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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."
IANAL, but I recall that Microsoft got in a bit of trouble because early versions of Windows were designed NOT to run on top of Digital Research DOS. Not going out of your way to support something is one thing, being exclusionary and abusing a monopoly position is another
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
I hope so (for them) because "it can't run Linux" means "no Android devices with our chip". That's a huge market to leave to the competition.
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.
In that case, the article summary was currect. Yeah, Clover Trail is an x86 CPU, but it has certain new power management states that have to be software driven, presumably w/ new instructions. Since Linux currently doesn't make use of them (I'm assuming that Intel worked w/ MS to ensure that Windows 8 does), if a vendor puts Linux on top of it w/o customizing it for this CPU, then it won't take advantage of the power management techniques. As a result, such a tablet will gouge more power than it would running Windows 8, and that's why Intel currently doesn't want to support it.
Once the next version of the Linux kernel - be it 3.5 or 3.6 - adds support for the Clover Trail instructions in its power management schemes, this CPU too will support Linux. The other possibility - Intel may be waiting for Android or Tizen to support this platform before it confirms that this CPU can run Linux.