Provide optimised arm binaries

[mainrs]

armv7 allows for further optimisation during compilation. We currently only offer armv6 binaries, which run on armv7 too though.

[juliangaal]

Which optimizations are these exactly? Getting an armv7 device in the mail today :D

[mainrs]

That's a hard one I think. At least I couldn't really figure it out. Cross compilation is a bitch sometimes >.>

We currently are on the move to Github Actions (GA) but still use the good old Travis CI. ci.yml does some linting and formatting checks for PRs, cd.yml does the binary compilation for linux and macos. The ARM binaries are still compiled on Travis CI.

So this issue would mean to first move the compilation of the ARM binaries to GA. You probably have to create a new workflow as you can't have arm and amd64 binaries installed on the same instance, something like cd_armv7.

Which optimizations are these exactly?

Ideally you would create three new workflows (armv6, armv7 and aarch64). In theory, armv6 can run on all of them, but each new version introduces new instructions and optimizations the compiler can do. So separate binaries would be ideal.

Currently, only armv7 gets build on Travis CI.

But how do I test workflows?

What a great question to ask! You would create a fork of Spotifyd, push a new workflow and create a PR. Make sure to set the trigger to pull_requests for testing purposes. Remove the old workflows to shorten run-time. Each new commit to the same PR will trigger a new workflow run. Quite cumbersome yes.

I think the key/trick is to create a workflow for each architecture. I already tried arm compilation but was super greedy and created one workflow for all of them, which didn't work. So I gave up for now :)

Note: You can still use the arm binary under releases for now if you want to. the improvements are minor (like, really minor). So if you don't have the time nor the nerves, don't try it haha :D

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