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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

#261

Post by jdsully »

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…

Redis is a popular program, it makes sense to spend the time to port it. But what your missing is the long tail, thousands of little programs scattered around - or edge cases in bigger ones.

Working on a non-x86 platform makes you a second class citizen, you will experience issues that others have already ironed out on x86. Software has a long tail of niche code not actively maintained but still heavily used. It doesn't make sense to switch to ARM there.

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

#262

Post by sonnyblarney »

With serverless, language VM's and other abstractions, I suggest this argument is going away.

People are not generally writing platform specific anything these days, this would be an exception not the rule.

That said, there are a lot of things that need to be done under the hood to facilitate 'our view on the world on ARM' ... and it might take time.

Once AWS starts to release a bunch of stuff on ARM - and the stacks we love and need are solid on them ... I suggest that could be the ARM wave that changes serverland.

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

#263

Post by rbanffy »

Androider wrote: post #257
Androider wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Node and Ruby applications do fail on ARM though, when it comes to native libraries and extensions. And now your whole distro is different than your development machine, which adds complexity. Do I really want to be debugging why node-gyp fails to compile scrypt on the ARM distro on the new Amazon A1 ARM instance (which it did in my case)? And if I solve that, what about the other 2451 dependencies? Let's pessimistic…

On a related note, if Apple does switch to ARM chips for their laptops, that will make mainstream ARM server-side development more viable than any cross-platform story ever can. Or kill the Mac desktop. One or the other :)

If that happens, a lot of low level programming will be done ARM-first. A lot of Swift and Objective-C code will be built, tested and run primarily on ARM.

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

#266

Post by orojackson »

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.

I mean, ARM is eating x86's lunch in the smartphone space.

Are ARM CPUs more power efficient than x86 CPUs? That could be the deciding factor on whether it will take over.

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

#267

Post by jammygit »

AstralStorm wrote: post #120
deng wrote: post #25

He is right. I'm still waiting for that ARM-based laptop with awesome battery life, which can run a proper OS with good speed and hence is not just a toy. Apple switching to ARM won't make much difference since I gather it will only run OSX, which will probably be pretty much iOS at that time. Yes, you will probably be able to run Linux on that thing, but almost nobody will actually do it because it makes much more s…

If Apple makes such hardware, it will be just a matter of time to port Linux to it. Probably easier than getting it to run on yet another weird internal architecture of a smartphone. And you can run Linux on that Yoga. It's just Windows for ARM that is the disaster...

They won't be selling the hardware, and macbooks don't run linux very nicely lately

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

#268

Post by kstrauser »

mark-r wrote: post #249
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 qui…

The NetBSD people vehemently disagree. By ensuring your software works on various architectures, you expose subtle bugs in the ones you actually care about. Lots of 32-bit x86 code was improved during the migration to 64-bit, not because the move created new bugs, as because existing ones (i.e. code that relied on undefined behavior) couldn't get away with it anymore.

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

#269

Post by hyperman1 »

Does someone know why ARM servers try to behave like intel servers.

ARM's forte is in tons of lightweight cores, compared to intel's small number of powerfull cores. There are tons of small mom n pop websites that have short burst of usages, followed by long bursts of calm. So why not give every site on a big server it's own small core, say for 60 seconds? After that you shut the core down, zapping all caches etc...

Things like meltdown and spectre simply disappear if the attacking code runs on a different core, so such an architecture would be good at isolating security sensitive data. In these GDPR times, it seems a good match for small sites, and one that Intel can't provide with their good but power-hungry cores.

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

#270

Post by jbverschoor »

islon wrote: post #67
mangecoeur wrote: post #24

Well all the kids are learning programming with ARM-based RPis so...

Are all these kids learning C or assembly? Because if they are learning Javascript, Python, etc. it doesn't matter in which processor their code is running.

True.. But the Apple arm cpu has some things to speed up javascript. I guess that makes it a high performance server cpu?
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