Brussels / 30 & 31 January 2016

schedule

State of arm64

What's broken on arm64?


Arm64 (aka Aarch64) is now fully available in distros. Nearly everything is built, with a few annoying exceptions. However quite a lot of stuff may not actually work very well, or may run embarassingly slowly. We want to know what's broken so we can fix it! This talk is intended to kick off this process of finding all the breakage and room for optimisations.

The arm64 port is now in pretty good shape with most things ported and built. However we know that there is plenty of software that is not optimised and some may not actually work at all. Please come along and moan about anything you have found which doesn't work as well on arm64 as it does on x86. We (Linaro, ARM and Debian) want your feedback on where to direct effort next.

This talk will cover the current status of the port, and of hardware availability. Only a few things are completely missing, but we know that a lot of software is using the basic 'fallback support' where other architectures have specific optimisations. Some stuff is probably building, but not actually working right. We are keen to fix things that are actively getting in the way of using arm64 in real systems, but to do that we need feedback from users on what to look at next as we move from mostly enablement to mostly optimisation. GCC, OpenJDK, & LLVM are known to be in good shape, but there is a pile of other stuff that probably isn't. It's very hard to test 'all the software in the world', so please tell us about stuff you've noticed not working well, or incredibly slowly, or that you suspect might be a problem and need work.

Speakers

Wookey

Links