ARM Is a Promising Platform But Needs To Learn From the PC

Posted by Unknown on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:43AM from the becoming-model-ctizens dept.

jbrodkin writes "Linux and ARM developers have clashed over what's been described as a 'United Nations-level complexity of the forks in the ARM section of the Linux kernel.' Linus Torvalds addressed the issue at LinuxCon this week on the 20th anniversary of Linux, saying the ARM platform has a lot to learn from the PC. While Torvalds noted that 'a lot of people love to hate the PC,' the fact that Intel, AMD, and hardware makers worked on building a common infrastructure 'made it very efficient and easy to support.' ARM, on the other hand, 'is missing it completely,' Torvalds said. 'ARM is this hodgepodge of five or six major companies and tens of minor companies making random pieces of hardware, and it looks like they're taking hardware and throwing it at a wall and seeing where it sticks, and making a chip out of what's stuck on the wall.'"

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That's the trouble with a monolithic kernel by Animats · 2011-08-18 05:53 · Score: 0, Troll

The embedded world doesn't have much trouble with this. For QNX, there's the kernel, which is the same for all CPUs with the same instructions set, and a "board support package", which has the driver programs for a given board or variant.
Linux is a monolithic kernel, and so it has to be hacked all over the place to deal with architecture variations. Linux lacks a clean conceptual model of operating system vs. board support.