[vlc-devel] [PATCHES] add support for arm64

[Felix Paul Kühne]

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

On 08.10.2013, at 20:33, Rémi Denis-Courmont <remi at remlab.net> wrote:

> Le mardi 8 octobre 2013 19:37:30 Felix Paul Kühne a écrit :
>> Feedback on patches is welcome.
> 
> The reality is that most packages in contribs, as well as VLC itself, are 
> based on autotools, or otherwise use compatible triplets. You cannot pass the 
> same architecture for AArch64 as you would for AArch32, if only because 
> AArch32 still needs to be supported. This is not only about NEON support in 
> two contrib packages.
> 
> aarch64, while rather ugly, is much easier to support than arm64 because it 
> does not match "arm*". And that is what ARM, LLVM and GCC specify. In the long 
> term though, it is likely that configure scripts need to support both.

This is technically absolutely correct. Regrettably, I stumbled across 2 limitations which lead to the current approach. "clang -arch aach64" is no valid compiler argument. It requires "clang -arch arm64". This leads to a arm64-apple-darwin13 dump machine string. 
However, this is string isn't recognized by virtually all contrib packages (with the notable exception of libav btw.), so if I don't merge the proposed patch set, the proper solution (which it would be without a doubt) would require patches to all the contrib libraries I need (that would be 13 minus libav atm) adding arm64 detection.
Not sure you'd like that :)

Cheers,

Felix


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VideoLAN
Felix Paul Kühne
Developer of VLC's ports to OS X and iOS
http://www.videolan.org
Blog: http://feepk.net
Twitter: @feepk