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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."
Intel may be in for some kind of fine over this.
Chips aren't exactly designed to "run Linux" or any other OS. It's Linux that supports CPUs.. NOT the other way around.
All this means, is that Intel doesn't want to help. It does not mean it won't run Linux. Linux always finds a way to work.
I can't see what possible benefit it is to Intel to deliberately limit the market for their processors. Unless they are doing this for Microsoft's benefit, in which case, surely, there are anti-trust implications?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Saying that a chip cannot run an os is like saying that a pc that display a slideshow of flowers cannot do a slideshow of auromobiles.
The only way to achieve that is by actively restricting functionality. Well they can keep it.
If there is one thing life has taught me it is that anything can run Linux. All intel has done now is simply issued a challenge which my guess is won't take long for some skilled hardware hacker.
Without Linux support, it's only Windows. Microsoft will have monopoly pricing power, and Intel will have no leverage to get them to offer a lower priced Windows version for Clovertrail products. Thus the product is doomed.
Basically, Atom is dead until Intel can ditch the Imagination Tech IGP and use an IGP with working Linux drivers.
My guess is that they have some hardware DRM in there and Microsoft is the only one with the keys.
The expression "won't work with Linux" can usually be translated as "don't know if it works with Linux and we would not support it if we did".
.... "But it is running in front of me now" I said.
I first met it with OS/2 rather than Linux when I was using internet banking in its early days. I rang the bank Help Desk (about a technical matter not a financial one) and it came out that I was on OS/2. "But Sir" they said "it doesn't run on OS/2, you have to use Windows!"
They were so shocked, as if I were being really irresponsible, that I feared they would cut off my account; but they didn't
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.
Seriously, even the summary says that it works and Intel is wrong. Mod this up now.
Typo - I rang them on a financial matter. I would not have been daft enough to seek their advice on OS/2.
Er my mac runs OSX, Linux and Windows...
Many of us have been expecting this sort of thing for a while. I suspect at the heart of it this has less to do with Microsofft and more to do with TPTB wanting to make inroads against general-purpose computing... hopefully that cat is safely out of [reach of] their bag...
I choose my operating system, and I choose my chips. And this chip won't be entering my house, unless someone in the kernel community decides to do Intel a huge favor and support it without them.
It would seem that everyone assumes this is some sort of collusion with MS. But if it runs Apple too, that might suggest otherwise.
And, yes, I know OS X and Linux share a common heritage.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
And better yet, Apple actively supports the use of Windows on Macs - Bootcamp - in addition to the VM vendors.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
It is the first time ever that Intel announced direct hostility toward some piece of software -- I hope, it's just someone's fuckup and not a policy change.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So by extension Android is out too?
I'm sure they'll see the error of their ways both in support when the countless numbers who don't read this article try to use linux, and lack of sales in the future because I can with great certainty tell you I'm not buying one.
This seems pretty shady on the part of Intel.
Of course there are probably some MS crazies out there who are like "Finally! A Chip that won't support that evil convoluted operating system!!!!!!"
Computer, especially smartphone and tablet are now a cash cow business. The happy few that have the biggest money will do anything to stop the flow of money to them. All of us will have a single choice: to pay them no matter what. Look like how the giant petrol companies are doing business.
...into the Appelsk walled garden that Windows 8 appears to be heralding in (Windows Store only apps, "for your own security, comfort and ease of use", coming to you in Windows 8.5/9). Last thing our walled gardeners want is an alternative OS weed like Linux, working perfectly on the same hardware...
Please, notify the European Commission.
I am positively sure they will not like this.
(I don't have any appropriate channels, otherwise I would have done it)
how, in a media swamped with Apple mania, do you get attention for a processor launch?
If Intel actually goes through with this Linux will never catch on!
To all you virgins: Thanks for nothing.
Exactly. In my (relatively limited) experience, Intel's wireless chipsets work much better with Linux than other manufacturer's, and though I could be wrong, I'm pretty sure it's because they actually develop their Linux drivers alongside their Windows drivers. If they changed this policy, then I seriously fret for the state of wireless support in Linux. I, too, sincerely hope it's someone's fuckup.
Provided the linux kernel is used in android and that intel tries so much to enter the android market, I highly doubt that their new power efficient chip wont work with linux. It would mean they won't ship it in android as well.
Is there any source for this statement besides The Inquirer? They're basically a tech tabloid and have gotten a lot of things wrong (or overly sensationalized) in the past. I checked Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, both of which covered Intel's presentations this week. No mention of this. 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. No reliable third-party tech sites saying the same thing.
This doesn't make sense in terms of Intel's overall philosophy. They have always been good about Linux support for nearly everything else – they don't want to get themselves tied in too closely with Microsoft, for fear that this would reduce their leverage.
I think this story is bullshit. A generous interpretation would be that the reporter heard that the chip ran Windows 8 and that Linux *currently* did not have the necessary support for the "new P-states and C-states" in Clover Trail, and misinterpreted that as saying that only Windows 8 will ever be officially supported. A less generous interpretation is that the Inquirer knowingly made up this crap to get more page hits. In any case, I expect Intel to make their actual position clear soon enough, now that this story seems to have gone viral.
...I've already got an AMD board that won't run Linux.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yeah, but they deliberately preclude OS-X running on non Apple PCs. They protect their hardware 'monopoly', while relaxing their software 'monopoly'
They tried building their own Linux distro. It sucked!
They tried giving docs and nobody cared.
They tried writing drivers themselves and again they sucked.
So now they are double daring every developer saying win8 is technically better than anything they coded
Really? I have OS X on my thinkpad. I teach intro programming for artists so having a OS X box I can demonstrate on is quite helpful.
Enterprise customers please note Enterprise Linux versions will not run on any intel chips as those chips lack features needed for Linux kernel 4.0 onwards.
At least, it will run on it.
graphics that forces them to say that, they don't want to waste time on supporting it on Linux.
The chip embeds a new silicon technology that will recognize Linux by efficiency of code to be executed.
If that'll be too much efficient, then the chip will melt itself.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Exactly. In my (relatively limited) experience, Intel's wireless chipsets work much better with Linux than other manufacturer's, and though I could be wrong, I'm pretty sure it's because they actually develop their Linux drivers alongside their Windows drivers.
Uh, not quite. Intel's Linux wifi drivers suck. Ever tried to use them in a network setting with many APs? You will find that after a number of switches between access points, iwlwifi just decides to stop working until you remove and reload the module. Classy. That bug has been in there for many months now.
Oh, yeah, and their wifi chips also require a binary blob. Ugh.
I have it on good authority that the way Intel wifi drivers are actually written is like this: there is a Linux team, and a Windows team. The Windows team is allowed to talk to the people who design and build the hardware. As a result, they can write good drivers that work around all the hardware quirks. The Linux team, however, is not allowed to talk to the people who build the hardware. They are not even allowed to talk to the Windows team. So they have to go on the internal specs, and those, of course, do not list all those little quirks and workarounds that are needed to build a first-class, robust driver for the hardware.
So, what the GNU/Linux community gets is a driver that is barely useable in some environments, and unstable in most others.
Thanks a lot, Intel.
There must be a special subsystem on the die that checks if the OS ID is linux-gnu and annihilates itself in a puff of smoke if it is so.
Not only that, Intel actually originally developed Meego b'cos Windows 7 did not support the Atom. Now of course, it's Tizen.
I think that seeing Microsoft porting Windows 8 to ARM, they decided to come out w/ a CPU that rivals it in power management, and got Microsoft to support this. They may be targeting their initial production of this CPU @ Windows RT tablets & phones, in which case, Linux may be on the backburner. Once the Linux kernel supports it, then they can make it one of the target platforms for Tizen, and also promote it for Android.
Given that Intel has to avoid losing the entire tablet & phone market to ARM, I doubt they'd be stupid enough to write off either the Windows RT or the ARM market. Windows RT is better in the sense that Clover Trail could run Windows (win64) software that ARM can't.
"Won't run Linux" is a challenge, not an absolute statement of fact.
I was going to avoid Windows 8 like the plague. Seems like your hardware should be avoided too.
That's not how it's worded from the article. They could have said "it's not designed to support linux", not "it wont' run on linux".
Reason for this one is the GPL. If GPL didn't force the source code to be opened, the Linux guys there too would have been allowed this privilege. But if they were to do the same things that the Windows guys did, they'd have to open up what they did, which could end up revealing design details about Intel's wireless chipset that would enable competitors - those who make other WiFi chips - to make exact clones of Intel's wireless chipsets. So obviously, Intel avoids letting that go out.
I'm willing to bet that had they had a FBSD team, this would not have been an issue. With the OBSD guys though, it might have been.
The chip maker that dominated the desktop market is favoring it's ally from the desktop market in a desperate attempt to grab some ground where they've otherwise had their asses handed to them. I'm surprised the move wasn't widely anticipated.
"It is the first time ever that Intel announced direct hostility toward some piece of software -- I hope, it's just someone's fuckup and not a policy change."
Such change could represent an opportunity for AMD, which was once the "anti-Intel/underdog/enthusiast CPU".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Seriously. Isn't this what Linux is about?
Adjust the Kernel so that we have a version compatible with the chip set. It's WHY Linux is open source and has a coimmunity.
Hazel, do us a favor: Keep eating your words -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3115271&cid=41325809 since you shot your mouth off and had to do that.
Why would they say this? Why not just say we are only supporting this chip for windows? As meaned x86 means linux either will or it will be trivial to port. This is almost as good as "why would anyone need more than 64k of ram?" Heck if you said you had an electric razor that wouldn't run linux that would just be a challenge to the community not a statement of "perfect tense" fact.
Apples can run alternative OSS operating systems with relative ease.
*Applesque
If you have to use fake french, at least do it right.
I think this mostly due to the PowerVR SGX graphics engine (remember the gma500 poulsbo). for the gma500 intel made a binary linux driver that did not impress anyone. I guess for clovertrail they are just not bothering with releasing a binary driver.
So it might work fine as a CPU, but have no graphics acceleration. however for a tablet chip that cannot play video or composite a desktop in software, it might be effectively useless.
Last time I read, the idea of the "walled garden" was something to do with 100,000 different variants of the malware appearing out of nowhere through the internet to any IP address, and that these were increasingly moving towards/into low-level device drivers, close to the BIOS remote administration features. The last refuge is to centralize the approval of all executable files.
One would think by disabling the use of non-windows operating systems instead of not supporting them they could be up against the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
Section 47 of the Act prohibits exclusive dealing. Broadly speaking, exclusive dealing occurs when one person trading with another imposes some restrictions on the other's freedom to choose with whom, in what or where they deal. Exclusive dealing is only a breach of the Act where the conduct has the purpose, effect or likely effect of substantially lessening competition in the market. In an assessment of the effect of the conduct on competition, it is not enough merely to show that an individual business has been damaged. The wider market for the particular product or service must be considered.
There was news not long back about the possible case against Microsoft. Microsoft wish to implementing this technology on parts of the market and my guess would be they have paid off Intel in one way or another, to drop the 'ability to use Linux' because they can argue to a court that it is unable to Microsoft is in no such position.
Or many I've had one cone too many and am a bit paranoid.
I also don't see how people would want to use Office on their tablets - unless there is a docking station, and Office becomes much, much, MUCH less weighty than it is now, but none of those are reality now.
But MS is beting the farm on it, and looks like Intel is joining the club. Those companies normaly know what they are doing marketing-wise (most of the time, anyway - "The internet is a fad" is there to proof they are not infallible).
Got popcorn?
Rethinking email
Does that mean this is not a general purpose computing machine? If that's true, then I think there's all sorts of legal problems ahead of them.
I believe there's certain loopholes in various laws to allow loopholes for general purpose computing hardware.
It is utter crap and should be avoided at all costs.
No problem intel, I will warn people away from your products and towards AMD's offerings.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The usual jargon for that is "Linux won't be supported". My first translation of "won't work with Linux" is "we'll actively sabotage Linux"... But, well, marketing language is ambiguous, one'd better not take too much out of it.
Rethinking email
No distance is safe.
Well, there's always from orbit.
Those damn monkeys had us worried for a while.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Little technical understanding by marketing folks, they just parrot company policy/thinkspeak - that is how you get statements like "Cannot Run xxx". Then again, with Intel scrapping for marketshare why would they broadcast non-support of potential customers ? Some kind of partnership with a certain software company ? Who knows.
Not a happy shareholder lately.
Lurking in the desert
To be fair: Nobody will run Windows 8 anyway. ;)
So if intel wants to cut itself... and sprinkle Window 8 cooties into the wound... who are we to judge?
Amd, arm or others...
So, the company that has open-source, document video drivers for Linux, and has apparently worked closely with Valve on their Linux gaming project, with great praise from Valve is *also* working with Microsoft to destroy Linux. Gotcha.
Wanna bet?
And there are still millions of WingozeXP lusers that still don't want W7!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Let's say that Intel wants to limit the audience for the chip, and cut their own sales. Let's say that AMD, VIA, and the ARMs makers will be delighted to fill in any vacuum.
What vacuum? This is not the only cpu that Intel will sell. If a vendor cares they can buy a different Intel cpu.
Linux for the desktop has such a small market share
That may be true for "desktop" as in the user's environment but not "desktop" as in PC hardware. Linux has some success as the server running in the closet, many of those machines are former desktop PCs.
First, Intel sold off XScale a few years back because a certain company stopped supporting ARM in their OS. Intel choose to run the ATOM horse instead. Now said company wants ARM and Intel's got nothing to sell.
Enter company willing to let Intel sell ATOM chips for x86 Win8... If they don't publish specs to anybody else. This is a Microsoft hedge against Win8 being ARM only with only Metro apps... But Microsoft doesn't want the x86 hardware "in the wild" at an ARM price point.
It's "Halloween Documents" all over again. Except Intel has to play along because they got noting to sell at the ARM price range.
Frankly, it's time for Linux and Open Source to "take it's ball home". There are several good truly open source boards like Raspberry Pi out there with enough guts for daily use.
...into the Appelsk walled garden that Windows 8 appears to be heralding in (Windows Store only apps, "for your own security, comfort and ease of use", coming to you in Windows 8.5/9). Last thing our walled gardeners want is an alternative OS weed like Linux, working perfectly on the same hardware...
That does seem to be the plan these days; but the CPU level seems an odd place to do it. If you've got a TPM and the right crypto sauce in your bootloader(which, along with everything and the kitchen sink, UEFI certainly can and frequently does) you can lock unsigned code out without any expensive and time consuming(and potentially buggy) dicking around with the instruction set, or memory layout, or connector geometry, or anything like that.
Really, while they still can work, control-through-churn is an obsolete strategy. Churning your software, APIs, instruction sets, etc. hurts your own developers and leads to time and bugs, and churning your proprietary connectors only keeps the chinese clone shops at bay for about a week. The future belongs to cryptographically enforced incompatibility laid on top of as much cheap, reliable, standardized stuff as you can get away with using...
Right next to my old WinModems.
I think I speak for many, many people when I say "Challenge accepted"
... Intel is falsely advertising that a chip with all the standard (for today) x86 instructions will not run Linux, which is an x86 compatible kernel, and says that the chip is for Windows 8 ...
Backwards compatibility is not the issue. It seems to be an issue of supporting new features. For example from the article:
"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."
... the whole "Linux always finds a way to work" irks me. Linux doesn't fine a way, some extremely talented and hard working individuals spend vast amounts of their time building/designing/testing code to support hardware. It's not magical ...
So you are saying Linux kernels are people? ;-)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE1ODA
Maybe it's intentional, maybe it's not, but it does seem to be a trend.
Koolade, much?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Too late, I've already tinkered with it and have Clover Trail pre-tests working on Linux... Next step Spectrum 128...
which could end up revealing design details about Intel's wireless chipset that would enable competitors - those who make other WiFi chips - to make exact clones of Intel's wireless chipsets
Palm trees and 8
Maybe Intel is betting on Windows 8.
Palm trees and 8
Maybe Intel is courting a relationship with Hollywood, and wants to reassure those media barons that they are "coming around" and helping to kill off personal computing. Intel might be trying to position itself as the CPU maker for "media consumption devices," which will not run operating systems that allow users to run unapproved software or (heaven forbid) software that can make a copy of a movie.
That is the point of restricted boot environments, Windows 8, iOS, etc.: to kill personal computing, and build a new world in which home computers are nothing more than glorified cable TV receivers.
Palm trees and 8
Have you ever heard of the term "hackintosh"? Apple does not support running OS X. It doesn't stop you from loading it on a PC. Are you also complaining that you can't run AIX on a Solaris machine?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
AMD AMD AMD do do do doooodo AMD AMD
Considering it's Windows 8, at least we can safely assume Windows 8 won't work on that chip either since Windows 8 doesn't work. Way to level the playing field.
By the way, what chip has ever been designed specifically to include Linux? They still make it work.
Tell that to an iOS user.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Really? I have OS X on my thinkpad.
OK, s/preclude OS-X from running on non Apple PCs/make it sufficiently difficult to run OS X on non-Apple PCs, and sue anybody who tries to sell machines with OS X preinstalled, so as to keep the number of people who do it low enough that it doesn't matter/.
Just curious, sad day if they stop giving them to us...
Tell that to a Windows Phone or Android user.
He was very clearly talking about desktops and laptops.
I expect that an unofficial (non-Intel) patch to support the various Clover Trail power management features will be available relatively soon after the processor is widely available. The Linux development community is quite capable when the need arises.
But it doesn't matter, because both Apple and Microsoft are doing all they can to turn desktops and laptops into the same kind of locked-down walled garden that smartphones suffer from.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Although I have no personal knowledge about this situation, if I were to speculate on rationale for the position that Intel is taking, it's power/electrical related.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that they way it is probably designed, you can't just turn on both cores at full clock rate and turn on the GPU w/o creating electrical/thermal instability or melting the chip. They probably have to do lots of dynamic voltage/frequency tradeoffs to get their chip to run which considers the whole system power/heat, thermals (temperature), and electrical current battery supply. Also the parameters to control the chip probably vary greatly from chip-to-chip with manufacturing process, so the per-chip information likely is stored somewhere undocumented. Of course Intel likely has a fancy driver that does all this stuff, but it probably needs constant attention (callbacks) from the OS and information from the OS about workloads, but they...
1. Are only tuning this for Win8 (don't have time to do anything else)
2. Don't see the required callback and information support in the current linux kernel
3. Don't want to release the API information to linux kernel writer so that competitors learn their secret sauce and piggyback on their hard work
They are probably reasonably sure that running a "default" x86 linux on their chip that doesn't adapt the voltage and frequency with workload will likely be a recipe for either electrical/thermal instability or perhaps even a meltdown. Using the code phrase that "linux" work seems to be the biggest clue here...
The reason why you're modded down is because you've inserted a completely inconsequential reference to Visual Studio.
how about not having those remote admin back doors in the first place? ..or at least having them disabled by default via a hardware jumper?
You'd seriously give up public access to general purpose computing because you fear malware? I guarantee you that in this dystopia you're supporting, the ONLY people who will still have some computing freedom left will be the malware authors...though backdoors/flaws in the 'trusted computing' stack.
of course, we could have sensible laws that do not support such false scarcity in the market...but I guess that's too much to ask..
`Intel said Clover Trail "is a Windows 8 chip" and that "the chip cannot run Linux"'.
.. what a coincidence ...
..
So Windows 8 uses four primary partitions and `Clover Trail' won't run Linux
"there's a lot of software work that has to go into a chip to support it in an operating system".
What a load of b****x, I wonder what contractual inducements they got from Redmond to make it just so
AccountKiller
Some where, some Linux developer just yelled "Challenge Accepted" at his computer screen. I've got money that it'll be working before this thing hits the market.
The article grossly misrepresents Intel's position. Win 8 is a big marketing and product support target. NOBODY at Intel is stopping anyone from building a Linux distro for Clover Trail and in fact, there is a ton of Intel kernel and driver code that could be used. Don't confuse lack of joint marketing a la Win 8 launches with technical reality
Cory Doctorow wrote about this:
The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
"They" (the corporates) have seen how good Linux, Android and Free Software have become. They understand that leaving general purpose computing open would mean they cannot protect their current profit margins as software becomes more and more a commodity. Hence in order for them to "win" (have control over profit streams), they must make you "lose" (lose control over your own devices).
First came TPM in hardware. Fortunately users defeated this by making it optional and controlled by the device owner.
Apple were the first to successfully foist it on users and people were happy and smiled, "I love my Apple, I don't mind Apple having all the control for safety. What is there to worry about".
Now it is the turn of the Windows folks to lose control. Applications will pass through Microsoft censorship, hardware will be controlled by them, since only they will write (closed-source) software that can run on it. Still we will have people laughing a Richard Stallman's prescience, seeing this decades ago.
The Linux guys are being shut out now, since the Empire knows it must snuff out the Rebel Alliance to get complete control of the computing galaxy (and all the riches therein).
If you are still a believer in "walled gardens" ("I prefer convenience to control of my devices") then you ought to reconsider your views in light of these developments. For those that were always distrustful of the walled gardens, your fears are starting to come to pass, but at least you had the wisdom to recognize them. Now it is time to raise hue and cry about this. Corporates will listen to disgruntled customers if there are enough of them to threaten sales significantly. Blog your asses off about how Intel are doing the dirty on the tech community with their misleading statements.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE1ODA
Maybe it's intentional, maybe it's not
It's probably intentional that Apple haven't gone out of their way to make sure that Linux Just Works(TM) on their machines. They probably don't care that much about Linux-on-Macs one way or the other; I doubt they'd go out of their way to make it work or to make it not work.
but it does seem to be a trend.
I'm not sure there's a long-term trend to make it harder. It might have gotten a bit easier after the switch to x86, with more use of standard rather than custom glue chips.
And, if you actually look at the intel-gfx thread pointed to by the Phoronix article, and follow that into the Linux kernel mailing list, it might just have been a bug or, at least, unnecessary (mis)feature that was subsequently fixed/removed.
The Phoronix article also linked to a blog post about a non-Apple laptop that needed a bit of help to boot Debian from a USB installation and didn't support all the hardware, so it's not as if "not entirely happy to run Linux" is an Apple-only problem.
Completely different platform, since AIX, AFAIK, does not run on the SPARC. But if AIX for x86 did not run on an Oracle x86 server running Solaris, that would be a problem.
Yeah, I've heard of hackintosh, but the fact remains that if you buy OS-X from Apple and install it on, say, a Dell, you're out of luck if you have any problems.
It's completely the same thing. If you can make AIX work on a Solaris box, go for it. But don't expect IBM or Oracle to help you. Just Because it's easier for Apple to support a Dell does not mean they have to. Dell can support Lenovo or HP machines if they wanted to do so. Why aren't you ranting how Windows OEMs won't support each other's machines?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How can you not see that it's totally the same thing. OH right, this is Slashdot and baseless Apple bashing is the norm.
Great chance for AMD to take the lead, that is if they the horrible video drivers for Linux.
I still love me some AMD processors. IMLTHO, they generally offer better bang for the buck than Intel. Posting this from an AMD box.
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
But of course may take 6-9 months to trickle into mainstream distros.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/09/15/2236235/amds-hondo-chip-a-windows-8-product
It's time to move to MIPS !
Huh? I'm talking about Apple - an OS vendor - not supporting machines that can run the OS, but where running the OS would void the warranty. Since when did Dell write OSs for their machines, and then say they won't support it on Lenovo? They last wrote something called Dell Unix something like in the early 90s. Which later became del Unix.
How is it the same thing? OS1 and OS2 run on CPU 1, which is used by PV1 and PV2. OS2 is made by PV2, who refuses to support those who run it on a CPU1 box made by PV1.
OTOH, OS3 runs on CPU3 and OS4 runs on CPU4. OS3 can't run on CPU4, and OS4 can't run on CPU3. PV3 makes OS3 and CPU3, and PV4 makes OS4 and CPU4. Ergo, PV3 cant support OS4, and PV4 can't support OS3.
So it's not like a customer can run AIX on a Sparc. But a customer can run OS X on a Dell. Just that it violates the terms of agreement if he does that.
Intel won't support Linux on one of their new architectures? And, what makes this different than their position in the past?
After all, the reason that the x86_64 architectures are generally referred to as "amd64" in the linux community is because AMD came to the linux/open-source communities and said, "Here! This is what we got. Take a look and tell us what you think." where Intel, when questioned about the specs on their 64-bit architectures, said "We can't tell you that... that's proprietary information."
To the best of my knowledge, Intel has never been much support to the linux community, traditionally. It still hasn't stopped us from developing code that supports their architectures... It just takes longer as you have to pick apart the specs from the outside. So, the first few that decide to load linux on a Clover Trail system will have some extra work to do, but I don't think this is any more of a show-stopper than it has been in the past.
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