Earlier quoted context omitted.
well, you skipped long :D
Yeah, skipped the one built-in type that is different between architectures (64-bits on 64-bit Linux, 32-bits on 64-bit Windows).
Indeed. And 32-bits on 32-bit Linux of course.
Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
You appear not to know what is meant by sharing across architectures here. Chris Siebenmann dates from the times when system administrators would do things like have most of the operating system executables and read-only data files remote-mounted from fileservers. We'd worry about such things as instruction set architectures and bitnessess and endinannesses of non-text file formats. We'd have "architecture-dependent"…
> And yes, it has been decades since this was a norm. ...So why is it relevant? Sharing files between systems with different architectures Just Works these days, unless you start getting into the really esoteric. "Having non-x86 machines is Bad, now, today, because of problems I had with managing multiple-architecture deployments 30 years ago " is not a useful statement in any way.
You can use QEMU to do automatic emulation, but I suspect that's not common.
Likely, the binaries are not from the OS, but from users/for users which run on different machines (and more likely than not NFS mounted across the systems to ensure consistency).
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#83This doesn't say anything meaningful. It just states some obvious things with some sort of implied value judgement with no information about how it's supposed to be bad, aside from the author's lack of experience. "you'll almost certainly wind up with a mixed setup". So what? It's not bad just because you say it is if you don't say why it's supposedly bad. It's also factually incorrect: "If you try to share things ac…
You appear not to know what is meant by sharing across architectures here. Chris Siebenmann dates from the times when system administrators would do things like have most of the operating system executables and read-only data files remote-mounted from fileservers. We'd worry about such things as instruction set architectures and bitnessess and endinannesses of non-text file formats. We'd have "architecture-dependent"…
I doubt this is related to the OS, more likely user home directories (e.g. people installing conda for x86 would run into issues running on arm), or shared software outside the standard OS setup.
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#84I run a handful of little servers, some x86, some ARM. I've had none of the issues that the author raises. Sounds a little like the old Linux v Windows or the PC v Mac debate - lots of fuss and really comes down to personal preferences.
But do you have users running their code on your system? I also run a few ARM SOCs, but I don't let random people run code on them.
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
chromium is also an abomination, its pretty much the single biggest thing one could possibly build. the sheer level of insanity in that codebase boggles the mind, >1GB highly compressed source is just not legitimate
You haven't seen Office...
i have a hard time imaginging it taking longer to compile than chrome, but yeah, I havent.
but like... there are two great pacific garbage patches, i guess its possible there are two software garbage patches bigger than the combined output software output of many countries.
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s much better than PC, there’s many more standards to chose from! /s > Getting the necessary kernels and software together isn't even all that difficult most of the time, the problem is that you need someone to set up an appropriate distribution Guess what? On PC there’s a ton of people who have set up a distribution and they are all appropriate for all PCs. That makes it a whole lot easier to find such a person f…
This works the same way for arm64 "system ready" uefi hardware https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/mantic-desktop...
Great! Perhaps one day all ARM64 systems will be ‘system ready’ uefi hardware, just like pretty much all x64 systems are PC systems. But today is not that day and that is why the author of the blog post is running into these problems.
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue, Hint: Chris Siebenmann has administered closed source Unices.
That is correct, it is ‘user6723’ who is talking about that and I was responding to that user. But nevertheless the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue regarding the subject matter, the arguments are rather confused and nonsensical.
> nevertheless the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue
Another hint: Chris Siebenmann's posts to comp.unix.wizards can still be found.
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is correct, it is ‘user6723’ who is talking about that and I was responding to that user. But nevertheless the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue regarding the subject matter, the arguments are rather confused and nonsensical.
> nevertheless the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue Another hint: Chris Siebenmann's posts to comp.unix.wizards can still be found.
> Another hint
If you quote only half of the sentence, it suddenly means something else! When used to attack it’s a variation of the venerable ‘straw man’ debate technique.
Nice if Mr Siebenmann made insightful comments on a Usenet group about Unix but that doesn’t mean his comments about ARM computers are indisputable.
How about you summarize the points in the blog post that you agree with?
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on the ARM machine you picked. There's an ARM UEFI standard, for example. With postmarketOS a ton of Android devices can now also boot the mainline Linux kernel. Samsung certainly isn't helping anyone run modern Linux kernels on their devices, but my old tablet released with Linux 3.1 now runs Linux 6.2. Getting the necessary kernels and software together isn't even all that difficult most of the time, t…
It’s much better than PC, there’s many more standards to chose from! /s > Getting the necessary kernels and software together isn't even all that difficult most of the time, the problem is that you need someone to set up an appropriate distribution Guess what? On PC there’s a ton of people who have set up a distribution and they are all appropriate for all PCs. That makes it a whole lot easier to find such a person f…
The basic boot process is easier, but it has the same "this board doesn't boot sorry try these steps" problem. Try disabling the splash screen and watch all the ACPI bugs and workarounds jump onto the screen during early boot.
It wasn't that long ago that you needed to download five different distros to brute force a working combination if you had a laptop with an Nvidia chip.
Even today you need to pass special boot options on some AMD boards because motherboard vendors can't be bothered to release microcode updates.
Linux 5.8+ refused to boot with 12th gen Intel graphics if you had a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter installed. I believe it took at least half a year before a fix was released (in a later version of the kernel, that wasn't backported). I remember this vividly because I showed off some dumb Gnome extension and he wanted it too, so he upgraded from a lower LTS to the then-current LTS and after a reboot he could no longer boot.
My laptop didn't have sound unless I passed some kind of special parameter in the boot config somewhere. It sometimes freezes on boot while loading GDM. The display flickers and jumps around if you have a maximized application. The Nvidia driver+WM combo doesn't recognize external displays on Wayland.
I've even run into one instance where the amd64 version of the distro shipped tons of applications requiring a certain instruction set, so installing the outdated (and now abandoned) x86 versions of the distro was the only solution.
Linux Mostly Works on Most Systems. The only reason you can get anything done on it is that there are more people using it and fixing the mess that hardware vendors have left behind.
I would say that most people will be able to run Linux smoothly on their hardware if they pick a user friendly distro, but random failure modes are everywhere.
Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder
#90This doesn't say anything meaningful. It just states some obvious things with some sort of implied value judgement with no information about how it's supposed to be bad, aside from the author's lack of experience. "you'll almost certainly wind up with a mixed setup". So what? It's not bad just because you say it is if you don't say why it's supposedly bad. It's also factually incorrect: "If you try to share things ac…
You appear not to know what is meant by sharing across architectures here. Chris Siebenmann dates from the times when system administrators would do things like have most of the operating system executables and read-only data files remote-mounted from fileservers. We'd worry about such things as instruction set architectures and bitnessess and endinannesses of non-text file formats. We'd have "architecture-dependent"…
As someone who runs many architectures, I do know what it means. I wasn't aware of the author's experience because Chris didn't offer any details, but that link does offer some clues.
The reality is that there have always been ways to have multiple architectures supported simultaneously, and they're neither all that complicated nor kludgy, unless one has to support poorly written software. Even back in the m68k -> SPARC transition, people had clean ways to keep things separate and clean, and to support the same homes and binaries across both architectures simultaneously.
We had the PowerPC to x86 transition show us how it can be done so cleanly that many people had no idea what architecture they were running. The same can be said about the x86 to ARM transition with Apple now. (Open)VMS explicitly supports multiple simultaneous architectures. We have ways of making fat binaries for other OSes, too - we had them back then, and we have them right now.
We also have examples of doing it wrong: Microsoft Windows. The idea that people had to know and choose whether they want a 32 bit or 64 bit OS is still incredibly stupid, as is needing to choose 32 bit or 64 bit software.
If people are writing binary files in endian specific ways, or with data sizes that depend on the specific processor, that's shitty programming. Any software doing that never had any sort of portability in mind, so that's not a good example at all. That kind of software is chided in public in the open source world, or at very least people know to isolate it and run it where it's safe.
Sharing a user's home across multiple systems, perhaps with different architectures, isn't to save disk space, by the way. Expecting users to manage data and configurations across multiple machines isn't reasonable. Shared homes is still both normal and common in larger environments.
If the author disagrees, it'd be nice to hear some actual examples of why it's a problem. After all, ARM isn't going away and RISC-V is only going to become more common.