[Arm-netbook] Linus wingeing about ARM

[Henrik Nordström]

fre 2012-10-12 klockan 10:24 +0100 skrev Gordan Bobic:

> Seems to me the ideal way forward would be that if they licence people 
> to use the ARM instruction set and designs, they must also include a 
> standardised boot mechanism. This may be hard to to retrospectively, but 
> putting that requirement in for every future licence would solve the 
> problem for at least the future cores.

ARM do have provisions for "BIOS" discovery in their IP blocks, in
theory enabling the same boot loader and kernel to work across a range
of SoCs. Today sadly probably only used by debuggers.

I don't view the booting part as such a big problem. u-boot fills the
"BIOS" space quite nicely. It's even less device specific than your
favorite x86 PC BIOS, and completely open. Additionally there is a clean
boot interface defined by the Linux kernel which keeps the OS interface
even if you change to coreboot or another bootloader/"BIOS". And if you
place u-boot/coreboot + devicetree in a SPI flash separate from the rest
you get a clean separation close to the same level as x86 BIOS. Sure,
there is no ACPI but is it needed?

This is more of a matter for device vendors to settle on structure than
ARM to impose. The main challenge is that Android folks isn't interested
in reducing the lockin in their devices. Meaning there is zero device
manufacturer interest in being able to run the same Android OS image on
multiple devices, only interest in making sure this do not happen.

And the shift to a common "boot interface" will imho come all naturally,
driven by Lnux distributions in the general computing usage of ARM
processor cores, not from Android.

The fact that ARM is being used more and more in general computing puts
a whole range of new requiements on system design which is not seen in
the consumer device segment or router segmennt, including the ability to
run the same OS on multiple different system designs.

Regards
Henrik