On Wed, 24 Aug 2011, Bill Gatliff wrote:
I have observed all the hand-wringing regarding the state of ARM Linux, and it's obvious to everyone that there is still work to be done. ARM isn't like PCs, and that's obviously inconvenient for Linus but it's an essential part of ARM's success.
I think that the thing being disputed isn't that ARM is different from PCs, but rather the issue that different ARM SOs do the same thing in different ways.
in the early days of the PC we had the same issues (those who were around to remember the 'almost' PC compatible machines (from some of the biggest names in the business). they all thought that they had good reasons to do things differently, but over time they all changed to hide the differences from the system.
ARM is currently in worse shape than the PC market ever was in this aspect, but in this case it's less a matter of getting the hardware guys to change what they do than it is to get better documentation of what the hardware is really doing and not duplicating drivers for cases where the right answer is just replacing a constant with a variable (just as an example of the very common case where the same component is wired to a different address)
David Lang