On ARM platforms, accessing the PMU registers requires special user
access permissions. Since there is no other way to get accurate timers,
the current implementation of timers in FFmpeg rely on these registers.
Unfortunately, enabling user access to these registers on Linux is not
trivial, and generally involve compiling a random and unreliable github
kernel module, or patching somehow your kernel.

Such module is very unlikely to reach the upstream anytime soon. Quoting
Robin Murphin from ARM:

> Say you do give userspace direct access to the PMU; now run two or more
> programs at once that believe they can use the counters for their own
> "minimal-overhead" profiling. Have fun interpreting those results...
>
> And that's not even getting into the implications of scheduling across
> different CPUs, CPUidle, etc. where the PMU state is completely beyond
> userspace's control. In general, the plan to provide userspace with
> something which might happen to just about work in a few corner cases,
> but is meaningless, misleading or downright broken in all others, is to
> never do so.

As a result, the alternative is to use the Performance Monitoring Linux
API which makes use of these registers internally (assuming the PMU of
your ARM board is supported in the kernel, which is definitely not a
given...).

While the Linux API is obviously cross platform, it does have a
significant overhead which needs to be taken into account. As a result,
that mode is only weakly enabled on ARM platforms exclusively.

Note on the non flexibility of the implementation: the timers (native
FFmpeg vs Linux API) are selected at compilation time to prevent the
need of function calls, which would result in a negative impact on the
cycle counters.