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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

#241

Post by chongli »

pjmlp wrote: post #230
chongli wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch friendly is mouse friendly. It's friendly but it's not space efficient. For applications with a huge number of features, a touch UI can't handle them. Touch screens don't have right click, so you can't get context menus. It's more than that, though. A touch screen UI for the iPhone makes zero sense on a 32" display. I'd much rather have a true multiwindow, multitasking operating system than that. Really, I woul…

Which is why not only do Android and Windows tablets/2-1 support mices, they also can be docked to proper screens.

Sure they can, but why bother? When I use Windows, I use real Windows applications with desktop UIs. The touch UI mobile apps are a joke on a desktop monitor.

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

#242

Post by robot »

xoa wrote: post #33

It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…

power matters a lot on a phone but not that much on the server

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

#243

Post by snowwrestler »

xoa wrote: post #33

It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…

Maybe the interesting part of the smartphone ARM story is the degree to which Apple has used custom silicon to optimize speed and power for their own specific workloads and software.

Why couldn't ARM-based servers do the same thing? I understand why a generic ARM-based CPU might not win against a generic ARM-based x86 CPU at running cross-compiled code in Linux. But what if the server has a custom ARM-based chip that is a component of a toolchain that is optimized for that code, all the way down to the processor?

Imagine a cloud service where instead of selecting a Linux distro for your application servers, you select cloud server images based on what type of code you're running--which, behind the scenes, are handing off (all or part of) the workload to optimized silicon.

I don't have the technical chops to detail how this would work. But I think my understanding of Apple's chip success is correct: that they customize their silicon for the specific hardware and software they plan to sell. They can do that because they own the entire stack.

I think if any company is going to do that in the server space, it would have to be the big cloud owners. No one else would have the scale to afford the investment and realize the gains, and control of the full stack from hardware to software to networking. And sure, enough, that is who are embarking on custom chip projects:

https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/why-tech-giants-are-design...

So, maybe the result won't be simply "ARM beats x86," but rather "a forest of custom-purpose silicon designs collectively beat x86, and ARM helped grow the forest."

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

#244

Post by 51lver »

jlarocco wrote: post #228

> I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable. Even if that's technically true, there's no reason there can't be ARM workstations. There aren't many because they're still generally slower, but there's no fundamental reason (that I know of) why an ARM workstation can't work just as well as an x86 workstation in almost every case.

Does your boss have a neice that can fix your arm bootloader? He probably has one that can fix your windows bootloader.

This stuff was "dark arts" that we committed to muscle memory in the 90s, and no normal mere mortal will ever learn why the safe mode menu existed, how to hotkey into a boot selection menu, or to boot up a live disk to restore system files. None of that is possible with, say, u-boot. You need to know the kernel load addr, the partition layout, and a ton of crap that just isn't portable from one device to another, and that that's AFTER your done fighting the thing for root access!

Arm workstations Just Won't Work the same way those super permissive x86 workstations did, and that will make them crap for developing on.

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

#245

Post by shitgoose »

antirez wrote: post #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 ye…

Linus said "the cross-development model is so relatively painful". What you described is a relatively painful effort of chasing the word alignments. Wouldn't it be better not to worry about alignments at all and spend your time on something more productive? I think this is his point - if non-productive effort can be avoided, people will avoid it.

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

#246

Post by Sammi »

chubot wrote: post #223

I feel this is why Ubuntu is one of the most popular server distros. Ubuntu is pretty unsuited for servers IMO. It's just complex and error-prone, IMO. The packages aren't always server-quality. But it's great for the desktop IMO, because Canonical actually tests against real hardware for you. So the fact that people use Ubuntu for desktop/laptop development makes it popular in the cloud, which I've always felt was u…

Same reason Nodejs got popular. Same reason Electron is popular now. It's what people know and have at hand. People always follow the path of least resistance. This is a first principle.

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

#247

Post by iveqy »

noah256 wrote: post #193
iveqy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a bug developing an IP phone. Connecting to one server worked but once on site with the customer connection to their server didn't worked, even though the servers where identical. It turned out that the power supply on their server was malfunctioning sometimes delivering too little power. Specially when taking the code paths my IP phone triggered. The server software was built in php. It's not often you st…

I’d be really interested to hear more of this story! How you isolated the problem down to the level of the PSU is going deeper into the machine than I’ve personally been, so this story could be a great teacher.

It sounds way cooler than it was. For some reason I openened up the server box and during a reboot I saw the LED on the motherboard flickering in a way I didn't expect. So we tried to change PSU and then everything worked.

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

#248

Post by mempko »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #97
acomjean wrote: post #28

linus worked at a 'failed' intel competitor "transmeta", which was trying to make low powered chips. intel/amd are tough competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta

I remember the Transmeta processor, they were neat. I only ever saw 1 Transmeta PC in the wild. IIRC it was a Sony sub notebook. Of course it was running in x86 mode and running Windows. I got to mess with it a bit and for the time it was a pretty good machine.

I saw an insane amount of Transmeta PCs in Japan circa 2005 during the "netbook era" running Windows. It was quite a surprise.

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

#249

Post by mark-r »

antirez wrote: post #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 ye…

Don't you see that his answer has nothing to do with a hacker mindset? It's an assertion that making your development and production environments as close as possible will save you from unexpected grief, coupled with an observation that this has driven server architectures historically. Especially with subtle problems like performance issues. I find it a very sensible conclusion.

Of course it didn't hurt that x86 quickly became the price/performance leader for servers, but he makes a good case that this will continue for at least the near future.

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

#250

Post by microcolonel »

While it's not strictly the case, I'll tend to agree that I have a big productivity advantage by sharing an architecture between my workstation and my server.

I want a RISC-V workstation, and if the counterpart on the server side existed, that'd probably be the change I'd make (if any).

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