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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

#411

Post by erik_seaberg »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #320
ams6110 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now your whole distro is different than your development machine Can you not develop on an ARM emulator? Or just buy an ARM machine for dev work?

Aside from the fact that emulation is slow (and thus more annoying to test), now you have to contend with emulator bugs. Is your software crashing because your code is bugged or because the emulator is bugged? Or worse: your software may only be working because of an emulator bug.

Or your software may be working because the emulator was correct where your hardware stepping may be wrong (e.g., FDIV).

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

#412

Post by jfrn »

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 not a very large scale piece of software or software system.

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

#413

Post by coldtea »

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…

It might be easy to do that in a well written single C/C++ codebase like Redis.

It's not simple nor something devs will ever want or care to do in a big web app with several binary dependencies.

Just consider that a single Node app's binary deps could trivially include the entirety of Chrome itself, not just in the form of Node's v8 engine, but e.g. as the PDF rendering "headless chrome" wrapper Puppeteer.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, add DBs, extensions, Python backend scripts, etc etc, and few will bother.

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

#414

Post by dijit »

wtracy wrote: post #355
supermatt wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NetBSD (and NetBSD code) is used pretty much everywhere. The internet pretty much runs on it.

I couldn't name a major corporation that uses NetBSD on their servers or routers. (Yahoo used to use FreeBSD servers, but even they migrated to Linux.) Is there a major router vendor or something else that uses NetBSD in a big way?

I can name several. But you won’t think of them as tech companies.

Hotpoint, pioneer, bose, Samsung (some TVs and audio equipment), whirlpool and many, many more.

They all use netbsd in firmwares.

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

#415

Post by carlob »

vbezhenar wrote: post #326
013a wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems likely that, simply, times have changed. There was a time when being on the same platform as the deployment environment was super important, but nowadays the tooling has gotten so much better that it matters a lot less. The proportion of people still writing C code on a day to day basis has dropped... well to pretty much a rounding error. The bigger issue is really that ARM servers aren't that much cheaper t…

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.

wait aren't virtually all android apps written in java?

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

#416

Post by einr »

syn0byte wrote: post #369
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya it's kind of weird he talks about how stuffing a beige box PC in the corner was the impetus for X86 servers. But the modern day equivalent of that is either a cheap $5/month VPS, a RaspberryPi, or an OpenWRT router, any of which could compile/run ARM code. I think fundamentally, the error he's making is comparing the current market to the late 90s/early 2000s market. Back then a RISC Unix machine cost thousands of…

Actually, you make the best case for ARM servers of anyone else in this thread. The starving college kid in a Helsinki dorm working on his EE degree can't afford 600-1000 dollars for another Laptop/Desktop to experiment with. A 35 dollar ARM SBC and a monitor that doubles as his TV is right in his price range... That doesn't invalidate his point. He's just saying that is basically what needs to happen for ARM servers…

The starving college kid in a Helsinki dorm working on his EE degree can't afford 600-1000 dollars for another Laptop/Desktop to experiment with. A 35 dollar ARM SBC and a monitor that doubles as his TV is right in his price range...

35 dollars will buy you an oldish x86 beige box that will absolutely flat out murder a Raspberry Pi performance-wise. Cheap, fast hardware is not a problem anymore.

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

#417

Post by nly »

syn0byte wrote: post #369
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya it's kind of weird he talks about how stuffing a beige box PC in the corner was the impetus for X86 servers. But the modern day equivalent of that is either a cheap $5/month VPS, a RaspberryPi, or an OpenWRT router, any of which could compile/run ARM code. I think fundamentally, the error he's making is comparing the current market to the late 90s/early 2000s market. Back then a RISC Unix machine cost thousands of…

Actually, you make the best case for ARM servers of anyone else in this thread. The starving college kid in a Helsinki dorm working on his EE degree can't afford 600-1000 dollars for another Laptop/Desktop to experiment with. A 35 dollar ARM SBC and a monitor that doubles as his TV is right in his price range... That doesn't invalidate his point. He's just saying that is basically what needs to happen for ARM servers…

> MS abandoning their Windows ARM port didn't help the cause.

Doesn't look like this is the case now

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/11/15/official-s...

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

#418

Post by jfrn »

supermatt wrote: post #316
admax88q wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well nobody uses NetBSD so... Sure portability increases code quality, but at what cost to time to market which seems to be the primary concern for most developers these days?

NetBSD (and NetBSD code) is used pretty much everywhere. The internet pretty much runs on it.

Citation or seriously some actual examples sorely needed for this statement.

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

#419

Post by coldtea »

jecxjo wrote: post #383
riffraff wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 env…

>And they only way that massive core counts help is if the software is designed to utilize them correctly.

That's for servers and scientific software (and perhaps 3D and such).

For regular devs the massive core count helps even with non optimized apps, because unlike the above use cases, we run lots of apps at the same time (and each can have its core).

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

#420

Post by erik_seaberg »

wtracy wrote: post #358
mehrdadn wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a world of difference between working correctly on x86 and appearing to work correctly on x86. Sometimes the difference has serious security implications.

If a program manages to avoid the entire maze of deathtraps, the C standard calls it strictly conforming. I doubt anything commonly used today could qualify.
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