ARM builds for Linux and Windows

[nuttyartist]

As the ARM chip architecture is getting traction, we should ship binaries in this architecture too.

[guihkx]

Right now, I believe Arm runners will only be available to paid GitHub customers later this year.

Additionally, I think the Qt Group doesn't offer pre-built Qt builds for Arm on any of their supported desktop platforms.

For Linux, we could technically (or probably) achieve this using a GitHub Action to set up QEMU and build for aarch64 using software emulation, but doing so will slow down the CI by a lot.

And we'd have to use whatever Qt version is provided by the Linux distribution, because as I mentioned above, the Qt Group doesn't seem to offer pre-built builds for Arm, and so they can't be easily downloaded and installed with aqtinstall.

[nuttyartist]

1. I'm a paid customer.
2. Maybe we can contact https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall to create pre-built Qt builds for Arm?
3. Or we just create our own repo for that and host these builds ourselves (we should only run the runners once every new major Qt release, right)?

[guihkx]

Maybe we can contact https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall to create pre-built Qt builds for Arm?

The thing is, they don't provide Qt builds at all. That's a tool that simply downloads official Qt builds provided by the Qt Group.

Or we just create our own repo for that and host these builds ourselves (we should only run the runners once every new major Qt release, right)?

That's surely an option, but I'd wager it won't to be easy to actually implement it...

[nuttyartist]

The thing is, they don't provide Qt builds at all. That's a tool that simply downloads official Qt builds provided by the Qt Group.

Oh, right.

That's surely an option, but I'd wager it won't to be easy to actually implement it...

Yeah, maybe we can get the community to help, it surely something many other developers will soon want to use as well.

[nuttyartist]

https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-for-windows-on-arm-may21-update

With Qt 6.8, Windows on ARM will become one of the standard desktop platforms supported in Qt.

Seems like we're going to get official ARM builds soon enough.