All clocks in Pulp Fiction are stuck on 4:20
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ARM is a 'hodge podge', says Linus Torvalds
THE SMARTPHONE AND TABLET ecosystem based on ARM chip designs is a hodge-podge of companies making random pieces of hardware and throwing things against the wall to see what ships, Linux creator Linus Torvalds said at Linuxcon yesterday.
However, Linux has managed make ARM compatible with it, Torvalds said, adding that things are looking "at this point pretty good. Not as bad as when I started to scream at people".
"On the kernel side, we try to support a lot of the ARM architecture," he said. "We don't quite know what the solution is yet, it's being worked on."
A lack of standardisation among ARM devices has made it difficult to ensure that Linux can properly support ARM hardware. ARM, meanwhile, would do well to imitate the PC, Torvalds said.
"I think ARM is a very promising platform," he said. "At the same time, the ARM community has never had the notion of a standard platform. ARM never had the PC."
Even though people "love to hate" the PC architecture which is "clunky" and "nasty", Torvalds said it is a nice platform with a lot of effort concentrated in one area that is easy to support.
"No concentrated effort to have a framework for things... since we try to support a lot of the ARM architecture, it's been a painful thing for me to see, look at the x86 tree and ARM tree and it's many times bigger. It's not constrained by this nice platform thing, it just has random crap all over it. And it was getting to me."
In the end he said, "I just snapped, and instead of running around naked with a chainsaw like I usually do, I started talking to people and a lot of people admitted it's a problem."
While Torvalds accepted that "a lot of people love to hate the PC," the fact that Intel, AMD and hardware makers worked on building a common infrastructure "made it very efficient and easy to support". µ
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@Mike
George Lucas was a one hit wonder? Wow, you need to get out more, I'm no george lucas buff, but holy shit, he;s had a lot more than one hit...
Star Wars
The empire strikes back
Return of the jedi
The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith
The Clone Wars
That's 7 just with star wars alone...
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Theirs 4 more...
American Graffiti
Howard the Duck
Willow
The Land Before Time
Theirs 4 more, by my count that's 15, that's not all of them either, i could go on, but i'm getting bored with this already.
I guess by your standards Michael Jackson must have been a one hit wonder too huh?
Back to the article, am i the only one that found amusement in the fact that Linus admits he runs around naked with a chainsaw? or is that normal behavior for you penguin lovers?
Changing the platform is relativly streight forward - simply load the right device driver modules, the only configuration should be some base addresses. This only has to be done once for each platform.
Linux on the other hand has so many dependancies, and differnent versions of key programs, such as init, inetd etc and different ways of doing things like starting/stopping services.
Even the device driver structures have changed between versions.
If you want standadisation, then look into a standard linux before complaining about the platform
Well Linus I guess you don't quite understand how ARM works so let me in on the secret. ARM licenses the CPU core, not the peripherals.
To give you an example, lets pretend that two imaginary companies - we'll call one Freescale Semiconductor and the other Texas Instruments (completely random name generation here) - license the ARM core and create devices using it. Each one has their own library of peripherals (e.g. timers, USB devices, video ports). What you suggest is that all of the ARM vendors should scrap their peripheral designs and "standardize".
Linus should worry more about how to reduce the bloat in the kernel than worrying about how to support all of the various ARM devices out there. Most semiconductor mfgs provide their own Linux drivers, and if they don't then I guess maybe Linus could call them out on that.
The variation is what makes the ARM arch so affordable. If Linux were a bit more modular then perhaps it would be much easier for the vendors to supply their own Linux components to the Linux community. When it was created, it wasn't intended to support embedded devices in the first place (i.e. real-time), so its kinda crazy that it is even used as much as it is...
Linus!
You should have NOT said that!
Now all the ARM manufacturers gather together to form a standard and the times of the power hungry x86-64 are over!
Well, (un)fortunately that will takes years...anyway I'm selling my Intel shares now...
Just look at the Linux kernel source tree, at the different, partly-overlapping versions of architecture support that are necessary for ARM. And compare it with the unified code that handles Microsoft-compatible x86 and x86-64 architectures.
Of course, this is the strength of Linux, that it is able to support such a tangle of nonstandard hardware and still thrive.
Which leads to the next question: how is Microsoft Windows 8 running on ARM going to deal with this overgrown jungle? I suspect Microsoft is going to find itself a bit out of its league...
"making random pieces of hardware and throwing things against the wall to see what ships"
Sounds like Cave Johnson to me. ;)
Until Android came along the mobile phone world hadn't really picked up Linux at all. That represents an awfully large number of ARMs not running Linux.
I know that ARM support has been in the kernel for sometime, it's just that it didn't attract any of the the major mobile manufacturers. So why was that? It was free afterall, so there must have been some critical inadequacy (from the manufacturers point of view). Power consumption? Open source?
Google picked it up (largely because it was free), forcing the rest of the industry to start paying attention. Google have done a massive amount of work in turning it into a (subjective opinion) blingy bodge for advertising purposes, but it still isn't a well thought out mobile OS that offers all that a user might actually want such as the openness we're used to in the PC world.
If mobile hardware does become better standardised (either through spontaneity or being forced to by a big player like MS, I don't care which) then we may at last be on the way to a better mobile offering. We'll know we've got there when you can install an OS binary or native app on almost any old mobile without it having to be interpreted in a VM, compiled on install, etc. That way we might actually use less memory, less power, and best of all lose the cash grabbing restrictions imposed by the likes of Google, Apple, etc. I would even be prepared to pay quite a chunk of cash for a mobile like that.
It's my main complaint with Linux: they just CAN'T focus on standard and adequate to build a system that doesn't require constant re-learning, but have to keep TINKERING with it for NO advance whatsoever. And while Unix has been "standardized" for at least three decades, it's so arbitrary that expertise requires a real mania, plus black magic.
And Windows is Unix copied into a CPM version, that copied and renamed DOS, then attempted to be converted back into Unix, all the while tacking on various wacky ideas and building in traps and tricks. Result is a truly insane hodgepodge. No one has EVER made a coherent system of Windows, it's just a constant mutation, conflicting with itself. Plus the talking paperclip.
Anyway, I doubt that the Linux types will have much trouble subsuming ARM. -- If OS/2 can be ported to the big-endian PowerPC (yes, it really was, short-lived and not much promoted) then the Linux types with their penchant for putting it in toasters and so on, will just have fun with the needed convolutions, no need for Torvalds to worry...
Obviously the guy also meant Android.
It's not rocket science to see that the rocket science of hodge podge Windows is now being replicated on ARM via Android.
If they can't compete they won't try to compete. It why Android is currently winning against more archaic mobile systems.
What makes you think Linux is late form the ARM party?
The ARM branch has been in the kernel source for yonks, IIRC.
It's a bit rich for Linus to say that ARM is a hodge podge. Linux (as in the distributions that we all use, including Android) isn't exactly blessed with perfect consistency and clarity throughout. And to say that ARM is a promising platform seems to ignore that almost every one of the billions of mobile devices out there is based on ARM, and that's rather more than the total number of Linux deployments in the world. A good question to ask is why Linux is so late to the ARM platform in comparison to everything else? Andoid's done OK-ish, but it's not exactly brought consistency, sanity and common sense to the mobile market. It's just a money making machine for Google really.
But a bit of standardisation would be good and then we can all crack on with the serious business of doing what we do on more portable hardware lasting longer on batteries.
I don't think Linux is going to force that standardisation on ARM. TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, etc. are all too busy differentiating themselves from each other to preserve market share. As soon as there's strong standardisation they all become just another ARM manufacturer, and that's not necessarily in their interest unless they are confident that they can become top dog.
Linux isn't currently big enough to make the manufacturers change their ways. If Linux/ARM based servers start looking fantastically advantageous then they might think it worthwhile chasing after some of Intel's market share.
But I think that Microsoft might just succeed. They've controlled the PC platform for years now, so they might just succeed on ARM. Intel should be *bloody terrified* of ARM becoming truly viable in the server market, and I'm not surprised they've been publically sniffy about Windows 8 on ARM.
Try replacing 'ARM' with 'Linux' and 'PC' with 'Windows'?
P.S. I both like Linux and use it everyday.
Linus had his one hit wonder, and people have embraced it, but people have been complaining about fragmentation for a long time now and apparently Linus thinks he's the only one who knows it's a problem.
The PC system is better than ARM because of better availability of drivers and better drivers, not because of more-similar hardware configurations.