Intel Says Clover Trail Atom CPU Won't Work With Linux

girlmad tips this news from the Inquirer: "Intel's Clover Trail Atom processor can be seen in various non-descript laptops around IDF and the firm provided a lot of architectural details on the chip, confirming details such as dual-core and a number of power states. However Intel said Clover Trail 'is a Windows 8 chip' and that 'the chip cannot run Linux.' While Intel's claim that Clover Trail won't run Linux is not quite true — after all, it is an x86 instruction set, so there is no major reason why the Linux kernel and userland will not run — given that the firm will not support it, device makers are unlikely to produce Linux Clover Trail devices for their own support reasons."

Really, Linux won't (currently) support CT

[Jahava]

So, as an aside, isn't the entire point of a tech aggregator to provide a technical summary? Not just copy and paste the article's summary... anyway...

FTFA:

Intel went to great lengths to highlight the new P-states and C-states in which it can completely shut down the clock of a core. The firm said the operating system needs to provide "hints" to the processor in order to make use of power states and it seems likely that such hints are presently not provided by the Linux kernel in order to properly make use of Clover Trail.

In other words, Intel has added new capabilities to Clover Trail that allow enhanced power management, and Linux doesn't currently support it. Anyone who thinks that this will continue to be the case for much longer is a moron, especially if Intel continues to release its architecture datasheets, which we have no reason to think that they won't.

The article really says: It can't run Linux because there's no support for it in Linux, and there's no support for it because it's literally brand-new.

Re:antitrust issues?

[UnknowingFool]

Sigh. Why is this one of the first reactions when a manufacturer doesn't do something you want them to do? Seriously, Intel not only does not have a monopoly of tablet processors, I would say they don't even have a majority. ARM processors power the vast majority of tablets. Intel is only hurting themselves by not supporting Linux.

Re:antitrust issues?

[jittles]

I can tell you that I ran windows 3.0 and 3.1 on DRDos 6 with no problems whatsoever. I never owned or used Microsoft DOS. So if there was some compatibility or stability problem I never saw it.

Re:antitrust issues?

[Ancient_Hacker]

Well, I never thought I'd be standing up for Microsoft, at least a little, But IMHO they had at least a LITTLE justification for putting up the warning message. Old Windows HAD to make MANY patches into the DOS resident code, and it depended on MANY undocumented data areas inside the DOS resident code. Any DOS clone, if it was to have a chance of running Windows, had to be very carefully engineered to match all those undocumented locations in DOS. The odds of Digital Research being able to guess all the exact locations that Windows depends on, and will depend on, is somewhat slight.

Re:smart ploy!

[retep]

They tried writing drivers themselves and again they sucked.

Dead wrong. Intel drivers are excellent and I and many others have had great success with them. They also usually work quite closely with the kernel community as a whole to make sure things work as expected; that's why what this article is saying seems to out of character for Intel. For instance, try searching for "intel.com" [kernel.org] in the git commit log. Lots of kernel developers are on Intel's payroll, including core people like Alan Cox [wikipedia.org].

Re:antitrust issues?

[NatasRevol]

No, that's not what TFA says:

"The firm said the operating system needs to provide "hints" to the processor in order to make use of power states and it seems likely that such hints are presently not provided by the Linux kernel in order to properly make use of Clover Trail."

I doubt this will be very difficult for Linux to put into the kernel.

Re:Sounds like BS

[Guy Harris]

I did a Google search for "clover trail" "Windows 8 chip" and found ONLY the Inquirer article and other articles and blog posts directly quoting and linking to it.

I did a Google search for

"clover trail" linux site:intel.com

and found a press release from June 2012 [intel.com] that said "The company has 20 design wins based on the forthcoming 32nm Intel® Atom SoC, codenamed “Clover Trail,” and designed for Microsoft* Windows* 8."

"Designed for Microsoft Windows 8" could mean anything from "we designed it to be incapable of running anything other than Windows 8" to "our design target was Windows 8 tablets but if it runs other OSes that'd be just fine with us (but maybe that's unlikely because, for example, Android for tablets is mainly being used on ARM so maybe no manufacturer will care about using it to run anything else)" to "we designed it so that it would run Windows 8 better than earlier designs".