Linux Arm64 toolchain

[Leszek Swirski]

Hi toolchain folks,

An external contributor asked me if it would be possible to add toolchain support for arm64 linux builds (in their words, "getting a linux arm64 build set up for chromium-browser-clang"). Is that something that's feasible (with low-effort) for us?

Thanks,

Leszek

[Nico Weber]

It's possible, but it's a bunch of work. Selfishly, I think it'd be really cool if we did this, but realistically it's not worth it.

The use cases for linux/arm64 are pretty limited at the moment:

* Raspberry Pis (not fast enough to build chromium on these)

* People running Asahi or Linux VMs on Apple Silicon macbooks (there aren't that many people here – albeit I'm one of them, and you can build chromium on macOS)

* I think some VMs on Amazon's cloud are ARM

So at the moment, it doesn't seem like it's worth it. This might change in the future.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/374811603 has some words on the wider topic of releasing chrome/linux/arm64 binaries.

(Having said that, I think it is possible to cross-build linux/arm64 on an intel linux machine and get a working build. It's' not something we officially support, but we did work with the community to accept patches for variable page size for this, for example.)

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[Leszek Swirski]

Thanks, that makes sense (and I agree that it's a shame on a personal level, but makes sense at a company level) -- I'll forward that along.