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A POWER'ful Announcement Is Expected Tomorrow Changing The Open-Source Landscape

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  • #31
    Originally posted by Sonadow View Post

    ARM is so widely used and yet just about every single major software application in desktop linux cannot even be built natively from unpatched upstream sources without errors.
    I don't think you are right. Most distros require patches to make software fit in with their scripts and filesystem hierarchy. A simple one is some systems store packages in /opt, some in /usr/local, etc. The source needs to be patched to find these libraries.
    Other ones are that slightly different compilers are used (or different standards or quirks), these again need to be patched around.
    Check out the FreeBSD ports or Arch Linux AUR and you will see that other than for drivers or x86 emulators; there are very few REQUIRES_ARCH patches.

    It sounds like your out of tree wifi driver failed because it had a binary x86 only blob or you didn't quite do it right; possibly if you can find them it would be interesting to see the errors.

    The biggest issue I see with ARM is platforms like Apple, Android or Windows RT which are extremely unstandard; you cannot just use a C/C++ cross compiler; you cannot just use CMake, you need to piss around with their stupid amateur toolchains and build systems. And finally bind your correct C code to whatever stupid language they have chosen to masturbate over, Swift, Java, C#.
    Last edited by kpedersen; 20 August 2019, 08:11 AM.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by Sonadow View Post

      It has got nothing to do with chicken and egg.

      ARM is so widely used and yet just about every single major software application in desktop linux cannot even be built natively from unpatched upstream sources without errors.
      Developers don't use ARM boards. There's no reason to bother with a platform you're not going to use yourself, right?

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      • #33
        The slides from Power's Hot Chips presentation was more exciting: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14751...neration-power

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        • #34
          Just to point out how much of a troll Sonadow is;
          On Ubuntu 56% (28208/50205) of packages will work on any architecture without so much as a re-compile.

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          • #35
            Sounds interesting. I wonder what IBM is really up to? Some small but POWERful SoCs from multiple vendors could be nice idea, for example.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by DoMiNeLa10 View Post

              Developers don't use ARM boards. There's no reason to bother with a platform you're not going to use yourself, right?
              Realistically, if we take a look, e.g. Debian on ARM would be pretty normal debian. With more or less same packages set. There're maybe few programs that are not portable, however I can't even readily name one for e.g. Debian packages. In case of external programs it can be e.g. steam and games, but that's what one gets for reliance on proprietary things...

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              • #37
                Originally posted by SystemCrasher View Post
                Realistically, if we take a look, e.g. Debian on ARM would be pretty normal debian. With more or less same packages set. There're maybe few programs that are not portable, however I can't even readily name one for e.g. Debian packages. In case of external programs it can be e.g. steam and games, but that's what one gets for reliance on proprietary things...
                The point is that developers probably won't even bother to check whether code they write is portable at all, so the fact that you can get these packages to compile on ARM is pure luck. People check whether things work on their machine, and don't even consider the possibility of using a different CPU architecture.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
                  Perhaps... AIX has been open-sourced. We will finally be able to get our hands on smitty!

                  More likely they have sold it to a (chinese?) company who will gut the POWER architecture, putting a few of the innovations into a niche domain specific chip and it will disappear forever.

                  Oh, the anticipation!
                  From what IBM announced. The schematics and software are fully opensourced. You are given the opportunity to replicate the hardware and software. Schematics
                  are provided to enjoy. If you have the $$$ build your own chipset

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by DoMiNeLa10 View Post

                    The point is that developers probably won't even bother to check whether code they write is portable at all, so the fact that you can get these packages to compile on ARM is pure luck. People check whether things work on their machine, and don't even consider the possibility of using a different CPU architecture.
                    Hmm... if devs go for it, eventually it gives them a very painful experience. Sure, some devs prayed for years to win32 and x86(-32). And then they had it hard. Even Windows currently considers 32 bits as fallback at most, inability to run code on e.g. mobile devices is hardly advantage either. So you should have seen faces of devs trying to migrate their win32 code to be at least 64-bits, lol . That's where things like OpenGL, Vulkan and so on look rather advantageous for gamedevs, btw. However, proprietary app is proprietary app. If it wants different lib version, certain arch or so, either give exactly that or it wouldn't work. And even trivial fixes are out of question. Something I strongly dislike about proprietary things. To extent I've got rid of any proprietary stuff out of my key workflows.
                    Last edited by SystemCrasher; 11 September 2019, 04:16 AM.

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