Status of support for Android on ARMv7 without NEON

[Henri Sivonen]

Do we support Android on ARMv7 without NEON?

Does the answer differ for our different API level builds?

--
Henri Sivonen
hsiv...@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/

[Nicholas Alexander]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsiv...@hsivonen.fi> wrote:

> Do we support Android on ARMv7 without NEON?
>

Ralph Giles told me just a few days ago that yes, we support ARMv7 with and
without NEON. This is relevant to the Oxidation project.

I may have been incorrect; I'm CCing Ralph to verify or correct me.

> Does the answer differ for our different API level builds?
>

Right now, we ship only a single Fennec APK that supports Android API 15+.

Nick

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

On 23-01-17 18:58, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> Do we support Android on ARMv7 without NEON?
>
> Does the answer differ for our different API level builds?

I believe that as of currently, we do fully support this. All our code
that has NEON codepaths uses runtime detection for NEON presence. In the
past, this was a point of attention for our WebRTC code when pulling
from upstream, and I've occasionally verified that this works correctly
by testing on a Galaxy Tab 10.1, which has the Tegra 2 chip. As far as I
know that is actually the only somewhat common chip that has the
unfortunate ARMv7-but-no-NEON configuration.

Our minimum API level is 15, which still supports this device.

To answer what is presumably your next question, Telemetry should be
able to answer what kind of userbase there still is on this
configuration (as NEON presence is IIRC in basic system data). I expect
it to be pretty slim.

--
GCP

[Ralph Giles]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 10:03 AM, Nicholas Alexander
<nalex...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Ralph Giles told me just a few days ago that yes, we support ARMv7 with and
> without NEON. This is relevant to the Oxidation project.

That is correct. We have bugs about dropping devices without NEON
(https://bugzil.la/1305815) but the Google Play store does not support
this distinction and the NDK docs say that a runtime check is
required. (https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis.html#v7a)
We've been maintaining support until someone implements our own
discontinuation scheme.

-r

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 8:03 PM, Nicholas Alexander
<nalex...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsiv...@hsivonen.fi> wrote:
>>
>> Do we support Android on ARMv7 without NEON?
>
>

> Ralph Giles told me just a few days ago that yes, we support ARMv7 with and
> without NEON.

OK. That makes it impractical to use NEON in Rust at this time then
(even with optimism about currently nightly-only Rust features
becoming available for Firefox code soon enough).

> Right now, we ship only a single Fennec APK that supports Android API 15+.

Thanks. I thought we we shipping a couple of different APKs for
different API levels.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

On 23-01-17 18:58, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> Do we support Android on ARMv7 without NEON?
>
> Does the answer differ for our different API level builds?

[msrec...@mozilla.com]

Right. Stay away from non-NEON. Firefox is going to stop working on non-NEON phones with 53, and the mobile team is figuring out how to communicate that to the users.

[haxe...@gmail.com]

I was updating from Google Play without any warning on my -indeed very old but good functioning- ASUStransformer tf101. Took even a while to figure out what the problem was and why all of a sudden FF didn't work anymore.
PtrK

[Ralph Giles]

Yes, the store doesn't provide any filtering for non-neon armv7
devices. We were going to write some runtime test+error page, but it
looks like that didn't happen.

Sorry for the hassle,
-r

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 1:00 PM, <haxe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was updating from Google Play without any warning on my -indeed very old but good functioning- ASUStransformer tf101. Took even a while to figure out what the problem was and why all of a sudden FF didn't work anymore.
> PtrK
>

> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

[di...@d10r.net]

On Tuesday, May 23, 2017 at 10:00:47 PM UTC+2, haxe...@gmail.com wrote:
> I was updating from Google Play without any warning on my -indeed very old but good functioning- ASUStransformer tf101. Took even a while to figure out what the problem was and why all of a sudden FF didn't work anymore.
> PtrK

I'm in a similar situation: Firefox stopped working on my TF101 (which even runs Android 6) after upgrade.
In my case the upgrade was done downloading the APK directly from Mozilla (link from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android), not Play store.

Is it now impossible to build APKs which run on this platform?

Where can I find an APK of previous versions?

[Ralph Giles]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 5:43 AM, <di...@d10r.net> wrote:


> Is it now impossible to build APKs which run on this platform?
>

Some patching would be required.

> Where can I find an APK of previous versions?
>

Historic versions of Firefox for Android can be found at
https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/ Please not that these will
have unpatched security vulnerabilities, so I don't recommend them for
daily use.

-r

[d...@lab10.coop]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 6:13:03 PM UTC+2, Ralph Giles wrote:
> Some patching would be required.

Doesn't sound like something somebody without knowledge of the code can do in reasonable time.

> Historic versions of Firefox for Android can be found at
> https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/

Thx, that helps a lot!

> Please not that these will
> have unpatched security vulnerabilities, so I don't recommend them for
> daily use.

Sure!
There seem however not to be so many alternatives. On this device I have an Open Source only policy, thus e.g. Chrome is not an option.
I tried Brave, doesn't start (probably for the same reason).
For the time being I feel safe enough with Firefox 52 and all trackers blocked. The device is mostly used for reading, not for wild Safaris :-)

Btw. I needed to reinstall Fennec after the failed upgrade.
While I have Sync set up, I'm not able to restore the previous state.
Despite having the same device name, the new install created a new logical device with initial settings. Is there a way to restore from the previous instance?