RPI2, www/firefox, error: "NEON support not enabled"

[Mark Millard]

On 2017-May-5, at 11:28 AM, bob prohaska <fbsd at www.zefox.net> wrote:

> On Fri, May 05, 2017 at 09:30:39AM -0700, Mark Millard wrote:
>> 
>> Wrong neon.
>> 
>> 
> Ahh, what I feared 8-)
> 
> 
>> https://developer.arm.com/technologies/neon says:
>> 
> 
> I did find that page, but harbored a faint (and apparently
> misguided) hope that the port might in some fashion implement
> the vector instruction set. Evidently not.

Freshports web page for it ( https://www.freshports.org/www/neon/ )
reports:

Neon is  an HTTP and  WebDAV client library for  Unix systems, with  a C
interface.

> Thanks for clearing up the confusion. Is this an issue which 
> must be addressed by the clang/llvm developers? 

An rpi2 has Cortex-A7 (armv7-A) cores that have NEON
but armv6 does not.

There is some possibility that with something like
-mcpu=cortex-a7 in use as a compiler option that
NEON would be used.

But I warn that there is an on-going bugzilla item for
FreeBSD's support of things like NEON for arm:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=217611

(VFP and NEON are related by the registers used.)

So there could be other problems with NEON enabled code
until it is all resolved. (And head gets the work before
stable/11 gets the result.)

===
Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net