[Mageia-dev] [fedora-arm] ARM summit at Plumbers 2011

Thu Aug 25 01:55:14 CEST 2011

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011, Bill Gatliff wrote:
+
+> I have observed all the hand-wringing regarding the state of ARM
+> Linux, and it's obvious to everyone that there is still work to be
+> done.  ARM isn't like PCs, and that's obviously inconvenient for Linus
+> but it's an essential part of ARM's success.
+
+I think that the thing being disputed isn't that ARM is different from 
+PCs, but rather the issue that different ARM SOs do the same thing in 
+different ways.
+
+in the early days of the PC we had the same issues (those who were around 
+to remember the 'almost' PC compatible machines (from some of the biggest 
+names in the business). they all thought that they had good reasons to do 
+things differently, but over time they all changed to hide the differences 
+from the system.
+
+ARM is currently in worse shape than the PC market ever was in this 
+aspect, but in this case it's less a matter of getting the hardware guys 
+to change what they do than it is to get better documentation of what the 
+hardware is really doing and not duplicating drivers for cases where the 
+right answer is just replacing a constant with a variable (just as an 
+example of the very common case where the same component is wired to a 
+different address)
+
+David Lang
+