Support arm32 export on Android

[randomdevpete]

Specifically I'm trying to target the Kindle Fire Kids tablet, working on a little game for my pre-school son.

It's straightforward enough to support it, as I managed to do it in a fork just by changing the scons flag for the architecture:
7031bfb

The build works well enough. However we want an export template that supports both architectures, so scons must be run twice with the different sets of flags. (This was easier on the old build system as there were already two scons runs to support x86 as well.)

I would have submitted a PR for this but I wasn't immediately sure how best to do this in github actions; ideally there'd be a matrix for architectures but I don't think a matrix can be used here? Perhaps a comma-separated list of architectures and run scons in a loop...?

[Benjamin-Dobell]

Admittedly we have a pretty hard time with our CI, it's really slow as is. Godot (the org) have access to higher tier GHAs than us, so this many build variants isn't as big of an issue for them (although I still see they have problems from time to time). Performance also isn't as good on arm32 devices. Because of this, this hasn't been a priority. I'm not ruling it out, just letting you know why we're not already building for arm32.

That said, which Kindle Fire model is this? I've built for my daughters' Kindle Fire tablets, they're arm64. Performance was pretty bad on these low powered devices though 😅

[randomdevpete]

That said, which Kindle Fire model is this? I've built for my daughters' Kindle Fire tablets, they're arm64. Performance was pretty bad on these low powered devices though 😅

This led me on a bit of a rabbit trail ... So it's a Fire HD 10, but 9th gen from 2019. What is not straightforward is that whilst it does have 64-bit hardware, apparently the OS limits it to 32-bit.

(Certainly it wasn't possible to install an arm64 build on there, I was only able to get something running once I switched to arm32.)

Performance is definitely an issue and I notice this with a number of app store apps too, but so far I'm able to keep things performant enough and I haven't even tried to do any serious optimisation. And I'm using physics and custom shaders in the mix.

But yes the CI is producing an awful lot of artifacts already :) Obviously the support for multiple godot versions multiplies the size of this problem too.

However having a look at the pipelines -- I am wondering if scons cache is not working properly. The android build takes ~20mins whereas in godot's repo it takes ~1min. If you look in the godot log here you can see many messages saying Retrieved <filename> from cache: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/actions/runs/21330139677/job/61393634567

Whereas in a GodotJS log here I can see none of those messages, even though the earlier message that scons cache is enabled is still there: https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS/actions/runs/21208460393/job/61010664703

So I am wondering if compilation can be sped up significantly if the cache was working properly.