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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

#381

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ZiiS wrote: post #350
vbezhenar wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write Java but I seriously doubt that ARM has comparable JVM, it’s probably slow compared to x86. Cross platform in theory, not so much in practice.

Remembers Jazelle DBX with a wry smile.

Falls squarely into the 'cute but pointless' category.

Java is intended to be used by optimising JVMs. Java bytecode is rarely optimised -- that's left to the JIT. Using the Jazelle approach, where is the compiler optimisation step supposed to occur? Nowhere, of course! You'd be far better off with a decent conventional ARM JVM.

If you're on a system so lightweight that this isn't an option, well, you probably shouldn't have gone with Java. (Remember Java ME?)

[Not that I've ever actually worked with this stuff, mind.]

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

#382

Post by pjmlp »

miohtama wrote: post #343

In early 2000 Java promised to be write once, everywhere. By the time it was between Windows and Sun. 20 years later we have finally reached this point for business applications, be them in Java, Python, PHP or some other VM based SDK. The mainstream development future is in Lambdas and other such containerised technologies. If you can run Docker or similar "home" you can also deploy. Our DevOps models have radically…

When I left C++ for managed languages, it was when the OS became irrelevant to me, with FFI being the only occasions where it still matters.

As you mention lambdas take it to the next level, and in such future Linux might not even matter anymore, hence his point of view.

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

#383

Post by jecxjo »

riffraff wrote: post #365
mullingitover wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself a pretty average Mac user, and I've already been turned off by the last couple rounds of Macs that Apple has shipped. Messing up the one remaining upside, x86 compatibility, would be be the straw that broke the camel's back. They still only have single digit market share in desktop computing, this could be the death blow for their platform.

But what if the switch to arm comes with a lot more battery life and great performance? Not all Mac users are devs.

I wouldn't imagine you'd get a lot of performance boost from the change. You'll see battery life but that assumes they aren't looking to run a crazy number of cores to make it compete with the x86. And they only way that massive core counts help is if the software is designed to utilize them correctly.

Its not that all users are devs. Its that all devs might not be able to make their software work well under that environment.

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

#384

Post by jecxjo »

nicoburns wrote: post #339
vbezhenar wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that it would kill desktop, but I’m sure that unless ARM will be much faster, developers will use x86 macs for a long time.

Apple's latest iPad processors are competitive with low-end laptop x86 processors. And they have a much stricter power budget than a laptop. If Apple wants to go this route, then they probably have the capability to build the chips to support it.

The part you're discounting is just how resource intensive desktop apps are and how much optimization goes into iOS apps.

To really see the benefit of changing they would need to add a lot of cores, and then cross their fingers that 3rd party app developers know how to do true multi-core development.

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

#386

Post by pjmlp »

kllrnohj wrote: post #367
pjmlp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using SE Linux and seccomp to close down entry points to the Linux kernel. Since this work only started on Android 7, it is clamping down the free reign that existed before.

Except they allow nearly everything for regular Android apps since libc lets you access nearly every syscall. Nothing was meaningfully "clamped down" there. You can't directly syscall some obsolete syscalls anymore, and you can't syscall random numbers, but nearly any actual real syscall is still accessible and nothing indicates that it won't be. As long as libc can do it so can you, since you & libc are in the same…

Android uses bionic.

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

#387

Post by kazinator »

pjmlp wrote: post #382
miohtama wrote: post #343

In early 2000 Java promised to be write once, everywhere. By the time it was between Windows and Sun. 20 years later we have finally reached this point for business applications, be them in Java, Python, PHP or some other VM based SDK. The mainstream development future is in Lambdas and other such containerised technologies. If you can run Docker or similar "home" you can also deploy. Our DevOps models have radically…

When I left C++ for managed languages, it was when the OS became irrelevant to me, with FFI being the only occasions where it still matters. As you mention lambdas take it to the next level, and in such future Linux might not even matter anymore, hence his point of view.

When I left C++ for managed languages, operating systems and C didn't stop being relevant; what stopped being relevant for me was the grotesque extensions of C dialect desperately trying to be a high level, managed language in increasingly irrational ways.

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

#388

Post by lsllc »

I build Go, Rust, C/C++ code for ARM/ARM64 (and MIPS) and it's completely transparent. 99.9% of the code just works, occasionally I need to worry about some details, but just once in a while.

Go definitely is the easiest, it's built in:

  GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm go build
Rust is almost as easy to cross build (as long as you have the right GCC toolchains installed!):

  cargo build --target aarch64-unknown-linux-musl
Sooner or later, Intel's hegemony on the server CPU market will end and it'll likely be some combo of ARM and maybe RISC-V (not sure about POWER). Cloud vendors like AWS and Google are looking closely at the margins and as the AWS a1.* [Graviton] shows, they're even willing to make their own CPUs if necessary.

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

#389

Post by kakwa_ »

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 :)

It will most likely kill apple laptops as a developer platform.

Unless you are deeply disconnected from the hardware, CPU architecture does matter. Most developers using macbooks I know have VMs for either Windows or Linux works.

It might be conceivable to use the ARM port of , or the ARM version of Windows 10. But it would also require a good desktop virtualization solution for ARM. If Apple release its own solution or creates a partnership with let's say VMWare to release something at the same time an ARM macbook comes out, it might work, but barely, and I'm not sure if developers are at the top of Apple's priority list. In the end, with the Linux subsystem in Windows, choosing Windows as a development platform might make more sense.

As a side note, if Apple switches to ARM, I foresee a lot of cringing. The switch from ppc to intel was annoying for a lot of Apple users at the time, but there were a lot of goodies (bootcamp, better autonomy, better performance, VMs) that kind of made it up for it, basically, nothing was lost in term of possibilities, a few were actually gained, and only the transition was a bit painful. With a switch to ARM, you may gain a little in term of autonomy, but with macbook pro already at +8 hours (~a work day), not sure it's a game changer, at best you will stay the same in term of performance, and you will lose in compatibility with other OSes.

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

#390

Post by kllrnohj »

blinkingled wrote: post #333

He didn't even discuss the every ARM board being a snow flake needing its own BSP, custom bootloader, OS distro etc. I am fine with x86 being successful - there are good reasons for it. I don't get why there's this ARM push in the PC and servers market. It's not making anything better.

> I don't get why there's this ARM push in the PC and servers market. It's not making anything better.

What push? There's a rumor that Apple might make an ARM-based laptop, and there's a bit of dabbling with ARM-based servers, but there doesn't seem to be any real push for it. More like hedging bets if Intel continues to shit the bed on 10nm. Except AMD's Epyc looks to be the real contingency plan for that now anyway.

I don't see any reason to expect Apple's motivations for using ARM (more control over hardware) would apply to anyone else, and Apple is the only one with an ARM CPU design that is even worth discussing in a laptop anyway.

So... I wouldn't expect the other 90% of the laptop market to follow, much less any of the desktop/workstation market.

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