Linus: '2016 Will Be the Year of the ARM Laptop' (softpedia.com) 182
jones_supa writes: Linus Torvalds took the stage at LinuxCon Europe in Dublin, Ireland, and talked about a number of things, including security and the future for Linux on ARM hardware. There is nothing that will blow your mind, but there are a couple of interesting statements nonetheless. Chromebooks are slowly taking over the world, and a large number of those Chromebooks are powered by ARM processors. "I'm happy to see that ARM is making progress. One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it'll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop," said Linus excitedly. He also explained that one of the problems now is actually finding people to maintain Linux. It's not a glorious job, and it usually entails answering emails seven days a week. Finding someone with the proper set of skills and the time to do this job is difficult.
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Finally! The year of Linux on the laptop!
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
It's the year of ARM on laptop!
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The kernel is the OS. Your app can sit directly on top of the kernel and interfaces with the system operated by it through it. If your app does not require an OS to provision it's resources and provide an interface to hardware it is, is part of, or includes, a kernel.
Shells, guis and the like are generally well over the kernel level. Hell, they are well over the init level.
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True, and I'll bet my LEG on it.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for the link to that article... from 2008. Of course, nothing has changed in the SEVEN YEARS since that article was written. Well, except for:
1. Those were netbooks, which were Atom-based and crappy, regardless of the installed OS
2. ChromeOS didn't even exist
3. Android was in its infancy
4. We're now talking about ARM machines with VERY capable GPUs
5. The competition is no longer WinXP or 7, but Win8/10.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the same Joe and Jane anymore (Score:2)
they WILL expect it to do every.single.thing.
Yup. Indeed, they will want to do whatever they are used to do on an average laptop...
(That, I agree with you).
Nope its a laptop and therefor should do what laptops should do which according to Joe and Jane is RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS, when it don't?
And THAT is exactly where your argument completely falls appart.
We're in 2015. Today's Joe and Jane don't give a fuck about installing windows programs. They barely know how to install stuff.
(They mainly know how to click on "ok". They can click and the "Ok/Next" through someting they got in their mail. But, the concept of going to a website, downloading a SETUP.EXE and running it is a bit complica
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Today "computer" == "gate to teh intertubes" (Score:2)
Joe Sixpack doesn't want to run Windows programs. He wants Gmail and Facebook.
...and pornhub.
Don't forget pornhub.
Remember: the internet is for funny kittens and boobs.
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By your logic people should be dropping Androids and iPhones like radioactive waste to snatch up those sweet sweet Nokia Windows Phones.
People understand that different programs run on different hardware now. I'm not saying that a pure Linux laptop wouldn't have perception problems, but they wouldn't be insurmountable either. Frankly the biggest sales cases for Linux laptops would be Governments and Schools anyway, and they have teams to train the users on new hardware.
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ARM does scale.
The problem isn't ARM in general.
The problem is usually slow bus, slow ram, slow peripherals. Oh and old/slow ARM CPUs.
Take high end 8 core Cortex A57 with high end RAM and a fast bus and it will do all things you do with a Core i3 and most things you do with a Core i5.
The fact is there is very little performance ARM stuff in the market. When people get ARM they usually do because of massive cost advantages, which mean low performance implementations.
Cortex has native JAVA acceleration for in
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Correction, ARM so much cheaper than Intel without a proportional performance disadvantage.
Linux/ARM go together... (Score:2)
You misread that. It's the year of ARM on laptop!
Not totally misread: while any x64 laptop would need Windows in order to be successful, that same software won't run under ARM. So while most Linux software would be available on the ARM, the same won't be true about Windows software, so stating that it would be the year of the ARM laptop is as good as saying that it would be the year of the Linux laptop. Particularly given that the most popular Linux laptop is the Chromebook, whereas Apple probably won't migrate their Macbook Airs to the A9.
However, I
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I don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a Chromebook with an Exynos 5 and wasn't that great, in addition to the hoops I had to jump through to install Ubuntu on it.
I traded it in for a Celeron Cromebook, which is faster. Much better experience, plus the i915 graphics driver is much more mature and has video acceleration support.
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Most importantly, the i915 graphics driver is actually fucking open source!
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Re:I don't think so. (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the bootloader. Some just ship with coreboot and that's it - you can't boot Windows that way. Windows requires either BIOS or EFI to boot, and most Chromebooks ship with neither.
Plus, chomebooks are a pain if you want to use them as anything other than chromeos - the security means you get prompted every boot (including reboots) that your chromebook is compromised. You have to hit a key combination (Ctrl-D?) to tell it you intentionally want to boot developer mode. Miss the opportunity and it goes into the recovery screen asking for you to insert a USB recovery key.
Yes, this is intentional. Chromebooks are supposed ot be super secure devices immune to malware. So the bootloader checks the kernel and filesystem it's about to run to make sure they're original.
Re:I don't think so. (Score:5, Funny)
That's like buying a recliner and saying: "At least if it turns out not to be very comfortable, I can take a shit in it!
Encourages you to reformat on every boot (Score:2)
How so? I thought to run anything but stock Chrome OS, you had to put it into developer mode. And every time someone turns the machine on in developer mode, it encourages the user to accidentally wipe the whole hard drive by pressing space to reinstall stock Chrome OS.
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The Celeron version was also newer and more expensive.
Kind of an unfair comparison.
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So you went from something that was terrible to something else that was only slightly less terrible? I'm having a hard time feeling inspired by your story.
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I think you underestimate just how obnoxious OSS zealots are.
having trouble finding maintainers (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the stream of abuse probably doesn't help...
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It's just like the games industry: burn out 100 and you'll still have 250 lining up to take their place.
Re:having trouble finding maintainers (Score:4, Interesting)
And only the worst will remain. The best people can get something better.
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If this stream of 250 you speak of actually exists, why is Linus saying he's having problems finding people?
Are they of suitable quality - this isn't crappy application code. Are they thick skinned enough to be willing to put up with the legendary abuse from the LKML? Are they willing to work 7 days a week for little reward?
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Neither does the lack of salary...
No. It won't be (Score:2)
Chromebooks will stay with Atom. They're cheap, efficient enough for laptops, and perform well. Plus manufacturers can use the same base hardware for Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops if they stick with Atom. The closest thing to "Year of ARM Laptop" will be the Surface clones running android Android.
Re:No. It won't be (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would be fucking amazed if Apple hasn't had an ARM desktop/laptop for a while now internally.
Apple maxiPad (Score:2)
The iPad Pro hits stores in November.
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Which runs iOS, not OSX.
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So if we're talking about Android and Ubuntu, it's exactly the same because they're both Linux underneath, right?
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Re:No. It won't be (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the hold up is that ARM needs to be comparable in terms of computing power to Intel.
I don't think "comparable" is sufficient. I think that to switch an OS where people primerally use propeitary native code to a new incompatible CPU architecture the new processors have to be substantially more powerful to offset the performance cost of the emulation.
I find it unlikely that ARM will ever make a processor that is substantially more powerful than a regular desktop/laptop intel chip.
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That's not how Apple development works. You code to their API using their dev tools and their compiler, and they will take care of it for you.
It sounds wild, but look at their history.
Apps built on Cocoa only needed a recompile to run on the new CPU arch when they switched to x86. Carbon-based apps could be a little more involved because it was their older API.
Yes, they had Rosetta, but that was only to translate unsupported legacy applications.
Actually, their whole migration to x86 impressed me more than t
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Apple will do a lot for the developer, provided the developer is still around to do the recompile. I've acquired lots of Mac applications over the years that I can't use today, and which were never available for the newer systems.
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They also should used the 4MB L3 g4's (Score:2)
They also should used the 4MB L3 g4's
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Not comparable, just good enough for 10 inch apps (Score:4, Insightful)
With our Chromebook, we've found that there are certain tasks that you want to do on a little 10 inch notebook, and certain tasks you don't. On a small laptop, a processor good enough for YouTube and Netflix is good enough. You don't want to run Visual Studio on a 10 inch device, so there's no need for a Core i7.
Obviously, it doesn't matter to you that a supercomputer is faster than your desktop, if your desktop is fast enough. Similarly , if an ARM is fast enough for the things you do on a small laptop, it doesn't matter whether Intel offers a more capable processor or not - if the ARM suits your needs, that's enough.
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The PowerPC was significantly more powerful than the 68K line, and I believe the Intel chips were significantly more powerful than PowerPC when they switched over. Moving up in power is complicated, since Apple insists on a smooth transition. Moving down in power would have many more problems.
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I had a 4 processor ARM workstastion with NT. it was the most unstable piece of shit ever made. Windows NT for ARM was so half assed it barely ran, but it had an advantage, it was mostly hacker proof and served as a gateway to our SCADA system back then. Virus proof, hacker proof for the most part as the only break in we had they kept trying to run X86 executables on it. after that we used a single direction ethernet cable to make it completely hacker proof. Yes, 100% hacker proof. the best hackers o
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ARM?
Wasn't was Alpha or something else?
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And apparently nobody has ever ported a compiler to the ARM platform?
This legacy crap of x86 is tedious ... people have been cross-compiling software for decades.
It's just the people who slavishly can't do anything not x86 (Microsoft) who keep us tethered to this.
I'm pretty sure Apple could port a lot of their own software relatively quickly. Again, this is something people
Visual Studio RT? No. (Score:2)
And Microsoft has an ARM version of the NT Kernel. The problem is never the OS, its the fact that the software for x86 can't run on ARM
And apparently nobody has ever ported a compiler to the ARM platform?
It appears that it's harder than it looks. Even Microsoft never got around to porting Visual Studio to Windows RT, an operating system based on NT for ARM architecture. And the legacy APIs on which free compilers such as MinGW (GCC for Windows) rely are restricted on Windows RT. There isn't even a concept of "current working directory", for cricket's sake.
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The big selling point for Microsoft is that Windows will run all your busted old shit. So more busted old shit is constantly created and ported to the current MS platform to become the new 'busted old shit' that people need to be able to run on new machines.
Until this cycle can be broken, there is zero incentive for microsoft to fully commit to any new architecture, as their major selling point will go away.
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So more busted old shit is constantly created and ported to the current MS platform to become the new 'busted old shit' that people need to be able to run on new machines.
Interesting. This makes me think that Apple may have discovered the "secret sauce", albeit accidentally. With each processor transition, Apple has provided a compatibility window that slammed shut at a point in time not too far from the transition; but, far enough to satisfy the vast majority of their customers. The Intel transition featured Rosetta, for a while (until 10.6), then dropped it. This effectively flushed the 'busted old shit' straight down the pipes.
Web and Data is the new paradigm (Score:2)
So more busted old shit is constantly created and ported to the current MS platform to become the new 'busted old shit' that people need to be able to run on new machines. {...} Until this cycle can be broken, there is zero incentive for microsoft to fully commit to any new architecture, as their major selling point will go away.
If you look at computing history, cycle don't get broken, cycles get replaced by obsolescence.
Microsoft will simply wane in the wake of online service platforms.
(People slowly don't use as much computers to run Windows-compatible software, they use computer to surf online and connect to service)
Back in the early days, big vendors like IBMs held key position in the market. New comer couldn't compete with them.
The *platform* was specific (big iron) machines.
Then came the PC compatible, and the shift of paradi
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If Adobe rewrites their CC apps for WinRT from Win32 they would semi-automatically pick up ARM support. But now that Microsoft is offering Win32 through the Windows Store they'll probably never move over to WinRT except on their mobile apps. Microsoft *should* have thrown $100m at Adobe and said "get this Win32 ARM compiler that we used to create Microsoft Office and port Photoshop" at the launch of Surface RT. That would have been an enormous coup.
It's rumored the Surface Phone will be x86 and run Wi
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Apple have had more experience than most doing processor transitions. 68000 -> PowerPC -> X86.
The same transition techniques of fat binaries (or fat app bundles) and emulation can still apply.
But this time they have another tool in their armoury. The Mac App Store. It means that when the user buys an ARM Mac, provided developers have compiled a new version, they'll simply install all their Mac App Store bought software in one go, ready to go as ARM native.
It'd have to be a very, very good reason to g
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Actually I believe we'll see exactly the opposite.
Arm has a grossly inferior instructions-per-watt performance next to Intel processors. The fact that Apple had to take a design team in house to find a chip that suited their needs does not speak well of the existing Arm chip vendors.
I can't imagine seeing an arm version of OSX any time soon.
And the Intel mobile chips are improving by leaps and bounds every iteration. I i firmly believe there's an internal iOS build for x64.
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Oh yeah, and if that happens they'll also tell all the world again and again that ARM processors are faster than Intel processors because of their advanced "super-computer" Altivec instruction set...
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And nobody will buy them. There is a buttload of cheap china windows 8 surface tablet clone out there that are cheap, and they run linux very well and easily. so nobody in their right mind would buy a arm based android tablet. you want to stick with something that is far morepower and power sippy like what all the current android tablets use.
That's how they get ya (Score:2)
>Would I say, "the ARM laptop is a clear and present danger to your free time?" Hell, no, I wouldn't! What do you mean I just said it?
-Linus Torvalds, 2016
"finding people to maintain Linux" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"finding people to maintain Linux" (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that could be a major reason why. I have been creating and supporting board support packages for Linux on ARM for 7 years. The number of public posts I have made to open forums can be counted on one hand for exactly this reason.
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Being successful means being an ass.
This is Bosses 101.
You don't become a billionaire being nice to people.
Linux would get nowhere if everyone was always nice to each other.
The whole Linux ecosystem is very specifically asses to each other, which is what helped it thrive in to so many distributions.
Disagreements lead to forks lead to new ideas and innovation.
OS development isn't for pushovers and crybabies. They can go become generic software developer for that.
Re:"finding people to maintain Linux" (Score:4, Informative)
What maintainers have quit? If you're thinking of that girl who quit, she wasn't a kernel maintainer, she just maintained some USB3 chipset driver thing. The other story about that guy who left in a huff was because he was trying to jam in unnecessary BSD features into the kernel after earlier trying to dump userland features into the kernel and Linus told him to talk a flying leap after he persisted.
Neither were maintainers. The just had kernel patches they wanted landed. If they were maintainers, they wouldn't need to submit patches.
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You salty bitch. Let's look at the full quote shall we?
On maintainer teams:
We’re getting lots of contributors, but we have more trouble finding maintainers. Probably because the maintainer’s job is to read emails seven days a week. Forever. That’s why we’re pushing for maintainer teams as much as possible. It lessens the steps to becoming a maintainer if you’re not the only one.
The reason its hard to find maintainers isn't because of imaginary abuse to your fee fees, but because maintaining code is pretty much the most boring and least glamorous part of being a developer. You usually have to take over code that someone else wrote, trying to fix bugs while not introducing regressions and still supporting hardware that's ancient, but still in use in Peruvian ISP's. It's often thankless and burnout can be quite common especially
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BWAHAHAHHAHAHHA (Score:1)
BWAHAHAHHAH bwahahha bwhahahah BWAHHAH
Turn it into a microkernel (Score:2)
That way lots of stuff could be farmed out to other people without the actual kernel people even needing to know about it.
Based on his other predictions (Score:1)
He has a machine that uses ARM (Score:3)
Almost all cellphones have an ARM-based CPU. Only a handful have an x86 CPU.
Having trouble finding people? Really? (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps eliminating profanity and insults on mailing lists and in submission reviews would be a good place to start?
Answer emails seven days a week filled with personal insults and profanity vs. a coding gig that with great pay, professional environment and a sane work week.
It's entirely possible to have code review with no profanity and insults, and have good code come out of it. Keep the review about the code and how it can be improved, and help each other out, since tomorrow it's going to be their code o
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Like we're going to listen to a 6-digit UID noob on fucking Slashdot for advice on how to run our shit.
If you can't commit to the hours required then perhaps you should seek out another hobby. And honestly, if you knew what you were doing you wouldn't be dealing with emails 7 days a week or being hit with "personal insults". Further, those "insults" ARE about the code, in your case they happen to be about the shitty fucking code you keep submitting.
I'm Linus Torvalds, fuck you.
P.S. Why are we losing devel
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"Like we're going to listen to a 6-digit UID noob on fucking Slashdot for advice on how to run our shit."
I trust him more than a 7 digit N00b that has a potty mouth.
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Clearly the five digit era yielded nOoBs without the ability to get a joke.
Can't find Maintainers (Score:2, Interesting)
The issues about working with assholes aside, I suspect the life of a maintainer is difficult, not because it is too stressful, but because there isn't a good way to rotate the burden across people and time. Maintainers take on this enormous burden (and love it..for a while), and then they get burnt out. But then what? Is there an exit strategy? Do they train their successor? Is there a retirement home for maintainers? Can they come out of retirement and contribute? (perhaps at a lower level).
Building
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In the real world, you go to work doing shit you don't want to do 90% of the time, but you do it because you like money.
The problem for Linux is people can get a better job elsewhere - less shitty work, less shitty working conditions, and better pay.
Just treat it like the job that it is.
Only if the price is significantly cheaper (Score:2)
I can't see people going for ARM in a laptop unless the laptop is significantly cheaper. Giving up the ability to run x86 software is a big problem for something as expensive as a laptop. Plus, most people expect a lot more from a laptop than they do from a tablet. Does ARM support USB 3 at full speed? Can you hook up an SSD and have it run at full speed? Can you get gigabit ethernet running at full speed. Can the RAM be upgraded using standard DDR 3 or 4 memory sticks?
Chromebooks are surprisingly useful. 10 inch scree (Score:2)
I installed Linux on my (really my wifes) Chromebook, dual boot. It turns out we never ever boot it to Linux. ChromeOS (aka the browser) does everything we want to do with it. We mostly view regular web sites, YouTube, and use Google Docs.
It won't run Visual Studio, but it turns out you don't WANT to run Visual Studio on a 10 inch screen. Everything we would want to do on a little Chromebook works fine without needing any x86-specific software.
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And Here's Why (Score:3, Interesting)
Arm SBC's (Score:1)
I concur from experience - arm devices like the various Odroids are already here and great fun to use.
Nope (Score:2)
It'll be the year of the same grand claims that do not produce any real results.
I think Linus is a year too early with his guess. (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at the latest in the ARM landscape, we have Apple A9, Qualcomm Kryo, ARM A57, ARM A72, and AMD A12. We can probably expect a small jump in Apple's performance next year along with a second revision of Kryo, but nothing competitive with Intel. A57 is being dropped for the fixed A72 since Apple screwed over ARM (tl;dr Apple shipped a new architecture in 2 years while ARM took almost 4 years for an inferior product -- everyone in the industry knows that design to shipping a new architecture is 4-5 years indicating either ARM screwed over all their non-apple partners (and themselves) by giving Apple a head start or Apple forced ARM to adopt a new ISA when they'd already had a couple years to work on int). Of all these architectures, I think only A72, AMD's A57 implementation, and AMD's A12 are worth focusing on.
A72 is supposedly close to the performance of Intel's core M processors, but I'm willing to bet that the default A72 can't actually compete with Skylake's wide dispatch, SMT, and vector units. The biggest question in this area isn't actually the CPU so much as all the "uncore" parts surrounding it. Even if it could have these things in theory, the companies controlling most of the patents in this area aren't using the A72 (AMD, Intel, IBM, Oracle, etc).
AMD's first generation of ARM processor (launching next year) is an A57 server part, but is probably going to be faster than most A72s in practice because it can be manufactured on a high-performance (rather than bulk) fab process and will have faster buses, faster memory, much larger caches, and even some parts of the core (like the branch predictor) may well be replaced with better systems while AMD's reworking the entire architecture for the new fab. This chip will probably be competitive in the low-power server market, but most likely won't be aimed at anything mobile.
Not much is known about AMD's A12, but for the first time, an ARM company seems to be moving into the higher-performance mobile segment. AMD failed with bulldozer (and has taken the heat for beating that dead horse for the past few years), but they at least had the sense to hire Jim Keller to help them make a couple new, next-gen architectures. While AMD has money troubles, it's in the intellectual property sweet spot to be able to put together a competitive chip. This is the chip I think Linus is wanting, but it's been pushed to 2017.
The complete unknown is Intel. They bought DEC and StrongARM was along for the ride, but they sold it in '97. They then made XScale only to sell it to Marvell in '06. I find it hard to believe that Intel's not experimenting with ARM design again. Even if they could make x86 compete in the low-end (atom has been a failure in that regard), convincing companies to switch will probably prove impossible as the current situation with lots of competing CPU providers works to their fiscal advantage. Apple won't be giving up the freedom to make their own chips (nor will Samsung). That said, I don't think we'll be seeing an Intel ARM chip before 2018-19.
tl;dr -- the current chips can't compete with Intel. The ones that can don't launch until 2017 or later.
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I forgot to mention Nvidia's Denver core. They dropped it in favor of A57 and I don't think we'll be seeing it again for a while. The original reason for making it seemed to be for x86 emulation (literally the next generation of transmeta), but their lawsuit settlement with Intel sunk that ship leaving them to repurpose the architecture for ARM. I like the transmeta idea, but like bulldozer it seems a little less good in practice at present. I think we'll see something similar return in a few years, but for
2011 (Score:2)
2011 was the year of the ARM Linux laptop.
You missed it by that much!
Chromebooks are taking over the world? really? (Score:2)
Garter says there'll be 7.2 million chrome books sold in 2015. That's well below Windows Phone sales numbers and if anyone claimed win phone was taking over the world they'd be locked away. Worse, 70% of those sales are in the education market where they're just used as locked down web browsers which is fine but no kid uses it in the classroom and thinks "wow, I have to ask for one of these for Xmas".
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Ok, do you have a better source? How many chromebooks do you think will sell in 2015?
There's no technical reason this couldn't happen (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the netbook argument all over again -- most people's use case for laptops is web and email, and it doesn't really matter what processor or OS the laptop is running as long as it works with most websites and email sends and receives ok. There are assumptions there -- that video and other resources used by websites work correctly -- and there's room for some specialized apps like Netflix, but that's pretty much it.
So Linux on ARM as a laptop? Sure. And it'll almost certainly be more reliable, run faster on equivalent hardware, and meet most people's needs who own laptops. There's no technical reason this couldn't happen.
The reason it won't happen is that there's this ninety billion dollar company and this other one hundred eighty billion dollar company that both have a vested interest in this not happening. And they're really good (at least so far) at making sure it doesn't happen.
Here's why nobody wants to work on Linux (Score:2)
He also explained that one of the problems now is actually finding people to maintain Linux.
Linus would have a much easier job finding great kernel maintainers if he was civil, objective, patient and kind on the mailing lists, rather than critical, cynical, foul-mouthed, insulting and belligerent.
Finding People... (Score:2)
"He also explained that one of the problems now is actually finding people to maintain Linux"
Gee, if only you weren't such an asshole, Linus, that problem would've been a non-issue TEN YEARS AGO.
Looking for ARM laptop (Score:2)
I'm looking for an ARM laptop:
Does this exist?
Am I the only one who noticed the irony... (Score:2)
...of Linus lamenting that it's hard to find kernel maintainers? Wonder why that might be [reddit.com]...
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Changing your mind isn't ironic. It's a sign of maturity. Failing to notice that you are part of the problem about which you are complaining, on the other hand...
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locked boot loaders like the MS Windows RT tablets
I suspect Microsoft will pull this one out of thir ass to force manufacturers to make the 'Windows only' vs 'Windows never' choice. And FUD will be invoked to let them know what happens to people who turn their back on the Beast from Redmond.
At some point, the ARM owners will sit down and calculate the lost opportunity cost Microsoft has caused them. And we'll have another round of Microsoft vs DoJ faceoff. The DoJ will take a fall in return for some more backdoors in Windows products.
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Perhaps, but I sorta remember Intel and AMD both having licenses to make ARM processors.
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I've been using SystemD alternatives for 35 years; sorry you've only seen fucked up Unix-like things