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Why Linus Torvalds Prefers x86 Over ARM (pcworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the architectural-digress dept.

Linus Torvalds answered a question about his favorite chip architecture at the Linaro Connect conference. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes PCWorld: People are too fixated with the instruction set and the CPU core, Torvalds said. But ultimately "what matters is all the infrastructure around the instruction set, and x86 has all that infrastructure... at a lot of different levels. It's open in a way that no other architecture is... Being compatible just wasn't as big of a deal for the ARM ecosystem as it has been traditionally for the x86 ecosystem... I've been personally pretty disappointed with ARM as a hardware platform, not as an instruction set, though I've had my issues there, too. As a hardware platform, it is still not very pleasant to deal with."
You can watch the whole half-hour conversation on YouTube. My favorite part is where Linus candidly acknowledges that "sometimes my grumpiness makes more news than my being nice... 99% of the time I'm a very happy manager, and I mentally pat people on the head all the time. That maybe then highlights the times when things don't work so well a bit more."

3 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Well... he has a point on all fronts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Well... he has a point on all fronts.

    1) x86 is so backward compatible it's... grand. Except for legacy bugs to push forward

    2) ARM is, or rather, was, not afraid to put efficiency above complete and total backward compatibility

    3) He get's a whole lot of news for being an ass. And that may help /. because I always come here to see the comments after news of a Linus blowup. It's awesome, coming from a multi-disciplinary background where job A's culture is nothing like job B... but oh, would it be great to combine the two! Billion-dollar sovereign debt deals and computer science. I wanna be able to yell at these geniuses like those assholes yell at those assholes. Uh... makes me get all warm down there.

    1. Re:Well... he has a point on all fronts. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As Linus says, the main issue with ARM is not the CPU core but all the other stuff you need to make a computer. On x86 most of it has become standardized, even if the standards are terrible. On ARM manufacturers do their own thing and produce a "board support package" (BSP) that provides semi-standard interfaces to it, but of course it's a pain for an open OS like Linux to deal with and many of them are not interested in providing enough documentation for native drivers to be written.

      ARM is kind of a pain in the arse to do low level development for due to the BSP stuff, but on the other hand in the low power/low cost segments x86 isn't even a player. You can get low end ARM parts for less than a Euro. If they were not such a bugger to work with they would be displacing 8 bit parts at a much greater rate, but 8 bit's simplicity keeps it popular.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Re:ARM driver vendor code is atrocious by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not just the code, it's the hardware environment as a whole. Every single freaking ARM SoC is a custom special-snowflake device with its own special-case add-on IP cores, Chinese-menu instruction set (we'll do this extension, and that one, but not that one over there, and the config register read that tells you whether it's available is privileged to it'll trigger an exception if you try and read it), undocumented memory-mapped crap, or a 1,000-page manual with partial documentation which in any case changes completely if you order an XYZb rather than an XYZa even though it's the same family from the same manufacturer. Just the perfect environment for vendor lock-in, but terrible for devs.