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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

#361

Post by Tistel »

purplezooey wrote: post #227

The mixing in of reader abuse is really off putting. "do you really not understand?" etc. I know, I know, it's been discussed a thousand times, but still.

Yeah, he just sounds like an angry "get off my lawn!" guy. Even if he has good points, he losses you because its all so rude. I don't understand why he has so much anger. He made a huge impact on the tech world, has a family/kids. I hope he made some loot of linux. He needs to learn to meditate or something. Dude, just be happy. Hardly anyone cares about the CPU anymore (I have been writing code for > 20 years, 13 of which was low level C/C++) outside of OSes and drivers. Its like 98% high level, warm and fuzzy, languages now. It's great.

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

#362

Post by spamizbad »

Linus is absolutely correct, despite how it feels like ARM should be winning in the datacenter.

If you want to win servers, you basically need to win developers too. So in the ghost world where ARM is dominating on the server, we're all writing code on ARM desktops.

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

#363

Post by Androider »

pcwalton wrote: post #342
MBCook wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Or is it evidence that Apple has worked REALLY DAMN HARD to make it work decently? I’ve certainly heard of bugs that the simulator doesn’t reproduce because it’s not ARM.

> I’ve certainly heard of bugs that the simulator doesn’t reproduce because it’s not ARM. And that isn't enough to get people to demand an ARM emulator. In fact, Android developers hate the ARM emulator and prefer the x86 simulator—more evidence against Linus' assertion.

Hi, I've done Android development professionally for many years, over multiple apps. I don't know anyone who uses the x86 simulator for anything except out of curiosity to check it out every couple of years if it's still completely worthless. Android developers develop with an ARM phone attached by USB, and it's still an abysmal experience compared to iOS.

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

#364

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #294
WorldMaker wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a time when being on the same platform as the deployment environment was super important Which is also interesting because there was a time before that where being on the same platform as the deployment environment was sometimes considered nigh impossible, such as the early days of the "microcomputer" revolution where a lot of software was written on big iron mainframes to run on much more constrained dev…

I know some software was written on minis to run on 8-bit computers, but I have a hard time imagining that as the norm. My Apple II dev rig was two computers, one running development tools and one to test and they were two because running my software wasn't possible on the development machine without rebooting and loading all the tools took 30 seconds - a painful eternity in Apple II terms.

It was quite common in the game industry.

As confirmed by multiple interviews on the RetroGaming Magazine, almost every indie that managed to get enough pounds to carry on with their dream, invested into such setup when they started going big.

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

#365

Post by riffraff »

mullingitover wrote: post #341
Androider wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, if Apple does switch to ARM chips for their laptops, that will make mainstream ARM server-side development more viable than any cross-platform story ever can. Or kill the Mac desktop. One or the other :)

I consider myself a pretty average Mac user, and I've already been turned off by the last couple rounds of Macs that Apple has shipped. Messing up the one remaining upside, x86 compatibility, would be be the straw that broke the camel's back. They still only have single digit market share in desktop computing, this could be the death blow for their platform.

But what if the switch to arm comes with a lot more battery life and great performance?

Not all Mac users are devs.

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

#366

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #308
Androider wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When developing for iOS you typically interact with the iOS simulator on your desktop, which natively compiles your app against x86 versions of the mobile frameworks. True native iOS development is pretty rare, and more painful. Overall, iOS development is a delightful experience because there's a singular hardware target and Apple pretty much nails the execution. For Android development on the other, you don't have…

> When developing for iOS you typically interact with the iOS simulator on your desktop, which natively compiles your app against x86 versions of the mobile frameworks. And the fact that the "develop on x86, test on ARM" workflow works so smoothly on iOS is strong evidence that Linus is wrong.

And to top that, Apple also has their own customization of LLVM bitcode, for more binary neutral deployments.

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

#367

Post by kllrnohj »

pjmlp wrote: post #229
gmueckl wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One article is about enforcing the exvlusive use of public APIs. The rest is about hardening the C/C++ code of AOSP. I dobnot see any "clamping down" here. What am I missing?

Using SE Linux and seccomp to close down entry points to the Linux kernel. Since this work only started on Android 7, it is clamping down the free reign that existed before.

Except they allow nearly everything for regular Android apps since libc lets you access nearly every syscall.

Nothing was meaningfully "clamped down" there. You can't directly syscall some obsolete syscalls anymore, and you can't syscall random numbers, but nearly any actual real syscall is still accessible and nothing indicates that it won't be.

As long as libc can do it so can you, since you & libc are in the same security domain. Or anything else that an NDK library can do in your process, you can go poke at that syscall, too.

It'd almost always be stupid to do that instead of going through the wrappers, but you technically can

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

#368

Post by kllrnohj »

MBCook wrote: post #331
jayd16 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? I was under the impression x86 had basically failed and everything was ARM. Or is MIPS or something else reasonably popular?

MIPS support has been officially dropped but x86 is still very alive - mostly due to the emulator these days, though, but some Android TV hardware was using it for a while, too.

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

#369

Post by syn0byte »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #251
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…

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 to start taking off. The next step is for companies to start deploying ARM workstations. That part still seems to be a good way off, MS abandoning their Windows ARM port didn't help the cause.

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

#370

Post by mongol »

mark-r wrote: post #249
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…

Don't you see that his answer has nothing to do with a hacker mindset? It's an assertion that making your development and production environments as close as possible will save you from unexpected grief, coupled with an observation that this has driven server architectures historically. Especially with subtle problems like performance issues. I find it a very sensible conclusion. Of course it didn't hurt that x86 qui…

Question is: when will development not occur locally at all? Is it possible that in a near future you actually develop directly in the cloud, on your own development instance directly? When this happens the cpu architecture of your laptop is irrelevant. It will just be a window to the cloud.
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