Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by nicoburns » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

geezerjay wrote: post #184

xoa wrote: post #33

It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…

> but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones. This is patently false. Mobile developers do test their apps on smartphones, eventhough google and apple offer VMs. You'd be hard pressed to find a mobile app software house that doesn't have a dozen or so smartphones available to their developers to test and deploy on the real thing.

Surely this would be the same for server software: If prod was running on ARM, then you'd probably have your CI server running ARM too. But that wouldn't stop you developing on x86 if that was what was convenient.

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

#192

Post by johnklos » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

Linus has been wrong before, but here he is clearly and unambiguously wrong. You don't - you NEVER - develop to the details of an architecture. The only exception is when you're doing OS development. Since things that people want to run in the "cloud" are exceedingly rarely OS development, the idea that you'd care about the architecture is quite silly.

We have vendors ardently trying to get us to commit to their specific environments, like NVIDIA, but they've been dropping bricks on their feet by not actively encouraging software developers to not target specific versions of CUDA. Anyone running TensorFlow knows how much this sucks. After a while, people are going to get fed up with the problems that come from a poor yet popular implementation and are going to start preferring less popular, yet less proprietary, more deployable solutions.

The idea that Intel and AMD can continue to keep the x86 platform performance advantageous forever is pretty ridiculous. We are already seeing Arm CPUs which are significantly better than x86 in performance per watt. How long will it be until we have high end consumer Arm and low end server Arm that completely overlap x86? One year? Two? Three? Possibly four?

x86 isn't over - that's not what's happening here. But it certainly hasn't "won" forever.

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

#193

Post by noah256 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

iveqy wrote: post #171

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…

I once had a bug developing an IP phone. Connecting to one server worked but once on site with the customer connection to their server didn't worked, even though the servers where identical. It turned out that the power supply on their server was malfunctioning sometimes delivering too little power. Specially when taking the code paths my IP phone triggered. The server software was built in php. It's not often you st…

I’d be really interested to hear more of this story! How you isolated the problem down to the level of the PSU is going deeper into the machine than I’ve personally been, so this story could be a great teacher.

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

#194

Post by asadkn » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

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…

Depends on general confidence level and how mission critical your deployed software is. For instance, I will always prefer to run PHP, Ruby or Python on Linux servers. But on the client side, I have faith in Electron Apps to run cross-platform without issues.

I wouldn't be comfortable with an underlying architecture change to ARM for at least years to come and the usage decision would be based on general consensus on reliability that follows.

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

#195

Post by mattnewport » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #123

deng wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but with smartphones you don't have a choice. so it's different. Exactly. Linus' point is that Arm has no real advantage in the server space to compensate for the problems with cross-development. That's completely different for smartphones, which is why Arm won that space.

When Apple replace Intel with ARM in their laptops, that goes away too. (See my argument elsewhere in this thread)

Apple is a small percentage of the laptop market.

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

#196

Post by antirez » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

asadkn wrote: post #194

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…

Depends on general confidence level and how mission critical your deployed software is. For instance, I will always prefer to run PHP, Ruby or Python on Linux servers. But on the client side, I have faith in Electron Apps to run cross-platform without issues. I wouldn't be comfortable with an underlying architecture change to ARM for at least years to come and the usage decision would be based on general consensus on…

I would more comfortably run my code developed on x86/Linux on ARM/Linux than on x86/FreeBSD for instance... Platform is just one unknown and not the worst if the tooling is good IMHO. Consider that complex software under Linux/ARM now has a ten years history at least, with numbers (mobile) that are not approached by any other thing on earth.

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

#197

Post by ableal » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

_underfl0w_ wrote: post #85

scraft wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing, but answering the question of are all phones ARM: no, there Intel too. Source: had to add Intel build support for our Android SKUs to run on said phones. Some Unity stats from about 6 months ago indicated: ARMv7: 98.1% Intel x86: 1.7% I think a lot of the Intel stuff has been discontinued, not sure what is actively being developed outside of ARM right now.

This is strange. Maybe like a Windows phone? Where does it get those device metrics? < 2% makes me think it might just be that Androidx86 emulator project.

There were a few x86 tablets dual booting Android and Windows, mostly from Chinese brands.

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

#198

Post by bni » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

People will run their Java Scripts on whatever architecture AWS provides for them. Do Linus really think the bulk of developers, the line of business developing kind, cares or even knows what CPU architecture is running beneath it all?

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

#199

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #190

pjmlp wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently you stop reading at the first sentence.

I'm not working on "glue between runtime and hardware".

If you are maintaining a JVM runtime for ARM or writing JNI stuff then it looks to me you are doing just that.

Otherwise you completely lost me there.

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

#200

Post by jayd16 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #69

xoa wrote: post #33

It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…

Smartphones are a good argument for both views IMHO. Native development (as in native machine code executables) on Android is still a terrible experience even though they had a decade to fix it. It's much better on Apple platforms, maybe because they actually cared about developer-experience and native code is a "first class citizen" there. It goes beyond the different instruction set of course and most of the time t…

What do you think can be improved in Android? Unlike iOS, Android is actually running in diverse hardware. All iOS devices are Arm, where as Android will run on x86. That alone makes it more of a hassle.