ARM as a primary architecture

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-03-21 at 10:38 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> Peter Robinson (pbrobinson at gmail.com) said:
>> > That's my point, I don't believe that working 3D should be a blocker
>> > to primary arch because like mainline it will likely come with both
>> > time and demand.
>>
>> Is llvmpipe not 'working'? (Admittedly, on low-power CPUs like ARM, it might
>> be more of a burden.)
>
> llvmpipe should work on arm - I've not tried - but I suspect it needs a
> modest amount of surgery to perform adequately.  Much of its performance
> on x86 comes from swizzling the pixel layout around internally so it
> nicely matches up with SSE2's register layout, which probably isn't
> quite what arm gives you to work with.

I think it could be made to work but it would need optimisation for
NEON (one of ARM's equiv of SSE) but that wouldn't work on all devices
but it would certainly be a good start but obviously needs someone in
the know to implement it.

Peter