Linux and ARM

[gerits]

Good new everybody!

Linus Torvalds told in an interview that ARM development is active at the moment and he thinks ARM is an important uprising platform, so lot of linux coming to RasPi.
http://www.linux.com/news/ente.....witterfeed

[DaQatz]

Nice.

[liz]

Awesome!

[Willofield]

great

[jamesh]

I would think there are more Arm based Linux machines out there than anything else (i.e. almost any Android or other Linux based embedded device - mobile phones, routers, printers. media players, tablets etc etc etc).

[gerits]

If you read the article it also states that although arm is cheaper, there also is no standard in it. So it's hard to develop software and drivers if every arm chip is different.

[Svartalf]

Actually, it's not as hard as you'd think.

The application code's going to be largely the same for R-Pi as it would be for BeagleBoard so long as you're not calling NEON stuff- since NEON's not on anything on that SoC.

The driver story's less because of there being no standard in it...it's because many of the devices in the space are goofball- you'd not even have them on the PC. However...if your NIC is the same one on X86 Linux, it's going to work FINE on ARM Linux. If your USB UVC cam is supported on X86, then it's going to be supported just FINE on ARM Linux. What causes issues is speciality devices. Most of the SoC's for the purposes most people care about, are going to be the same. It's people like me that end up having the "fun" mentioned in the article- and it's not QUITE as bad as Linus makes it out to be. I should know, I make a living doing that sort of work for the players in this space.

[jamesh]

Quote from gerits on August 18, 2011, 22:26
If you read the article it also states that although arm is cheaper, there also is no standard in it. So it's hard to develop software and drivers if every arm chip is different.

It's not the chips that are different (although there are obviously different models, but its easy to tweak the compiler to cope with that) - it's the platforms that the chips run on that are all different. The PC gave everyone a bog standard platform - all PC's look the same to the OS. Whereas there are many different Arm platforms, all requiring different board support packages (BSP's) to run - that's where the difficulty lies. BeagleBoards, Raspi etc. Both Arm chip devices, both completely different and requiring different kernel builds. PC's never had that problem - the same kernel should work on all.

On the other hand, if the platform supplier supplies the BSP to make things work and run Linux, then to the end user, it's just another Arm platform on which their software works (providing its compiled to the right processor model!)

Certainly all more complicated than PC's but not insurmountable.