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Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

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Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#141
post #14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if there is nothing to develop for... Chicken and egg problem. However, I think that Windows on ARM will soon become a real thing, this could bring the developers, it will also help the ARM devices spread among Linux users. Regarding what Linus wrote, I do not buy it. There is so much stuff can run without cross-compilation: js and other scripts, java, c#. Also look at things like Android and iOS, you are already…

I do buy Linus' argument, you need to be able to do native development. My ARM64 development machine is a Pinebook, ARM32 a Cubietruck. Both have only 2GB of RAM and could really do with more. At least the Cubietruck has SATA so mine has a SSD.

With rich language runtimes, as app developer I don't care if my application instance runs on top of an OS, hypervisor or just plain bare metal.

The only devs that need to care about the native part are the ones writing the glue between runtime and hardware.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#142
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but with smartphones you don't have a choice. You don't have much choice now sure, but it's not as if there weren't any efforts at x86 smartphones (like the ZenPhone). Nor is it as if there wasn't a long run up of phones leading to the modern smartphone either. And even in this how is not directly relevant to the case of x86? I mean, we're directly doing a comparison to the RISC/MIPS/etc era yeah? Couldn't back the…

Most legacy software needs an emulator anyway. X86-64 and OS libraries are not sufficiently similar. Try running a Windows 95 era application on Windows 10. You can even have problems with Windows XP era stuff. And server space in general does not do legacy without keeping everything intact. The only real issue is lack of ARM developer PCs.

Windows does make a huge attempt to make stuff backwards compatible, however. I run a copy of Cardfile copied from Windows NT4 on Windows 10 just fine.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#143
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But developers can ssh to the cloud, and develop there, right? Then why do they insist on 32GB i9 laptops running MacOS or Linux? One must assume that there is some practical purpose, unless one is rather cynical and believes that maybe the just like shinnies.

.. develop remotely? I can, if I wish. I have an extremely high bandwidth link to servers. But there's still latency, and that makes all the difference. So in practice I always develop locally. I use Git and VNC and sshfs-mounted filesystems to access the remote, but my tools and editors are always local. I can build remotely, but not work remotely. And I still like to build locally all the same, during the actual de…

I find it hilarious that this is the developer attitude for their own work, but then they turn around and expect users to just suck it up and accept latency because cloud!

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#145
It's extremely hard to agree with Linus on that. One problem in his argument is that he believes that everybody has a kernel hacker mindset: most today's developers don't care about environment reproducibility at architecture level. The second problem is that he believes that every kind of development is as platform sensitive as kernel hacking, and he even makes the example of Perl scripts. The reality is that one year ago I started the effort to support ARM as a primary architecture for Redis, and all I had to do is to fix the unaligned accesses, that are anyway fixed in ARM64 almost entirely, and almost fixed also in ARM >= v7 if I remember correctly, but for a subset of instructions (double words loads/stores). Other than that, Redis, that happens to be a low level piece of code, just worked on ARM, with all the tests passing and no stability problems at all. I can't relate to what Linus says there. If a low level piece of code written in C, developed for many years without caring about ARM, just worked almost out of the box, I can't see the Ruby or Node application to fail once uploaded to an ARM server.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#146
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphones are a good argument for both views IMHO. Native development (as in native machine code executables) on Android is still a terrible experience even though they had a decade to fix it. It's much better on Apple platforms, maybe because they actually cared about developer-experience and native code is a "first class citizen" there. It goes beyond the different instruction set of course and most of the time t…

Native (NDK) development on Android is hard on purpose, as means to increase the platform security and target multiple SOCs. NDK level programming is explicitly only allowed for scenarios where ART JIT/AOT still isn't up to the job like Vulkan/real time audio/machine learning, or to integrate C and C++ from other platforms. In fact, with each Android release, the NDK gets further clamped down. I would like a better N…

Yeah, right, just like the PS3 was intentionally hard to develop for to keep away the rubble. That worked out really great (at least Sony did a complete 180 and made the PS4 SDK a great development environment).

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/sony-playstation-ps3-develope...

As long as Android allows running native code via JNI, the security concerns are void anyway. If they are really concerned about security, they would fix their development tools (just like Apple did by integrating clang ASAN and UBSAN right into the Xcode UI).

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#147
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple replace Intel with ARM in their laptops, that goes away too. (See my argument elsewhere in this thread)

The argument isn't "same instruction set". The argument is "same development & deployment environment", by the logic of which the Apple argument fails because not many people deploy to Apple servers.

So you run a Linux VM, just as lots of Mac-using developers do today. But the instruction set of the VM has to match the instruction set of the host, unless you’re in the mood for slow emulation.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#148
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphones are a good argument for both views IMHO. Native development (as in native machine code executables) on Android is still a terrible experience even though they had a decade to fix it. It's much better on Apple platforms, maybe because they actually cared about developer-experience and native code is a "first class citizen" there. It goes beyond the different instruction set of course and most of the time t…

I bet Apple's experience moving from PowerPC to X86 gave them a leg up as well, and in both cases (PowerPC/X86, MacOS/iOS) they had the power to force developers to cross-develop to maintain access to their platform. Nobody is in a position to force server-side developers to switch to ARM.

Don’t forget 680X0 to PowerPC.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#149
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's amazing how everyone from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Linus Torvalds is labeled as "toxic" To be clear, there is a difference between toxic people and toxic behaviors. The former, I think, doesn't exist. There are people who often engage in toxic behavior, and those who do rarely. Pointing out toxic behavior is the first step to correcting it. And correcting it is in fact the goal of community guidelines, in o…

When we are talking about toxic, I think we all understood it meant behavior. And the point of community guidelines isn't to make it the community more inclusive, it's actually to make it more exclusive. Limiting speech and thoughts are exclusive behaviors, not inclusive ones. But I'm all for HN or any other platform having guidelines. I studied philosophy in college so I don't need an explanation of what poisoning t…

Well, we are going to disagree about this, so I won't drag this on forever. However I would like to be clear about a couple things.

> And the point of community guidelines isn't to make it the community more inclusive, it's actually to make it more exclusive.

Again, mixing up behaviors and people. The whole point of community guidelines is to serve the community--to include and support a wide range of people, not a wide range behaviors. Certain behaviors just flat out drive people away--that is the very definition of exclusiveness. Being "inclusive" of these toxic behaviors leads to an exclusive culture. The worst, most exclusive cultures are the ones without guidelines, full of bad behavior. Inclusiveness requires curation of behavioral guidelines. Let's not invert the sense of words when convenient for argumentation (e.g. calling community guidelines and behavioral standards "exclusiveness" because they discourage one type of bad behavior but encourage hundreds of other good ones).

> What I find ironic is that under the aegis of "inclusivity and encouraging discussion", you are advocating for exclusion and stifling Linux Torvalds' speech.

This seems to be the crux of the issue. First, it's an exaggeration to say that advocating against using insults and inflammatory language is "stifling" (see above). I actually want Linus to speak his mind--just do so without the anger channel. It's really fucking annoying to some people. Even calling ideas stupid is really fucking annoying to the people who have those ideas. But the worst part is, for every Linus there is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of people who are going to read something like that and just silently leave. That's a sign of a bad culture. That's toxic right there. And those people who leave are the meek ones who normally wouldn't speak up because they don't want to get the firehose and spotlight pointed right at them. They don't want their ideas called stupid or idiotic or be told they aren't dealing with reality. Those kind of people that actually can be very bright and have very different (and valuable!) perspectives. The kind of people who just disappear and you never notice. And I've met plenty of people like this--if you ever people-managed, you find out hey, this or that person is leaving, and it's because they actually really didn't like being around this group. It's a loss. Most people just don't notice, but their community just got a little worse each time that happens. So you gotta find soft ways to stop it.

At any rate. Generally your comments can be construed as a defense of people that really don't need any defense. That makes it even worse when the community explicitly stands up and defends loud, obnoxious, unnecessary behavior and lionizes these "hotheads". (To be clear, I am not suggesting you are explicitly doing that, it just has that ring to it). Trust me, hotheads need no defense. They need no coddling or encouragement to keep mouthing off. Many hotheads will stick around and annihilate a community, perhaps unconsciously, because it works. They win. So don't defend them. Defending bad behavior is a death spiral, as it sends exactly the wrong message about inclusion, and that's double bad.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#150
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When "mobile" and "PC" gets merged I don't see this happening. PCs are tools for getting real work done. Mobiles are mostly communication and entertainment devices. I like to fall back on this Steve Jobs quote, employing a car/truck metaphor for computers: When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars go…

> Mobiles are mostly communication Communication is also work, especially as you go up the management value chain. I think maybe people should refer to the thing that PCs do and mobiles don't as "typing".

It isn't just the keyboard which PCs hold as an advantage, it's the mouse as well. There are a lot of tasks that workers do on PCs with a mouse that can't be done reliably with a touchscreen.

Maybe an iPad Pro with its stylus could perform a lot of those mouse-driven tasks, but using the stylus for long periods of time is going to be exhausting and injury-prone. By using a mouse your arm can rest comfortably and allow you to work for long periods of time with minimal effort and no strain.

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