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Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
271–280 of 545 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#272ARM laptop and machines are here. Windows on a RaspberryPI is going to make the ARM processor more appealing to the dev market and once more people buy super cheap ARM processors ARM will show up in servers. People will dev for ARM and want ARM servers. Netflix uses pfsense wich is BSD and it runs like a champ on ARM and netgate even makes an ARM based unit that is for small offices and is amazing. ARM laptops also last for like 25 hours so I think people will be switching.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even on NetBSD, my old love, you can not take you program on the x86 machine, pack it and then run it on arm. You will have to crosscompile and hope it works.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Surface is real Windows.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#275It'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…
I'm with Linus on this one. I had the pleasure (?) of working on a C/C++ codebase that compiled on Windows and ten different flavors of Unix. It was all "portable", but all over the place there was stuff like #if defined AIX || defined OSF1 short var; #else int var; #endif And to get it right, you had to compile it on all the platforms and fix all the errors (and preferably all the warnings). Yeah, cross platform is…
Single platform cross-development (e.g. iOS) is a lot easier.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#276I thought the main reason x86 won was the tie in with Windows PC's and servers. Microsoft took the market. The apps were written for x86. So, most servers are x86.
Intel and PC makers also charged less for hardware. I always wanted one of those RISC systems. They cost upper four to five digits. On the high end, NUMA machines cost around six or more digits. People started building Beowulf clusters out of Intel boxes to knock off digits. Clustering got big. So, it was cheaper on small and large end to run Intel.
Compatibility with dominant system and low cost. Maybe add that they kept optimizing for workloads like gaming on top of that.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#277It'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…
"I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable.
Or successful."
iOS seems like a huge counterexample (as you note.)
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wouldn't call their bugs. If the binaries worked correctly on x86 due to compiler specific guarantees then the code wasn't buggy. It just wasn't written for a generic C or C++ compiler.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#279It'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…
I don't think you are not really disagreeing with Linus - he's not saying ARM is not viable - he is saying it will not win . With your current setup (cross-compiling), are your ARM executables more performant than x86? Or do they have any other advantage at all over x86? Without an advantage, ARM can't possibly win. Having a cheap, viable ARM-native development platform drastically increases the chances of ARM-only k…
We have to define what "winning" means here. Google uses POWER9 and specialized GPU-like chips for some workloads. All cloud providers can gain from being able to offer products that perform better or have lower prices than it would be possible with x86.
Right now ARM probably outnumbers x86 in number of machines running Linux by a very large margin. In my backpack there is one x86 machine and two ARM ones and that doesn't count the one that's in my hand
It all depends on what chips become available at what price. All cloud providers do lots of hardware design for their own metal. I'd they tell you that their next data center will be primarily ARM, they create a market for a million unit run of whatever CPU they choose.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#280This is why if Apple ever did a legitimate server offering with virtualization they would kill it. How many devs, develop on Mac and deploy to linux? And also now use VMs for containers. Imagine if MacOS supported containers natively. They leave so much money on the table.
Are you arguing for native macOS containers (like Windows containers but for the Xnu kernel rather than NT kernel?) or for macOS to somehow support Linux containers (and system calls) "natively," more like BSD's Linux system call emulation and Windows' so-called "Windows Subsystem for Linux?"