91–100 of 100 posts
Voice against innovation!!! Without architecture diversity, he wants to limit innovation, and promote a monopoly. x86 is anything but an open source standard, due to patents, and thus cannot be easily standardized. So he also voices against open standards.
The author is confused. The points they make are not about x86 vs. non-x86, they're instead about mixing different architectures. Yes, if you write a program and deploy it on three machines, and they all have different pointer sizes, endianness, and executable formats (PE, ELF, etc.) then, yes that can suck. If this article was written 10 years ago, more people would probably agree. But nowadays, its perfectly possib…
Challenge: specify a mainstream architecture (e.g. targeted by Debian stable) which doesn't have char=1, short=2, int=4, long long=8 bytes with GCC or Clang.
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That's ridiculous. Almost every large and small company has some kind of Microsoft server or cloud subscription. The Linux machines that do get deployed are absolutely full of pre-built distros, firmware images, and closed-source executables. No serious systems administrator is going full Gentoo on their entire setup. It's a waste of time and effort to do so. Obviously the author knows they could compile Firefox them…
Being an amateur who landed a job and being someone who is qualified for the title are not the same.
>> No serious systems administrator is going full Gentoo on their entire setup. It's a waste of time and effort to do so.
This is a total strawman argument, but I'll knock it down anyway. There are professionals who actually do use Gentoo on their local machine. The local machine (a laptop) doesn't do any compiling, there is a server that builds the packages.
I was actually using Gentoo myself for a couple years and all my packages were automatically built by a cluster of servers using distcc, so any build job was done with something like "make -j128"
Because I knew how to use Unix-like systems properly and having a dedicated build server, Gentoo didn't cost me any time, quite the opposite actually, because Gentoo is flexible with package versions and everything tends to just werk.
>> That's not how sysadmins people get their software, though.
For those of us contending with PowerPC and ARM, it is half of how we get our software, the other half is we have already automated the process and a cicd pipeline has built the software often before we as humans notice a new version is out.
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> Relying on anyone else to provide a binary categorically disqualifies someone as a systems administrator. Come on, that's too harsh. We're not all Gentoo users, most sysadmins use packages provided by the distros. There's also the issue of close-source software, that only supports certain distros and architectures.
Whether this is "harsh" or not doesn't change that it is true.
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I would not compile Firefox on AM64. I would also not download it from Mozilla. I'd just install it via the usual repository mechanism. The range of ARM64 binaries in the various repositories has been increasing in the last years.
Earlier 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.
What the author wrote objectively demonstrates a lack of essential skills and also a lack of temperament for what could be called a sys-admin, and therefore they are ultimately disqualified.
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That's ridiculous. Almost every large and small company has some kind of Microsoft server or cloud subscription. The Linux machines that do get deployed are absolutely full of pre-built distros, firmware images, and closed-source executables. No serious systems administrator is going full Gentoo on their entire setup. It's a waste of time and effort to do so. Obviously the author knows they could compile Firefox them…
The base system packages are exempt from the stipulation I posted above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't pointers pretty much universally 64 bits, except for some old or esoteric machines? And why would you not be able to treat one as an integer? Are there any examples of such ISAs? Finally, floating point formats do differ, but that shouldn't affect anything except precision and binary format. Also I'm pretty sure "float" is standard IEEE 32 bit and "double" is standard 64 bit, with predefined exponent/mantissa…
x86 is hardly esoteric. New software for it is being published today.
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x86 is hardly esoteric. New software for it is being published today.
x86_32 counts as an old machine (the most recent CPU being the first generation Intel Atom). It's being dropped left and right in favour of only supporting 64-bit machines (x86_64, aarch64, maybe RV64).
It is hardly legacy yet.
Separately, there is also the x32 ABI, although that hasn't really gained any traction.
I 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.