Comment by rowanG077
5 years ago
This is one of the things that really, really make me mad internally. Phones are exactly like you describe locked down proprietary pieces of hardware. The computing world could be so much better if it everything was open.
I fear everyday that the arm "revolution" will make open computing a thing of the past. Look at the arm laptops that are released. Not a single one can run Linux.
The pine book pro runs linux. Also, the bootloader can be unlocked on the new mac arm laptops.
It isn't the locked bootloader that is the issue with porting Linux to new ARM Macs, it's that ARM SoCs require vendor support for Linux in varying degrees, and Apple has made it clear that they won't support other OSes on ARM Macs outside of virtualization.
> Apple has made it clear that they won't support other OSes on ARM Macs [...]
That’s not completely true. They seem to be open to Windows.
Craig Federighi has stated that Windows could run on M1 hardware, but Microsoft’s licensing doesn’t allow the ARM version to be installed in a non-exclusive manner.
Source: https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/20/windows-can-run-natively-m1-m...
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But Linux can run on arm just fine? I used to run my website and a bunch of other stuff on an arm64 VPS.
It isn't that the CPU architecture that's the problem, because that's well supported, it's the rest of the hardware configuration that isn't standardized and is almost always unique between ARM SoCs.
ARM servers use UEFI, and have enumerable buses for hardware detection, while most ARM SoCs require a custom bootloader or a forked open source one, and can't enumerate over hardware, thus requiring something like the DeviceTree in Linux.
Here's an idea of what kind of work ARM SoCs need for Linux to run on them[1].
[1] https://elinux.org/images/a/ad/Arm-soc-checklist.pdf
Yes but the instruction set is only a tiny part of conpatibility. Intel and amd have generally standardized on ACPI for hardware discovery for example. But ARM has not. This means there is no Generic way to know what the capabilities of arm system are. That's Just one of the issues though.
Arm standardized on dtb’s. It’s a static file that describes all the information ACPI lets you probe dynamically at boot.
Edit: and also uboot, which bootstraps the kernel, and hands it a dtb.
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> Not a single one can run Linux.
My ARM Chromebook which boots into Linux would beg to differ.
Then stuff has changed recently. The last time I looked this up it was custom stuff and I couldn't just download Ubuntu or some other distro and press install.
Can you put stock Debian on it as easily as I can on a PC?
No. It's definitely a special distro.
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>Look at the arm laptops that are released. Not a single one can run Linux.
Some of the earliest ARM laptops ran Chrome OS, which is an image based Linux distro (vs package based).
People have been running more recognizable distros on some of these models for a long time, with varying degrees of success.
Take it easy on the hyperbole. There are definitely options.
The vast majority of ARM SoCs' Linux support amounts to Linux forks, and not mainline Linux support. Forks eventually stop being maintained, and quickly become outdated.
Now that I look at it, it looks like this is the case for some[1] ARM Chromebooks, too, in that they are stuck having to use the specific ChromeOS kernels that ship with images for their Chromebook models.
[1] https://github.com/RaumZeit/LinuxOnAcerCB5-311