ARM64 Linux support

[ZhongRuoyu]

We hope to provide official support for ARM64 Linux, starting with a beta later this year. That includes providing bottles for the platform, and bringing first-class support for brew and core formulae.

To make this happen, the following need to be settled (roughly in order):

• Release Portable Ruby - Add support for bottling Portable Ruby for ARM64 Linux #19111 / Add arm64 CI homebrew-portable-ruby#278
• Provide Docker images - workflows/docker: build and publish ARM64 Docker images #19275
• Support bootstrapping glibc - Add AArch64 support glibc-bootstrap#31
• Prepare CI infrastructure for bottling, similar to x86_64 Linux:
  • rely on GitHub-hosted runners mostly, - workflows/dispatch-build-bottle: support :arm64_linux builds homebrew-core#211313
  • and self-hosted runner for long-timeout runs
• Start bottling core formulae - Tracking issue for Linux ARM bottling homebrew-core#211761

Also, the following will happen when we feel comfortable:

• Add installer support - Update install.sh install#963
• Announce beta for ARM64 Linux (this will happen after a significant portion of formulae are bottled)

What is the motivation for the feature?

There has been considerable interest, both internally and externally, in running Homebrew on ARM64 Linux. Having discussed this at the 2025 AGM, we believe that it is feasible for us to start working on this.

How will the feature be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users?

Users on ARM64 machines like Raspberry Pis and Ampere servers can also benefit from Homebrew on Linux. Apple Silicon users can also run Homebrew in Docker natively.

What alternatives to the feature have been considered?

Provide a limited level of support for the platform, most likely shipping the aforementioned features barring the bottling-related ones. This will essentially place Homebrew on ARM64 Linux at a support level similar to Rust's tier 3 support.

[cheese]

Start with Ubuntu 24.04 or just keep in sync with x86_64 Linux？

[ZhongRuoyu]

Start with Ubuntu 24.04 or just keep in sync with x86_64 Linux？

This is irrelevant to specific distro releases. The aim is to support any ARM64 Linux system, as is the case with Homebrew on x86_64 Linux (which works for systems with glibc > 2.13).

If you mean Homebrew's CI environment, it will be kept in sync with x86_64 Linux.

[sihaixianyu]

Support linux in aarch platform will promote the use of homebrew vigorously : )

[huyz]

Support linux in aarch platform will promote the use of homebrew vigorously : )

Heheh not sure if Homebrew needs more vigorous promotion. The awesome Homebrew volunteers are quite busy as it is 😃. I believe Linux ARM support is already on the way anyway

[kvokka]

In my use case, with devcontainers, using one of the default images mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/go on a MacBook with an M1 processor (which has support for the arm64 arch), when i try to install brew inside the container, I get the default stub.

$ lscpu | grep Architecture
Architecture:                         aarch64

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
==> Checking for `sudo` access (which may request your password)...
Homebrew on Linux is not supported on ARM processors.
  https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux#arm-unsupported

[Bo98]

This is intentional for now while many issues are still being ironed out. brew install go for example was only became functional a few days ago. There's still some high profile packages we're working on (qt and ghc).

The main reasons for this is because:

• We are fixing things daily so want a fast-updating tag rather than a once-per-week.
• Docker on macOS will eagerly choose arm64 if available on Apple Silicon, which we're not ready for people to switch to that yet.

Basically: still consider arm64 Linux as experimental at this stage (it's tier 2 support: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers), even though it quite stable and nearing completion. master means you are explicitly opting into that experimental status.

We will start pushing latest + versioned tags soon. Possibly starting with Homebrew 4.5.0. I suspect we'll have something here within the next couple weeks as we've now reached 85% coverage and I'm working on fixing some of the outstanding blockers this week.