[Feature] Native builds for Windows on ARM

[jakibaki]

What feature would you like to see?

Native aarch64 builds of ImHex for Windows ideally using DirectX instead of OpenGL.

How will this feature be useful to you and others?

It would be very useful now that there are devices on the market that are fast enough that many ImHex users might actually consider using one (typing this from my x13s ^^).

Using opengl makes no sense on any existing windows arm devices since the opengl driver just layers opengl on top of directx (and imhex makes my gpu crash after a minute or two)

Request Type

• I can provide a PoC for this feature or am willing to work on it myself and submit a PR

Additional context?

I might set that up myself if I have the time and motivation unless anyone particularly wants to do it for me :)

[WerWolv]

Hey! As with Apple ARM builds, I'm happy to support them but I'll need help with setting it up since I don't have such a device myself.
As there's no native ARM runners, you'll need to cross compile ImHex from x86 somehow. I'm not entirely sure if mingw has builds for everything that's needed though

[macshome]

For the apple builds it seems like you could just specify the architecture flags. I'll try this on an Intel Mac. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75562856/convert-cmake-for-compiling-apple-arm-cpu/75623927#75623927

[WerWolv]

For the apple builds it seems like you could just specify the architecture flags. I'll try this on an Intel Mac. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75562856/convert-cmake-for-compiling-apple-arm-cpu/75623927#75623927

Thank you!
Keep in mind though that ImHex requires GCC to build on every platform, including macOS. I don't know much about the situation on Apple machines but you'll probably need to manually install a ARM64 version of GCC and specifically use that then to cross compile

[github-actions]

This issue is marked stale as it has been open for 11 months without activity.
Please try the latest ImHex version. (Avaiable here: https://imhex.download/ for release and https://imhex.download/#nightly for development version)
If the issue persists on the latest version, please make a comment on this issue again

Without response, this issue will be closed in one month.

[jakibaki]

Issue still exists. I should finally do that.

[JoshTheAggie]

Natively built b6b24df now on my ThinkPad x13s, using MSYS2's aarch64 packages (see https://www.msys2.org/wiki/arm64/).
I manually installed everything in get_deps_msys2.sh, but with "mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-" prepended to each package name.
I also installed mingw-w64-clang-gcc, though ninja says it still compiles with Clang. I believe it's just a wrapper package. I didn't see a GCC build in the mingw aarch64 repo.

I got a successful build, with two issues I had to overcome:

1. To use Clang/llvm, see fix: include headers necessary to build with llvm #2181 for the headers fix.
2. main/gui/source/stacktrace.cpp currently assumes Intel machines only. See the diff I pasted below for what I added (tbh, I have very little knowledge of what this file is doing so I don't know if this decisively fixes everything or if there is more to do. I do know x86 and ARM64 assembly though.)

diff --git a/main/gui/source/stacktrace.cpp b/main/gui/source/stacktrace.cpp
index a0810950..7afa90c7 100644
--- a/main/gui/source/stacktrace.cpp
+++ b/main/gui/source/stacktrace.cpp
@@ -54,6 +54,14 @@ namespace {
                 stackFrame.AddrFrame.Mode = AddrModeFlat;
                 stackFrame.AddrStack.Offset = context.Esp;
                 stackFrame.AddrStack.Mode = AddrModeFlat;
+            #elif defined(_ARM64_)
+                image = IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_ARM64;
+                stackFrame.AddrPC.Offset = context.Pc;
+                stackFrame.AddrPC.Mode = AddrModeFlat;
+                stackFrame.AddrFrame.Offset = context.Sp;
+                stackFrame.AddrFrame.Mode = AddrModeFlat;
+                stackFrame.AddrStack.Offset = context.Sp;
+                stackFrame.AddrStack.Mode = AddrModeFlat;
             #else
                 stackFrame.AddrPC.Offset = context.Rip;
                 stackFrame.AddrPC.Mode = AddrModeFlat;

With that, I was able to get a working ARM64 native build. I'll be playing more with it in the weeks to come, as this x13s will be my travel companion and I'm picking back up some reversing work I've neglected. I'm not confident enough in it to make a PR yet. Definitely could use more help testing.

Edit: I do see GitHub recently added arm64 runners for Windows 11 and Linux in public preview. I'd definitely be willing to test if I knew what sorts of things needed to be tested.

[petero-dk]

Any news on this?

[WerWolv]

Some news - I started working on getting in to build on the CI in this branch here: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex/tree/feature/windows-arm64-build

It's using MSVC sadly though right now which I'm not too happy about. I'd rather have it use msys2 as well

[WerWolv]

Another update. I got both the MSVC and the MSYS2 build to work now thanks to the Windows 11 ARM runners GitHub recently added. Here's the two installers, they're currently untested so please let me know if it's working properly. Setting up a Windows VM on my mac right now but it would be great to also see if it works right natively. There's also no NoGPU version here because there's no prebuilt Mesa for ARM Windows right now

Windows Installer arm64.zip
Windows Installer MSVC arm64.zip