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No ball-and-chain of Windows compatibility holding you back. No possibility of being lazy and using a traditional PC BIOS + ACPI etc. architecture. x86 doesn't
by blasdel 17y ago
No ball-and-chain of Windows compatibility holding you back.
No possibility of being lazy and using a traditional PC BIOS + ACPI etc. architecture. x86 doesn't even have mature alternatives: EFI doesn't really help anything, and OLPC's OpenFirmware approach was implemented poorly. With ARM there's already a bunch of well-implemented variant architectures from multiple vendors with full support in dozens of operating systems.
- wmf 17y agoYep, on ARM you don't have those problems; you have different ones: every system has unique firmware and requires a special bootloader and kernel, making it impossible to create one OS image that will boot on many ARM systems. http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/ http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/ There is hope, but I doubt it will arrive in time for the first wave of ARM "smartbooks": http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/ http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/ Also, Ubuntu and Chrome OS seem to have divergent plans for firmware.
- rbanffy 17y agoIf OLPC pulls the XO-1.75 off, there will be a reference design for ARM-based notebook that is open-source from top to bottom.