Building Node 0.12.7 from source fails

[alexellis]

Hi

There is not very good support from an NPM package perspective for Node 5.0 - Ghost blog for instance has only just put 4.x on its supported list. Fortunately there is a binary available from Node for 4.2.3 which a lot of packages appear to have migrated to, but I noticed a 60% drop in performance between 0.12.7 and 4.2.3 and wanted to run some tests against 0.12.7 and 4.2.3.

The Node changelog hints at dropping VFP2 support for ARM v7. This sounds like it could have an impact on calculating floating point numbers.

The issue I have is that can't do a fresh install of 0.12.7 and building from source (4-5 hours each time) results in a binary that gives 'illegal instruction' - I think this has something to do with a GCC build flag around VFP2 / VFP3 processor ability.

Is there a way (through version control or AUR) to find the original working Arch build script for v.12.x?

[WarheadsSE]

VFP2/VFP3 are ARMv6/ARMv7

If you want to see older working versions, see the git history for the package in PKgBUILDs on github.

[alexellis]

Thanks @WarheadSE.

I got a little way with makepkg but had to hack the PKGBUILD a little bit:

I got no match for this:
arch=('i686' 'x86_64' 'arm')
so had to add armv7h, that got me past this part.

Then I couldn't find arm.patch - I realise now this is also in the git directory.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Do you have any idea as to what may have caused a slow-down between 0.12.7 and 4.2.3 from a Node perspective? I can see some sed statements about VFP3 etc in the PKGBUILD.

[WarheadsSE]

They may have just gone with least-common-denominator and disabled VFP usage on ARM