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Andrew Mello edited this page May 27, 2026 · 1 revision

Why -bin

This is rpc-go-bin, not rpc-go. The -bin suffix follows AUR convention for packages that ship a pre-built upstream binary.

What -bin means in AUR

Suffix Source
<name> Source build — package compiles from upstream source on the user's machine during makepkg
<name>-bin Pre-built binary from upstream release — makepkg only downloads, verifies, and installs
<name>-git Source build from the latest VCS commit (rolling)

rpc-go-bin is the binary variant.

Why binary and not source

  1. Upstream ships official binaries. Intel's GitHub releases include rpc_linux_x64.tar.gz for every version. No reason to rebuild what Intel has already signed off on.
  2. Smaller install footprint. No Go toolchain dependency. rpc-go is a Go module with ~80 dependencies — a source build pulls in the entire Go ecosystem and compiles ~60s of Go code on every machine. The binary is ~10MB and installs in milliseconds.
  3. Identical binary across users. A binary package gives every user byte-identical output. A source build can drift if Go's standard library changes between releases.
  4. No rpc-go source package exists on AUR. If you want a source-build option, file an issue.

Trade-offs

  • You trust Intel's release pipeline. The binary is fetched from github.com/device-management-toolkit/rpc-go/releases/. SHA256 is verified at install time against the value baked into PKGBUILD.
  • x86_64 only. No ARM, no i686. Intel only ships x86_64 Linux binaries. (rpc-go has experimental ARM support upstream but no release artifacts.)

Verification

The SHA256 in PKGBUILD is computed fresh by the auto-update workflow against the tarball that Intel just published. You can re-verify yourself:

VER=$(grep '^pkgver=' PKGBUILD | cut -d= -f2)
curl -sL "https://github.com/device-management-toolkit/rpc-go/releases/download/v${VER}/rpc_linux_x64.tar.gz" | sha256sum
grep sha256sums_x86_64 PKGBUILD

The two values should match.

If you want source

Open an issue at https://github.com/88plug/rpc-go-bin/issues — happy to add a sibling rpc-go source package if there's interest.

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