Comment 9 for bug 507416

@Bryan: in the case of chromium which you describe, the application ought to be fixed to NOT use NEON by default -- or it wont work on e.g. Marvell v7 (ARMADA) -- instead of using it if the kernel has it. In general, packages built for Ubuntu should not look at the currently running kernel to decide to which level to optimize for. Apps should use the configure target triplet and toolchain defaults.

One example package doing this is ffmpeg; it detects whether the toolchain defaults to enabling NEON to build or not a NEON flavour.

If Chromium can not be built without NEON at all, then the kernel needs not change, we just need to make sure we don't use it on hardware without NEON.