Welcome to Rockhopper!

The Rockhopper Penguin Eudyptes chrysocome is a flightless seabird indigenous to the islands of south America. It is the smallest of the yellow-crested black and white penguins. The nominate race chrysocome breeds on the Falkland Islands and on islands off of Argentina and southern Chile. Like many other Linux projects that have been named after a penguin, Rockhopper! has been named in honor of the Rockhopper Penguin.

Rockhopper! is a highly specialized Open Source Software project. We are dedicated to the advancement of a free, bleeding-edge, source code based linux operating system.

Like the Jackass! Toolkits that are built on a highly-optimized and stabilized state-of-the art GCC 4.1 compiler, the current release of Rockhopper! is built upon the development-stage GCC 4.2 alpha and brings a highly optimized experimental toolkit to the x86 platform.

Rockhopper's optimization is based on the logical use of selected compiler flags and linker flags for the x86 architecture, integrated support for the Native Posix Threading Library, and the generation of processor-specific code for each of the 686-class members of the Intel Pentium family of processors.

Rockhopper! is rebuilt every time that an updated version of GCC 4.2.0_alpha is made available. At the time of this writing, the Rockhopper! toolkits are being updated once a week and the weekly updates are published for download on The Jackass! Project mirrors. Because the toolkit is being rebuild every week, we are focusing the development of Rockhopper! on frequently updated toolkits rather than on building architecture-specific tarballs. For this reason, Rockhopper! is optimized for i686.

Rockhopper! currently supports the following x86 sub-architectures. Each processor-specific distribution file contains a Stage 3 tarball that is the equivalent of a pre-compiled Stage 1 installation.

Intel x86: Pentium Pro

We are now in the development & testing phase of Rockhopper! for GCC 4.2.0. Users who are interested in testing the most bleeding-edge linux toolkits available are invited to test Rockhopper! 4.2.

The Rockhopper! toolkits for GCC 4.1 have been finalized with the official release of GCC 4.1.0. They are now being deployed in the 2006.1 release of Jackass!