Main Project

For the main part of this course, we were to choose two open source projects that haven't yet been ported to AArch64 and do so. The two projects I chose are Qlandkarte GT and Traverso.

Qlandkarte GT

The great majority of the work I have done so far involves this project. While searching for assembly code within the source files, I have only found a few lines of bit shift operations which had a C fallback. Building the package was a lot more time consuming than anticipated: I've acquired all the dependencies and proceeded to auto-configure the make file by using CMake, as instructed. However I've ran into one issues where the error message I got was stating that I am missing one of the dependencies. This turns out to be an extension to one of the major dependencies (the ones mentioned in the installation instructions). After reaching out to the community I've been told I need a development version of that extension, and with that in mind I set off searching for it. I've spent countless hours installing and re installing different versions of that extension, but still kept getting the same message. Eventually I finally got it to configure and create the make file, and built the package.

Before I begin to create a road map for how the project should be ported, I want to set up an emulated AArch64 environment and try to build the package as is on it. The project has a fair amount of dependencies, which worries me that some of them might not be compatible with ARMv8 architecture, which will open up a can of worms. I'll post an update of how that goes in a very near future, as soon as AArch64 environment is set up.

Traverso

Unfortunately I have only had a very quick look at the assembly for this project, which produced quite a few lines of assembly, including atomics. I will also update on this project as soon as I have a closer look at the source files.