[Arm-netbook] Linus wingeing about ARM

[Henrik Nordström]

fre 2012-10-12 klockan 14:37 +0100 skrev Gordan Bobic:

> Uboot is a step in the right direction, but it suffers from the same 
> proprietary fragmentation as the kernels. There are different uboot 
> variants even on extremely similar devices, e.g. Sheeva/Guru/Dream plugs.

There is also a lot going mainline u-boot. Even if your device ships
with an old odd hacked u-boot many devices have mainline u-boot support.

> > 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.
> 
> Except there are many orders of magnitude more of Android ARM users than 
> Linux ARM users. And for that reason alone, I don't expect the 
> manufacturer focus is likely to change.

I don't expect anything usable to come out of the android phones/tablets
camp in this area, nor that there any time soon will be easy to run a
linux distro on such devices (with a handful number of exceptions)

> Only on very specific SoCs. Calxeda chips and Marvell chips, sure. But 
> in the majority of other cases there seems to be relatively little 
> general computing pressure at the moment.

Yes, but you have to give the ecosystem some years. This will start in
the server side, and then laptops, some tablets and maybe something rubs
off to the consumer android focused camp.

Landscape on the server side have a different focus and goals, and both
power and interest to push this shift forward and set standards.

Regards
Henrik