"I often find black-and-white people a bit stupid, truth be told" - Linus Torvalds, 2005 (not on the subject of race/ethnicity)
Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
491–500 of 545 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#492Why is he still coding in Perl? Am I missing something? Shouldn't we upgrade to python or something? Do I have to learn Perl and code x86 software on a 15' CRT monitor while running Slackware to get it?
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#493Why do i feel he is dead wrong, the stability of a system in dependent on Kernel Writers more than the system builders. ARM would make it for a very important reason the electric bill, more and more Data-centers are geared towards saving on their electric bills to be highly profitable, many are already using renewable sources like Apple and Google. Also if he isnt willing to support ARM for Server-space some other kernel will make it. Also most X86 host these days run in Virtualised environment, there is no difference if it actually runs on x86 or ARM.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand it on this? I agree that I use Ubuntu on server because I use it on the desktop, that makes sense. However, when I installed Ubuntu Server 18.04 recently it was delightful . There was this simple feature they added which automatically pulled down my ssh key from my GitHub account. During the install it asked me to enable the semi-recent kernel livepatching (and old fashioned unattended-upgrades) it eve…
I guess I'm making an argument around predictability and stability. To be honest I haven't used Ubuntu as a server in several years. Maybe they have improved things. But I think they can mostly improve things "on top", but not the foundations. Patching over problems by adding layers on top generally isn't great for stability, and is bad for debuggability. I'm comparing Ubuntu to BSDs, where there's actually a manual,…
Fwiw Ubuntu server has gotten a lot better than it was. Initially it was more like a little bloated, better tested, sometimes oddly configured "Debian testing" - now it's more of a proper Debian derived distro, with a fairly decent "server" version.
You should no longer have to expect problems doing an in place upgrade from lts to lts release of Ubuntu (which has been true for Debian stable as long as I can remember).
As for running packaged versions of things like apache and them autostarting... I see your point, but I don't think it's a weakness - it's more of a difference of opinion.
One thing canonical seem to be doing right (which I initially thought of as a bad case of NIH) is lxd/lxc, juju and zfs integration. I've yet to play with it seriously, but it does come with a lot of shiny stuff out of the box. That said - it appears (light) containers are winning the mindshare - and I can see how an email server as a container/appliance might be preferable to a custom scripted lxc "VM"/image - if you get the upstream supported container, you likely get some help in keeping the stateful data out of the container.
The benefit/problem of lxc/lxd is that you can just keep working with the "VM"s as virtual servers.
Anyway the end result is a lot like modern freebsd jails - in a good way.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#495He 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...
> If Apple makes such hardware, it will be just a matter of time to port Linux to it.
I'm guessing it'll be as easy to run Linux on an arm MacBook as it is to run Linux on an iPad.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed you might not, but the person that wrote your JVM does, and the person that wrote the system that runs on does, and the person that wrote GAE does... That single instance you're running on already took half a dozen or so other systems developers and more before it got to you, so in your example you're the minority. It's because of the work they've done, that you can not care about the architecture you're runni…
Sure, but every time you move down the stack a level, you shrink the network effect by several orders of magnitude. Linus' argument is that x86 stays on top because everyone is developing with x86 at home. It's much less convincing to argue that x86 will stay on top because the people writing JVMs use x86 at home. There just aren't that many of them, and if they get paid to write ARM, they write ARM.
Indeed, but by at home he means in the office too (he says as much), and I don't see offices don't this unless they have a real incentive to throw out the hardware they've invested in, perhaps in the not so near future when they inevitably have to replace it all due to failure the arm stuff will have a chance to take some share.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers don't develop on Surface books, and Macbooks are in low percentages. The majority of people in the world writing code are using x86 PCs and Microsoft and Apple aren't about to change that with any *Book. Linus' premise that everyone will continue to use x86 for development is because they will. There's no incentive for companies or individuals to go switch out all of that x86 hardware sitting on desks and…
> Macbooks are in low percentages For some reason Macbooks seem disproportionately represented amongst web developers. All the agencies I know in Sydney and Melbourne are full of macbooks. > There's no incentive for companies or individuals to go switch out all of that x86 hardware sitting on desks and in racks with ARM alternatives which will offer them lower performance than their already slightly aged hardware at…
I'm not assuming per-se, im guestimating, basing it on my understand of x86 and ARM. I graduated in Electronic Engineering from a university department who's alumni include Sir Robin Saxby, they pushed ARM hard, and I have a fairly good understanding of where it's at architecturally compared to x86.
Apple have 100% control over every part of their hardware and software from the get go, so it's inevitable they perform excellently on that hardware; they can optimise their code to death, and increment the hardware where it can be improved upon.
Web developers make up a fairly small proportion of the developers I've ever worked with, I have worked for software houses where web just isn't a thing for us other than for our own marketing. None of these people run Mac's, they all run PCs, and these PCs don't have the same control in their hardware/software process that will bring about the kind of "excellent" result you see from an iPad. They'll be relying on Microsoft to get Windows optimised, but Microsoft will be working with dozens, even hundreds of partners, Apple works with one, itself.
I suspect, also that they'll be more expensive because of all the new development the manufacturers have to put into releasing these new ARM laptops. Microsoft will have to put extra work into Windows, which will cost money, and finally those of us that run Linux will end up with something that hasn't had the benefit of the decades of x86 development on the desktop has had, thus, worse performance, at least in the beginning.
I could imagine a laptop equivalent of big.LITTLE, where you have x86 cores for the real grunt work, and ARM cores for power saving, bit I don't see pure ARM in the workstation space.
It'll be an interesting time, but based on my own experience, I'm betting on Linus with this one and I don't see myself or my colleagues or my workplace moving to ARM anywhere outside of non-laptop-portables any time soon.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#498Earlier 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…
Current crop of Apple A chips runs circles around almost all Intel chips which they put in the laptops at a fraction of TDP.
I think you will see a lot of performance boost after switching to ARM. If they start on the "low end" then a macbook will be practically on par with a mbp. This might not be useful at first for native development, but I am quite sure that macOS, iOS and web development will be very much possible on these machines - the three domains that Apple cares most about.
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#499It'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…
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…
node-gyp has caused me headaches everywhere
Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space
#500He 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…
I love my ARM-powered Chromebook. True, it can’t teally do native development, but ARM clients aren just coming. They’re here. And wow doesn’t have amazing battery life and an unbrickable OS.