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Neon enablement in qt for raspbian.



Back when Mike and I founded raspbian, there was only the pi1. Packages that used neon often set off our armv7 contamination checker and at the time we saw neon support in raspbian as at best a pointless waste of space and at worst a problem, so we simply disabled it wherever we ran into it.

However times have changed. The raspberry pi 2 and 3 have been released and Raspberry Pi want to continue shipping a single image for all their products for the forseable future.

As a result I am currently working on re-enabling neon in raspbian where appropriate. I have been doing the work in raspbian jessie and intend to forward port it to raspbian stretch later. Clearly since we still support the original raspberry pi and the new pi0 only packages with correctly functioning neon runtime detection are candidates for neon enablement.

There are two qt source packages in raspbian jessie where we currently have neon disabled. qt4-x11 and qtbase-opensource-src . I have a couple of questions.

1: are these packages supposed to have runtime neon detection (either in the packages own code or through ld.so hwcaps). 2: For each of the packages can anyone suggest a simple benchmark/test that will hit the neon codepaths which I can use to check that neon detection is doing it's job (i.e. that the package still works on the pi1 and there is a performance improvement over the package without neon on the pi2)


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