On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Dave Airlie wrote: > > As long as SOC vendors keep producing wildly different architectures > > besides the core CPU we'll have this problem. Denying the reality won't > > make that problem go away either. And device tree won't stop those > > vendor from still trying to do things differently (better?) because they > > are not constrained by having to ensure this single proprietary software > > stack still boot. > > So you are saying the only way to get the Linux ARM shit cleaned up is > to hope Microsoft succeeds in making Windows a success on ARM? Absolutely. On Intel, it is (still) Windows the reference. If Windows doesn't boot on your motherboard you have a problem. So motherboard vendors won't make crazy incompatible things. They are constrained to fix their hardware because they just cannot alter Windows to suit their hardware differences. That really helps keeping actual differences to a minimum and only to things that are not fundamental. So Windows really helped making a uniform hardware platform on X86. On ARM you have no prepackaged "real" Windows. That let hardware people try things. So they do change the hardware platform all the time to gain some edge. And this is no problem for them because most of the time they have access to the OS source code and they modify it themselves directly. No wonder why Linux is so popular on ARM. I'm sure hardware designers really enjoy this freedom. We software developers would much prefer if the whole hardware platform was standardized and set in stone. That would certainly make our lives so much better and then we would have spare cycles to actually abstract all those GPIO drivers even further. But that would benefit Windows on ARM quite significantly too. Nicolas
