[liaison]

We were all set to do a build for someone recently who claimed that they needed a 64 bit build for their pi3, and that's when we found that our standard Loaders actually worked just fine. Digging further it transpired that while the pi3 has a 64 bit architecture, the OS releases being provided at the time (at least as standard) and hence the binaries are all 32 bit.

I've seen the inevitable 64 bit OS interest, though just 4 days ago there was a comment on the PI forum saying:

"I suppose the Pi4, if it is to be competitive, may have more memory - which will trigger a 64-bit OS"

Is it possible to buy a PI3 that's shipped with a 64 bit OS yet?
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Community Admin

[suberimakuri]

That's right.
The standard RPI os provided are 32 bit so your loader works fine.
Debian now supports 64 bit arch on them and this will continue to mature and other arm boards will become available.
If you can start preparations to release a loader for arm 64 (a arch 64) that would be great.
Cheers

[vldrmn]

Given the explosion of new low-cost devices running powerful CPU's, I would kindly ask you to provide a 64 bit ARM loader.
Popular devices such as the Synology DS218play, run 64 bit systems on Armv8 Cortex processors. Those CPUs should have backward compatibility, but given just a 32 bit loader, many people are out of luck.

P.S. My business is actually loosing on potential customers on this.

[alastair]

@vldrmn,

We are considering adding aarch64 Loaders to our standard builds. However, adding new platforms is not trivial and means we have to transfer resources from other projects.

Having said that, we do have some aarch64 Loaders that we have already built. If you are interested in trying those then please create a ticket at out Support Help Desk at https://support.ioncube.com
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Alastair

ionCube

[Shurx]

Good news. The bootloaders 10.2.5 for versions php 7.0 and 7.2 have been tested. Work stably on the arm64 platform. The test was conducted on a device Khadas Vim (Ubuntu 16.04)
I can test php 7.3 if there is a build.

[alastair]

We have now included ARM64 (Aarch64) loaders as part of our standard builds. You can download the current version, 10.3.4, from https://downloads.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_aarch64.zip

Included in the archive are non-thread-safe loaders for PHP 5.5 to 7.3.
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Alastair

ionCube

[vldrmn]

I just wanted to thank the ionCube team for it, and for the continuous work with keeping up with the PHP versions and the popular platforms. I am a happy ionCube customer!