Dolphin on Ubuntu ARM?

[Bill F]

Has anyone tried compiling Dolphin on a Cortex A9 yet in Ubuntu?
I know these aren't fast enough now but maybe next year they will be.

I have an Omap4 development platform from TI and it runs Ubuntu pretty well, but I haven't tried compiling Dolphin yet.

Next year we might see 2.5 GHz+ Cortex dual/quad core CPUs from TI and Nvidia.

[shuffle2]

Dolphin currently only compiles/runs on x86.

[Bill F]

So I tried it anyway and as expected it halted on the SSE2 requirement.
Also the Nvidia cg toolkit dependency didn't install. (I expect this to be fixed by Nvidia since they are a major ARM supporter)
Is that needed for OpenGL compiling?
So I have done some searching and found out that ARM already has an extra instruction set similar to SSE. It is called NEON. The OMAP4 already has it.
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.php
http://www.arm.com/files/pdf/NEON_Support_in_the_ARM_Compiler.pdf
http://blogs.arm.com/software-enablement/161-coding-for-neon-part-1-load-and-stores/
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/ARM-NEON-Intrinsics.html

"Cortex-A9 NEON Media Processing Engine (MPE):

The Cortex-A9 MPE can be used with either of the Cortex-A9 processors and provides an engine that offers both the performance and functionality of the Cortex-A9 Floating-Point Unit plus an implementation of the ARM NEON Advanced SIMD instruction set that was first introduced with the ARM Cortex-A8 processor for further acceleration of media and signal processing functions. The MPE extends the Cortex-A9 processor's floating-point unit (FPU) to provide a quad-MAC and additional 64-bit and 128-bit register set supporting a rich set of SIMD operations over 8, 16 and 32-bit integer and 32bit Floating-Point data quantities every cycle.

Further enhancing the SIMD capability, the MPE also support fused data types to remove packing/unpacking overheads and structured load/store capabilities to eliminate shuffling data between algorithm-format to machine-formats. Utilizing the MPE also enlarges the register file available to FPU and increases the design to support 32 double-precision registers, while retaining the Cortex-A9 processor's 32/64-bit scalar floating-point and core integer performance."

Maybe the only thing needed to make Dolphin run on ARM (under Ubuntu anyway) is to replace the SSE/SSE2 instructions with standard C and/or NEON and we are good to go.

If I ever get a chance to try compiling some NEON instructions I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Do any of you devs know off hand how much SSE I would need to squash to make it compile and which files/projects to look in? Maybe if I had time away from homework I could work on this sometime this year.
It might even be viable to run Dolphin on the NGP if we can hack it to run Ubuntu and if it runs 2 GHz or faster.

[skid]

It is just a handful of SSE. Most places which make use of SSE have a fallback position too, so I don't think SSE will be much of a problem. It is the assumption of x86 that's going to be a problem - basically anything that uses x64Emitter.cpp. Take a look at SonicAdvance1's work on x86-less and BE/LE conversion code to get an idea of what's required.

[Bill F]

Do you know how I can contact SonicAdvance? He doesn't appear to have a forum account or gmail in Google code like every other Google code account I have seen...

[neobrain]

#dolphin-emu on efnet. He's sometimes there, called Sonic1 then.

[Sorry_Charlie]

Just thought I'd toss a bump. I was reading about the FXI Technologies Cotton Candy Dongle, and I thought of how I'd love to be running Dolphin on this. It's a pretty sweet device actually. Dunno if the current hardware is powerful enough. But maybe 2nd or third gen hardware will be able to run Dolphin.

Here's hopping to getting an ARM Ubuntu/Android version made in the future.

http://www.fxitech.com/products/

The Cotton Candy is a USB stick sized compute device allows users a single, secure point of access to all personal cloud services and apps through their favorite operating system, while delivering a consistent experience on any screen. The device will serve as a companion to smartphones, tablets, and notebook PC and Macs, as well add smart capabilities to existing displays, TVs, set top boxes and other media that supports USB mass storage.
Benefits

Provide consumer-friendly access to the Cloud
Accelerate the adoption of “smart screens”
Extend the life of consumer hardware like laptops, monitors, TVs, set top boxes, tablets and more by accessing the latest OS, software and apps.
Provide a consistent experience across all screens
Create a single point of content storage.
Consolidation and organization of personal digital content.
Share media from mobile devices on large screens and projectors – videos, movies, photos, games and more.
Drive down the cost of computing, allowing more people to have a personal, secure computer.

Technology Specifications

Quad Core ARM® Mali™-400MP Graphics Processing Unit
– Quad-core ARM Mali-400MP 720p / 1080p OpenGL ES v2.0
– 30M Polygons, 1.2 GPixels / s
ARM® Cortex™-A9@1.2GHz
– NEON extensions
– TrustZone extensions
Connectivity
Wifi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Memory
1GB DRAM
Up to 64GB memory local storage (microSD)
Software
– Android
– Ubuntu
– Virtualization client for Windows, Linux, Mac, embedded

Video / Audio / Media Support
– 480p/720p/1080p decode of MPEG4-SP/H.263/H.264 AVC/MPEG-2/VC1
– MP3, AAC, AAC+, Real Audio
– JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG
– Additional video, audio and image formats can be supported through 3rd party codecs
Connectors
– USB 2.0 male form factor for power and connection to devices that supports USB mass storage
– HDMI 2.1 with audio for connection to devices that does not support USB mass storage

[Bill F]

After seeing what my OMAP 4430 dev board (Pandaboard) and my OMAP 4460 (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) can and can't do, I would say it won't be viable until Cortex A15 devices come out (2.5GHZ+).
Even these might be too slow. When the ARMv8 64 bit chips come out those would probably handle Dolphin.

[Sorry_Charlie]

Hmm, kinda figured dual core A9's wouldn't cut it. Well I'm hopefully the A15 are powerful enough. Guess they'll be out in the wild come 2012--so that's just around the corner. I'd love to carry around a usb sized computer to play my Wii games in HD.

Thanks for the input.

[NaturalViolence]

Current x86 chips are still nearly an order of magnitude faster in per thread performance at the same clock rate. I guarantee that even if you get dolphin running it will not run well even on an A15 based chip.