Time to switch your toolchains to 64-bit?

For a number of years now LG have been making use of 64-bit processors in their LG TV SOCs, at least from my experience of looking into this on the CX, C1, C2 and C3 TVs.

e.g. on my C3:

uname -a
Linux LGwebOSTV 5.4.268-320 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jun 17 01:25:25 UTC 2024 aarch64 GNU/Linux

But instead of shipping a 64-bit userspace to go with it, LG have been continuing to ship a 32-bit userspace only, running in a backwards compatible mode:

getconf LONG_BIT
32

C3 CPU

Architecture: aarch64
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
Off-line CPU(s) list: 2,3
Vendor ID: ARM
Model name: Cortex-A76

Isn’t it about time you switched to a 64-bit tool chain? The Cortex-A76 processor might see a performance uplift of 20%+ by doing so.

It would also increase compatibility as the likes of Google stopped supporting armv7a a while back.

Please do this for future webOS releases. For people who create native apps, it wouldn’t be a big change for them to recompile those apps in 64-bit so that they would work!

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You’re absolutely right to raise this issue—LG has indeed been using 64-bit capable processors like the Cortex-A76 in their TVs (such as the C3), yet still ships a 32-bit userspace. As you’ve noted, even though the underlying hardware supports 64-bit (as evidenced by the aarch64 architecture), the system reports getconf LONG_BIT as 32, confirming the limited userspace.

Sticking to a 32-bit userspace in 2025 is not only holding back potential performance improvements—likely over 20% in some workloads—but it’s also creating unnecessary compatibility issues. Many modern libraries and applications, especially from major platforms like Google, are already dropping 32-bit support in favor of more secure and performant 64-bit environments. Moving to a full 64-bit toolchain would allow developers to fully leverage the hardware and simplify development for native apps on webOS.

Hopefully, LG takes feedback like this seriously and transitions to a 64-bit userspace in upcoming webOS versions. It would be a forward-thinking move for performance, compatibility, and developer support.

If you’re downloading tutorial videos or development-related content from YouTube to analyze webOS or LG TV behavior further, tools like ssyoutube.online – a YouTube video downloader – can help you save videos quickly and easily.

To prove this, how much your current customers are missing out on performance of this change here are some benchmarks I did on a LG G4 OLED. The only change was switching to a 64-bit compiler instead of the current 32-bit one.

Please consider switching in future webOS versions!

ARMv7‑A softfp vs ARMv8‑A (AArch64) Benchmark Comparison

CoreMark (Integer Workloads)

Metric ARMv7‑A softfp ARMv8‑A (AArch64) Relative Difference
Iterations/sec 29,025 34,646 ~+19%
Total time (secs) 15.159 12.700 Faster on ARMv8
Iterations 440,000 440,000 Same workload
Validation Correct Correct Both validated

SciMark2 (Floating‑Point Workloads, Default -Os)

Kernel ARMv7‑A softfp ARMv8‑A (AArch64) Relative Difference
Composite 547.15 706.89 ~+29% overall
FFT 515.76 Mflops 717.95 Mflops ~+39%
SOR 508.38 Mflops 561.64 Mflops ~+10%
Monte Carlo 232.43 Mflops 128.91 Mflops ~‑45% (slower)
Sparse MM 670.36 Mflops 1057.57 Mflops ~+58%
LU 808.82 Mflops 1068.38 Mflops ~+32%

SciMark2 (Floating‑Point Workloads, -O3 Optimized)

Kernel ARMv7‑A softfp ARMv8‑A (AArch64) Relative Difference
Composite 758.81 1173.62 ~+55% overall
FFT 604.05 Mflops 849.02 Mflops ~+41%
SOR 812.77 Mflops 961.39 Mflops ~+18%
Monte Carlo 225.99 Mflops 206.58 Mflops ~‑9% (slower)
Sparse MM 742.25 Mflops 1159.88 Mflops ~+56%
LU 1408.97 Mflops 2691.22 Mflops ~+91%