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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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I'm conflicted on ARM.
The additional competition is great, but it presents a great risk of PCs becoming more locked down. They don't have an open, standardised BIOS/UEFI like x86 systems do.
Booting alternate OSes on ARM systems can be a nightmare. Usually it's straight up not possible.
I don't want PCs to be like smartphones. I don't want locked bootloaders.
EDIT:
FFS people. I know there are some ARM devices that allow booting of non-official OSes. That's why I said usually.
Even for those devices though, they typically have to use non-standardised firmware (you can't just take an OS for device A and use it for device B in the same way you can take an .iso and install it on any x86 machine), and it requires the OEM to want the device to be open.
Your desire to go "umm ackshully..." and be technically correct over a point I never made in the first place is blinding you to the point I was actually making: x86 is fairly open, standardised, and modular by default. ARM isn't. And all it takes is a look at the phone/tablet market to see that OEMs don't want them to be.
I worry, and I don't think unreasonably, that ARM becoming the standard could mean a further erosion of the openness of PCs.
Don’t be conflicted. RISC-V or GTFO.
Yep it keeps getting faster and faster.
"it keeps getting faster and faster" isn't really saying much when it's 1/10th the performance of a raspberry pi.
Yeah, but RISC-V also costs 1/10th the price of a Pi.
To license the arcitecture it costs a whole lot less, but when it comes to getting an actual usable computer they cost the same or more as an ARM machine, and perform worse.
For micro controllers (currently) it's great.
Oh, I absolutely agree. Licensing is where the big difference is at, but that makes sense though, as ARM and RISC-V are both RISC based processors.
It's loosely akin to comparing AMD vs Intel. Of course, you cannot pop-out an RISC-V and replace it with an ARM. However, the PCB's should contain all the same parts, meaning they'll have both have a similar price.
Unlike Intel/AMD, which you'd need extra capacitor, heat sinks, whatever - to help it handle all that extra power those CISC processors need (which results in heat).
The pi foundation is starting to roll out chips with risc v processors built in. It's extremely cheap and open spec.
One example is RP2350.
More options in computing is better for everyone.
Someone just needs to work on some open-source GPU for it, otherwise it'll still have some of the usual shortcomings of many ARM SoCs.
“RISC is good.”
Standardized firmware isn't something that's specified in the ISA, is it? It's just shitty phone manufacturers.
Asus had some x86 phones a few years back. I haven't dug into them, but I doubt they had a full bios/efi.
pine64 arm devices have u-boot, while a bootloader does fullfil a subset of the uefi spec.
As a simple user of Linux, I totally understand what it means for me....less choice, more google-android-like shit hardware. No thanks 👍.
I would like RISC-V to also get 'good enough', considering that it seems to be a shitton more open than ARM is.
I think that there's a legitimate place for all-in-one "smartphone" SoC PCs. You can make them cheaper, smaller, and use less power.
It's just not really what I want for myself in a PC. I want the modularity and third-parties competing to provide components.
But I am pretty sure that there are plenty of people who don't care about that.
There has to be enough scale to support products like that, though. SoC systems might cannibalize enough to make scale hard.
sigh
Well, we'll see where things go.
I mean, different use cases yeah? There's certainly a big market for people that just do the basics on their devices, ie email, web browsing, documents/spreadsheets etc that don't need a full blown powerhouse computer, nevermind that they have no clue what an operating system even is nor do they care, as long as they get their memes and cat videos in between work tasks.
I'll bet there will always be an x86 segment of the market for gamers, power users, tinkerers, and the like. Though, that market may unfortunately shrink in the coming years that could lead to vendors abandoning the space, which could lead to fewer choices and higher component prices. On top of which, major venders might see it as an opportunity for lock-in and advertising, so yeah it'll be interesting to see what happens.
The sliver of hope here is that the hacking community has always found ways around proprietary bullshit, and we can only hope and support that those efforts continue, lest we further our race in to a stupid corporate dystopia.
Tbh I really want to get my hands on a snapdragon X laptop at some point just to play around with it. The energy efficiency alone makes me very curious.
I was under the impression that most of the issues around getting Linux to work on them was around driver support. As in: people are absolutely able to install an arbitrary OS, but the functionality is just super janky in most cases. Is that not accurate?
You’re definitely right in terms of arbitrary OS installation, some folks have got Ubuntu running on Lenovo snapdragon laptops recently.
The lack of “portability” though is a bit troubling, it seems each device (tree) has to be manually added, developed, tested, and have an install image created for it, unless I’m missing something. And this will be arduous and potentially problematic for corner cases or small numbers of adopters of a particular machine model (so basically the same as right now I guess).
As well, software packages have to be ported to the new architecture, which in some cases is easier said than done. Sure basic Unix utilities are portable enough, but more advanced and complicated software might have some issues, unless an efficient compatibility layer could be developed.
This! Exactly!
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but since Microsoft made TPM mandatory for Windows 11+, locked down bootloader are on their way.
Basically, TPM allows (Windows) software to validate/verify the integrity of the OS and hardware. This also (could) include the bootloader/bios if Microsoft chooses to do so.
TPM is the equivalent of attestation on Android, which is the exact reason why your Banking App won't work on your rooted/custom Android Phone.
That being said, we should embrace ARM. X86/AMD has 30+ years worth of "history" baked into each ( CISC) chip. This complexity is why your PC draws soooo much power and generates soooo much heat.
Not all ARM chips are in phones, nor are they all locked down like one. There are several ARM devices and SBCs now where switching OSes is as easy as swapping out an SD card. Most do use uboot as a standard and some are even capable of utilizing UEFI.
But it's not standard.
What made PCs take off was the BIOS war, which occurred because manufacturers were dependent on 3rd party OS's, which were still competing for dominance.
Where can I watch or read about this? Like what can I Google for more?
Some SBCs only boot from said SD card though, while some do support more robust media. However, too many images are presuming you boot from SD which is a pita.
With or without Das Uboot, they still rely on board specific firmware (even Uboot is customised for many boards to make it work). OSes that state they do support aarch64, often require to have UEFI on your system so no way they are gonna boot on e.g. your Raspberry Pi.
Add to that, that is unlikely that browsers compiled for arm64 will have feature parity with their x86-64 counterparts. Goodbye Digitale Rights Management, and with that goodbye services like Tidal or Spotify (unless you run an OS that is still supported by their apps).
I was gonna say I thought Raspi was ARM.
UEFI exists on arm and windows on arm devices can boot other OSes through it just like on x86.
Raspberry Pi owners: 🙄
"usually"
I am a raspberry pi owner (actually I've owned like a dozen and still own 8). And a pinephone owner.
And even on those very open devices, booting alternate OSes is less straightforward than on x86.