=== armv7 Ports Quality Assurance

Contact: Robert Clausecker <fuz@FreeBSD.org>

As part of a long term project to improve the quality of the FreeBSD ports collection for the armv7 architecture, a number of issues in the base system and in various ports have been fixed.
Through this action, the number of binary packages that could be successfully built from the 2023Q4 branch of the ports collection was increased from 30018 (as of 2023-10-04) to 31118 (as of 2023-11-24).

Two kernel bugs affecting package builds (link:https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267788[PR 267788] and link:https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=274705[PR 274705]) were identified and addressed, with these two alone being responsible for around 900 failed packages.
The most common other causes for build failures include

 * lack of FreeBSD-specific armv7 support code
 * data alignment issues (armv7 being one of the few architectures for which we do not support unaligned memory accesses)
 * address space exhaustion during the build processes (usually LTO related; link:https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=274705[PR 274705] addressed many cases)
 * lack of OpenMP support on armv7 FreeBSD

If you are a user of the FreeBSD ports collection on armv7, do not hesitate to file a bug report on our link:https://bugzilla.freebsd.org[bug tracker] should there be any issues.

