PostgreSQL versions
Many PostgreSQL extensions are still supporting older server versions that are EOL. For testing these extension, server packages need to be available. I’ve built packages for PostgreSQL 9.2+ on all Debian distributions, and all Ubuntu LTS distributions. 9.1 will follow shortly.
This means people can move to newer base distributions in their .travis.yml, .gitlab-ci.yml, and other CI files.