Re: armhf NEON exception for chromium
On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 12:18 PM Andres Salomon <dilinger@queued.net> wrote:
> So my proposal for chromium is this:
> a) Enable NEON for chromium's armhf build.
> b) Add a check in debian/rules for 'neon' in /proc/cpuinfo's Features: line, and fail to build if NEON is not present. This should ensure that any buildds or downstream builders don't waste resources configuring/building chromium on a non-NEON board only to have it fail somewhere in the middle.
> c) Using the current shell script wrapper for chromium (which already checks for things like SSE3 cpu instructions on x86), check for NEON support at startup by also looking for the string 'neon' in /proc/cpuinfo; if NEON is not supported, print an error message and exit before launching the chromium binary.
> d) Ask the buildd admins to restrict building of chromium from any Armada XP buildds, which appear to be the only armhf buildds left in rotation that lack NEON support. If they are unwilling/unable to do this, then I'll have to play the giveback game for armhf (step right up! everyone's a winner!), which I often end up having to do currently because the 2-3 day armhf builds will sometimes hang/crash halfway through.
This seems like a very good idea to me. I doubt anyone running
chromium on an armhf at this point would try to do so on anything that
doesn't support NEON. As a user (and developer targeting armhf) this
seems like a win for users, IMVHO.
paultag
--
:wq
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