Building Berkeley DB for Windows on ARM64

The bundled solution build_windows\Berkeley_DB_vs2010.sln provides ARM64 configurations (Debug|ARM64, Release|ARM64, Static Debug|ARM64, Static Release|ARM64) for the library and for the C command-line utilities. Output goes to build_windows\ARM64\<Configuration>\, mirroring the x64 layout described in Building Berkeley DB for 64-bit Windows.

Requirements

Visual Studio 2022 (or the standalone Build Tools) with:

• the Desktop development with C++ workload,
• MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ ARM64 build tools (Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.ARM64),
• a Windows 10 or 11 SDK.

Building

The solution is a VS2010-era project and declares no <PlatformToolset>, so the toolset and SDK version must be supplied on the command line; otherwise msbuild defaults to the VS2010 toolset and fails with MSB8020. From a shell where the ARM64 cross-tools are active (vcvarsall.bat x64_arm64, or the "ARM64 Native/Cross Tools Command Prompt"):

cd build_windows
msbuild Berkeley_DB_vs2010.sln /m /t:db ^
    /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=ARM64 ^
    /p:PlatformToolset=v143 /p:WindowsTargetPlatformVersion=10.0

Substitute a utility name for db to build a single tool, or omit /t: to build everything the ARM64 solution configuration covers. Building from the IDE works too: select ARM64 in the Platform dropdown, and retarget the solution when prompted.

Because ARM64 build tools are available on x64 hosts, this cross-compiles from an ordinary x64 machine as well as building natively on Windows-on-ARM.

Verify what you produced with dumpbin; an ARM64 image reports AA64:

dumpbin /headers build_windows\ARM64\Release\libdb53.dll | findstr machine
            AA64 machine (ARM64)

Scope and status

The ARM64 configurations cover the library (db) and these utilities: db_archive, db_checkpoint, db_deadlock, db_dump, db_hotbackup, db_load, db_log_verify, db_printlog, db_recover, db_replicate, db_stat, db_tuner, db_upgrade, db_verify.

The Java, Tcl, SQL, PHP, C++ STL and example projects remain x64-only; they depend on external SDKs that are not part of a cross-build.

Note

The ARM64 configurations are verified to build, and the resulting binaries are confirmed to be genuine ARM64 images (AA64), but they have not been exercised at runtime and no test suite has been run against them. Treat Windows ARM64 as untested: validate it in your own environment before relying on it. In particular, Berkeley DB's mutex and memory-ordering code has not been tested on a weakly-ordered Windows machine.

Maintaining the configurations

dist/win_arm64_configs.py generates the ARM64 configurations by duplicating each x64 configuration in the solution, the affected .vcxproj files and VS10\library.props / VS10\application.props, substituting /machine:arm64 for /machine:x64. After adding a project that should build for ARM64, add its name to ARM64_PROJECTS in that script and re-run it:

python3 dist/win_arm64_configs.py

python3 dist/win_arm64_configs.py --check reports whether any file is missing its ARM64 configurations without modifying anything.