7 ms·

Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead

153 points by tbirdz 11y ago

ant6n 11y ago
Well, there's still some x86-32 around (some not too old Atoms), and armv6 (Raspberry Pi). And I'm hoping OpenRISC or RISC-V will be successful eventually. I don't really get the point about how open software lost. Sure the hardware is disposable, but consider that the amd64 platform is only a relatively minor modification of the x86-32 platform, and that has only seen relatively small changes since the 386 - which is what the first linux was based on 24 years ago. The 32 bit arm architecture, just like the 386, came out in the mid eighties.
- Matthias247 11y ago
  32bit x86 even got some new devices last year through the Intel Quark family. As these devices don't MMX and other stuff, they have an even older instruction set then the Atoms. And yet they are brand new.
  - ant6n 11y ago
    Do they even run normal linux then? Even the 32bit atoms supported SSE2.
- rc4algorithm 11y ago
  OpenRISC has been stagnant for many years and will probably never make it to silicon.
- makomk 11y ago
  The last time I tried running Linux on OpenRISC, it was... interesting. There's upstream kernel support, but it's not compatible with the version of libc I could find - fails to boot due to syscalls that were removed when the code was pushed upstream.
DHJSH 11y ago
NVIDIA CUDA! That's what today's world is.
vonmoltke 11y ago
First sentence should be, "Today's GUI-based end user world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64." There are tens of millions of systems where the ability to run a web browser, PDF viewer, or office suite is irrelevant. I'm not talking about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems. I get the impression that the author of this is completely focused on desktop and mobile software and has written an editorial based on the perspective that those are the only realms that exist. I agree with her conclusions with respect to consumer and office platforms, but think she makes the gross error of then projecting that onto the rest of the computing world. Many platforms will stay alive outside of this space with good toolchain support and poor GUI application support.
- pyvpx 11y ago
  the author is Miod Vallat, an OpenBSD developer who has "nurtured" many "alternative" architectures' support.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
  > I'm not talking about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems. What architectures would you consider competitive in each of these areas? As far as I know, most of the areas you listed are migrating to ARM and AMD64 for new designs/installations at a pretty quick pace.
  - Artemis2 11y ago
    I only know IBM's POWER8 that has interesting applications server-side (massive threading), but otherwise, the future is indeed AMD64/ARM64.
- Marat_Dukhan 11y ago
  >> I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems In HPC x86-64 (in fact, Intel x86-64) is the only thriving architecture: here is the breakdown from the last Top500: - 445 systems are Intel x86-64 - 21 systems are AMD x86-64 - 19 systems are IBM Blue Gene/Q. IBM discontinued the Blue Gene line, so these systems would be replaced with something else as they age. - 7 systems are IBM Power 7. There are no IBM Power 8 systems on the list. - 7 systems are SPARC-based. AFAIK all of them are Fujitsu systems installed in Japan, and they are not accessible to researchers outside of Japan. - 1 system is based on Chinese ShenWei architecture. - There are no ARM (neither ARMv7 nor ARM64) systems on the list.
justincormack 11y ago
There are way more MIPS systems than aarch64 systems, and even more Power8 systems than aarch64. Risc-V is interesting as an open source design, with commercial interest. GPUs are not any of those three. There is quite a bit of work going on, it may just seem a bit niche to some people.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rc4algorithm 11y ago
  The vast majority of MIPS systems are bargain-basement embedded systems, though. Also, the ISA is pretty messy (especially at the kernel layer) and doesn't support many modern features such as per-page W^X or crypto acceleration. I dislike monopolies more than most, but MIPS isn't currently a very strong contender for ARM's market share.
  - david-given 11y ago
    Right now MIPS rules the television and set-top-box world, because there are, I think, two Chinese companies both of which own the IP for a MIPS core and all the digital TV decoder logic; which means that they can produce a complete end-to-end TV chipset and not have to pay anyone anything. So they're vastly cheaper than anything else. Also, don't dismiss them. My last company was a startup producing a portable native gaming platform. I did a couple of ports to some MIPS-based smart TVs, and it totally rocked; I think we ended up with Lego Batman running on it in HD with an XBox 360 controller plugged into the USB diagnostics port on the back. Of course, at the userland level all these platforms are horrible piles of fail. The ones I've seen all run badly-ported Linux kernels, and on at least one they hadn't bothered to write device drivers, and as a result the TV UI stack did audio by talking via pipes to a standalone executable, running as root, which fiddled with the hardware registers. Unsurprisingly we had latency problems...
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      I believe MIPS is a popular choice with internet routers too (at least the ones designed for domestic use). Out of interest, what did you use for your base OS when you were doing MIPS development? Did you reuse an existing distro? Does Linaro support MIPS? EDIT: Just found out there's a Linaro-like organisation for MIPS called Prpl. Is that what you used? http://linuxgizmos.com/mips-supporters-form-a-linaro-like-collaboration/ http://linuxgizmos.com/mips-supporters-form-a-linaro-like-co...
protomyth 11y ago
"Have a look at all free operating system projects: they really only support amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Gee! Sometimes they pretend to support a few other experimental platforms. Or other platforms which have not been tested in years and are only cross-built because they are not self-hosting anymore." I'm pretty sure the NetBSD[1] and OpenBSD would dispute that statement. OpenBSD even compiles its ports directly (not cross compiled). Both projects benefit from these architectures by finding bugs. Also, although not a popular company, Oracle just introduced a new SPARC and given Oracle's behavior, they wouldn't do it unless it had a profit and a future. 1) look at one of their exhibits, these folks believe in running on anything including toasters
- rc4algorithm 11y ago
  This was written by Miod Vallet a couple days ago. He was the main nonstandard arch developer for OpenBSD and resigned last week. So, the context is that the author was one of the few leaders of the Luddites and considers it a lost cause.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Kinda of figured, and for a lot of stuff, I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I still think it has value. My biggest frustration with the alternate chip vendors is the total lack of a simple ITX / ATX motherboard with a chip, expandable memory (preferably ECC), and a standard set of ports. Even ARM is problematic at this. I am mystified at how hard it is for a chip vendor to produce a motherboard.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Of course toasters run ARM these days.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    ARM's probably the processor architecture least suited to making toast.
eveningcoffee 11y ago
This view gets rather dim at the end. From where is this from?
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > where is this from? From the (ex-)OpenBSD developer Miod Vallat (ex according to https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u7z6c/todays_world_is_amd64_armv7_and_soon_aarch64/cxcxh7f https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u7z6c/todays_world_...): > https://twitter.com/MiodVallat/status/669253976261570561 https://twitter.com/MiodVallat/status/669253976261570561
  - eveningcoffee 11y ago
    Thanks!
VMG 11y ago
Gist mirror: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e61cf7590d8dfa0ebf3 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e61cf7590d8dfa0ebf3
nine_k 11y ago
I'd like to notice that Google recently invested significant effort in using power8, including building their own servers based on it. I hope these guys have enough motivation and resources to keep the platform alive. They use a huge lot of open-source software so I suppose the support will not be locked out in-house.
- qihqi 11y ago
  I think it is merely an effort to not give Intel the monopoly over Google's datacenters. Because otherwise, Google will not have any negotiating power regarding prices of the chips.
  - pag 11y ago
    This. I think a side-benefit is that it lets them evaluate alternatives to x86 on a larger scale, and that if anything, the effort will lead to more portable code.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy some AMD chips ? Are they that behind ?
    - nine_k 11y ago
      I think power density and performance per watt are more important for Google than chip price. Power8 has greater density than Xeons with comparable Mips/W or Mflops/W.
      - moonchrome 11y ago
        I'm not talking about chip price but the cost of migrating and maintaining systems for separate architectures.
4ad 11y ago
Actual readable version: http://sprunge.us/cFDM http://sprunge.us/cFDM
- thinkpad20 11y ago
  Thanks; trying to read that on my iPhone would have required a magnifying glass.
anuraaga 11y ago
Old news? When even game consoles, the standard for going proprietery for performance, went amd64/arm, the consolidation of platforms was a foregone conclusion.
mhkool 11y ago
Mill Computing will release a new CPU with much potential since it will be fast and consume 1/10 of the energy of an Intel CPU. I hope that they will be successful and I plan to buy a Mill computer one day. BSD is a better OS than Linux so it will be my preferred choice. I wish that the author would be able to accept the world how it is: like a priest, one does a lot of good work and receive little appreciation. That is how it is. If you are able to get satisfaction from the fact that you do something good, you keep on doing good for the rest of your life.
- pkaye 11y ago
  I think there is lots of inertia in staying with existing platforms (x86, ARM.) Even Intel got their ass kicked with Itanium even though they tried to undo a lot of mistakes there.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > I wish that the author would be able to accept the world how it is: like a priest, one does a lot of good work and receive little appreciation. That is how it is. If you are able to get satisfaction from the fact that you do something good, you keep on doing good for the rest of your life. Doing good things usually does not pay bills. :-(
- Jerry2 11y ago
  >Mill Computing will release a new CPU Their CPU is years away. There isn't even an FPGA prototype of it anywhere. And once they reach prototype stage, it will take around 5 to 10 years for it to reach consumers.
- PeCaN 11y ago
  I think even clockless designs are going to be here sooner than Mill. Mill is cool and all but it's probably going to end up like countless other fascinating designs, which is to say quite irrelevant.
- ris 11y ago
  "Mill Computing will release a new CPU with much..." (insert recycled hype of a product that has yet to have a HDL implementation, let alone silicon) "BSD is a better OS than Linux..." I think you've built your world out of dogma where it's a lot more fun to have "an opinion" and express it than to deal with the nuance involved in the real world.
frik 11y ago
"aarch64" is the new 64-bit ARMv8, I had to Google that name. There are various other minor and not so minor platforms like Power, Mips, OpenSparc, etc.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > "aarch64" is the new 64-bit ARMv8, I had to Google that name. It's not exactly new though, it first shipped in the iPhone 5S a bit more than 2 years ago. > There are various other minor and not so minor platforms like Power, Mips, OpenSparc, etc. Which is exactly the platforms the author (Miod Valaat, who recently resigned as OpenBSD nurturer/implementer/maintainer for many of these) is talking about considering he explicitly lists them in the first paragraph: > Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips, power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.
corysama 11y ago
Methinks the commenters here are having too much fun contending the amd&arm claim because it's in the headline and it's fun to call articles stupid. But that detail is only incidental to the message of the statement. And at this moment, I don't see anyone discussing the meat of this resignation letter. > So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses, key chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting as EFI which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE 1275); and reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. This issue at hand is that a minority of oss developers sometimes fight very hard to keep a long-term architectural vision maintained. But, an overwhelming majority just swoops in and does the minimal work necessary to get what they need running today with little consideration for tomorrow. Eventually the long-term minority gets frustrated by being eternally overwhelmed and resigns. This is such a case. So, questions seem to be: Is this really inevitable or can something realistically be done to improve the situation? Is it going to bite us in the ass or is it actually "better" in a worse-is-better kind of way?
- yuhong 11y ago
  I think this is partly because of how Android devices are commodities. You will notice that on the server side there is ARM SBSA with UEFI and ACPI.
- cwyers 11y ago
  I think that statement is missing an "and." So he's disgusted by EFI. What impact does that have five layers up the stack? Computing has moved from being bespoke to commodity. In a very real sense, cheaper is better - more people can afford it and the people who could always afford it can afford a lot more of it. I suspect that the benefits of cheaper is better vastly outstrip thia guy's grievances about EFI booting.
mschuster91 11y ago
> No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. today's stable Linux tree? Shit people still ship 2.6.x kernels these days because they don't want to invest the engineering resources to keep their vendor-specific customizations accumulated over YEARS in the same processor family up to date.
sklogic 11y ago
Big iron is very much alive and kicking. And we're likely to see a raise of RISC-V soon.
- scott_karana 11y ago
  > Big iron is very much alive and kicking. > Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips, power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    My point is that there are far more than "a few people".
rahulb10 11y ago
And then I heard about RISC-V.
rahulb10 11y ago
And then I heard about RISC-V
bjwbell 11y ago
With the cost in multiple billions to build a fab and the consolidation of semiconductor manufactures the reduction in # of architectures isn't surprising.
- coderdude 11y ago
  You can go fabless for a few million. The cost barrier isn't very high for a serious contender.
djcapelis 11y ago
As one of the people who has done work to keep Linux running on an neglected hardware platform (OpenSPARC T1 with an FPGA target) I agree with this article. The patches for supporting various functions in the FPGA version of the T1 chip were never mainlined and have diverged from the current version of the kernel. The old version of the kernel they originally applied to no longer compiles without a number of changes. Automake doesn't work with the old makefiles anymore. So if you type make, you have to rewrite the makefile. Then if you do that, they still don't compile because of behavior changes in gcc. Some of these are the fault of the kernel developers making bad decisions, like including both -Wall and -Werror in their flags which cases compilation to fail with newer compilers when new warnings are introduced. (Compilers are always allowed to add warnings later, and indeed they do.) Along with a few other things that fail. Since I didn't want to develop on a years old kernel anyway, I forward ported Sun's old patches to a newer version of the kernel and successfully moved the newest kernel code available for the platform forward a few years. But was never able to get the latest kernels working, because the newest kernels all fail on that platform during initialization. I'm sure it's something I could fix if I needed to, but tracking down why a kernel crashes on an entire platform before it starts init is just no fun. Maybe someone else fixed that bug and pushed it forward again, but as far as I know the current status of running Linux on an FPGA with the OpenSPARC T1 core is that the latest kernel available is 3.9 from my tree on github. [1] Which is a shame, this is one of the very few open cores for a truly fast and well designed processor available in the world. [1] https://github.com/djcapelis/linux-kernel-opensparc-fpga https://github.com/djcapelis/linux-kernel-opensparc-fpga
- ddebernardy 11y ago
  > I'm sure it's something I could fix if I needed to, but ... So in other words, no demand, no work. Had your job depended on it, you'd have done so. For everything else, if no hobbyist is willing to work on it then it gets de facto deprecated at some point down the read. Plus, OpenSPARC T1 has been around for what... a decade? For all of its technical merits, that's about as old as dinosaurs in IT time. Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997 and was the size of an oversized US fridge. Smart phones packed the same amount of computing power 13 years later. :-)
tambourine_man 11y ago
Replicating content here since it's impossible to read it on mobile at pastebin.com Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead, Jim. Noone is investing enough money and brain power in the other architectures. Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips, power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway. Keeping an obsolete platform alive is fun because this reminds you of the '90s, when there was a large choice of hardware platforms, with roughly similar cost/power rations. Eventually, the cheap PC killed almost all competition, and the smartphone market gave ARM an unhealthy market share in the embedded systems world. Then, after a while, it's not fun anymore, because noone is writing code with your platform in mind, because it's not deemed powerful enough, because modern compilers no longer support your platform (or they produce broken code for it, which is even worse). Does your platform have a hardware limit of a few hundred MB of physical memory? You won't be able to run a web browser or even a PDF viewer on it. Does someone still run today's gcc's testsuite on your platform? No? Sorry dude, here's a nickel... Keeping a platform alive is a real team work. This requires a serious commitment from all the ``building block'' projects: a not-too-bug-ridden toolchain (as/ld/gcc), as well as support in the flagship projects (emacs, python, X11, mozilla, libreoffice...), and accurate, up-to-date documentation available free of charge. None of this is true of platforms, except for amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Because of this, trying to keep a platform alive is really going against the tide. Have a look at all free operating system projects: they really only support amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Gee! Sometimes they pretend to support a few other experimental platforms. Or other platforms which have not been tested in years and are only cross-built because they are not self-hosting anymore. Of course, you'll still find a few looneys which will do an incredible amount of work to prevent the decay of their platform of choice, and give the impression that these platforms are still first class citizens. But these guys are the same as ten years ago. And eventually, they get tired and give up. Just like me. The worst part in this, is to look back and realize that, after all those years, free software has lost. Companies working on non-free software have been smart enough to get the momentum of the free software developers to work on embedded platforms in order to tremendously shrink they software engineering costs, yet getting positive press. So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses, key chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting as EFI which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE 1275); and reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. I've spent 20 years in my life trying to promote a certain view of free software, its values and its ethic, fighting for it, getting involved, trying to lead by example, and on this day, I get the feeling that all I did was wasting my time and that nothing I did has been useful. It's a hard pill to swallow. Better resign now than keep trying and only get bitterer in the process.
jwatte 11y ago
I think this is what we get because we've successfully evolved the business model up the stack, and the bottom is largely solved. This id a good thing, except for those who enjoy innovating (or reinventing) at the bottom layer.
jondubois 11y ago
I can relate to the stuff about free software losing the battle against commercial software. I've maintained 2 open source projects over the part 10 years and for both cases, I saw an 'as-a-service' alternative which did the same thing come up and get a massive amount of traction. The worst part is that the attitude towards open source projects has degraded. One time I mentioned one of my (somewhat popular) open source projects in a pubic chat room (just a single post) and I was accused of spamming! Even though the project was relevant to the chat and it was completely free and open source. People don't value free software anymore. It's all about ridiculously expensive SaaS services with massive lock-in nowadays. So I've had enough. I'm joining the dark side. I'm going to start building services and help make the world a worse place. I'm not going to be one of these poor old FSF guys who keep fighting for software freedom for their whole their lives. Things are getting worse - You just have to accept it and move with it.
rbanffy 11y ago
Any platform that's not on enough programmers' desks, being actively used, becomes legacy. Once it becomes legacy, it dies. It can survive long periods as a niche product, but, then, it won't run new software, the compilers won't target it, new applications won't be written for it and, ultimately, the last machine of its kind will be turned off, replaced by the current incarnation of something that is actually used.

153 points by tbirdz 11y ago

ant6n 11y ago

Well, there's still some x86-32 around (some not too old Atoms), and armv6 (Raspberry Pi). And I'm hoping OpenRISC or RISC-V will be successful eventually. I don't really get the point about how open software lost. Sure the hardware is disposable, but consider that the amd64 platform is only a relatively minor modification of the x86-32 platform, and that has only seen relatively small changes since the 386 - which is what the first linux was based on 24 years ago. The 32 bit arm architecture, just like the 386, came out in the mid eighties.

Matthias247 11y ago
32bit x86 even got some new devices last year through the Intel Quark family. As these devices don't MMX and other stuff, they have an even older instruction set then the Atoms. And yet they are brand new.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Do they even run normal linux then? Even the 32bit atoms supported SSE2.
rc4algorithm 11y ago
OpenRISC has been stagnant for many years and will probably never make it to silicon.
makomk 11y ago
The last time I tried running Linux on OpenRISC, it was... interesting. There's upstream kernel support, but it's not compatible with the version of libc I could find - fails to boot due to syscalls that were removed when the code was pushed upstream.

DHJSH 11y ago

NVIDIA CUDA! That's what today's world is.

vonmoltke 11y ago

First sentence should be, "Today's GUI-based end user world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64." There are tens of millions of systems where the ability to run a web browser, PDF viewer, or office suite is irrelevant. I'm not talking about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems. I get the impression that the author of this is completely focused on desktop and mobile software and has written an editorial based on the perspective that those are the only realms that exist. I agree with her conclusions with respect to consumer and office platforms, but think she makes the gross error of then projecting that onto the rest of the computing world. Many platforms will stay alive outside of this space with good toolchain support and poor GUI application support.

pyvpx 11y ago
the author is Miod Vallat, an OpenBSD developer who has "nurtured" many "alternative" architectures' support.
0xcde4c3db 11y ago
> I'm not talking about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems. What architectures would you consider competitive in each of these areas? As far as I know, most of the areas you listed are migrating to ARM and AMD64 for new designs/installations at a pretty quick pace.
- Artemis2 11y ago
  I only know IBM's POWER8 that has interesting applications server-side (massive threading), but otherwise, the future is indeed AMD64/ARM64.
Marat_Dukhan 11y ago
>> I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems In HPC x86-64 (in fact, Intel x86-64) is the only thriving architecture: here is the breakdown from the last Top500: - 445 systems are Intel x86-64 - 21 systems are AMD x86-64 - 19 systems are IBM Blue Gene/Q. IBM discontinued the Blue Gene line, so these systems would be replaced with something else as they age. - 7 systems are IBM Power 7. There are no IBM Power 8 systems on the list. - 7 systems are SPARC-based. AFAIK all of them are Fujitsu systems installed in Japan, and they are not accessible to researchers outside of Japan. - 1 system is based on Chinese ShenWei architecture. - There are no ARM (neither ARMv7 nor ARM64) systems on the list.

justincormack 11y ago

There are way more MIPS systems than aarch64 systems, and even more Power8 systems than aarch64. Risc-V is interesting as an open source design, with commercial interest. GPUs are not any of those three. There is quite a bit of work going on, it may just seem a bit niche to some people.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rc4algorithm 11y ago
The vast majority of MIPS systems are bargain-basement embedded systems, though. Also, the ISA is pretty messy (especially at the kernel layer) and doesn't support many modern features such as per-page W^X or crypto acceleration. I dislike monopolies more than most, but MIPS isn't currently a very strong contender for ARM's market share.
- david-given 11y ago
  Right now MIPS rules the television and set-top-box world, because there are, I think, two Chinese companies both of which own the IP for a MIPS core and all the digital TV decoder logic; which means that they can produce a complete end-to-end TV chipset and not have to pay anyone anything. So they're vastly cheaper than anything else. Also, don't dismiss them. My last company was a startup producing a portable native gaming platform. I did a couple of ports to some MIPS-based smart TVs, and it totally rocked; I think we ended up with Lego Batman running on it in HD with an XBox 360 controller plugged into the USB diagnostics port on the back. Of course, at the userland level all these platforms are horrible piles of fail. The ones I've seen all run badly-ported Linux kernels, and on at least one they hadn't bothered to write device drivers, and as a result the TV UI stack did audio by talking via pipes to a standalone executable, running as root, which fiddled with the hardware registers. Unsurprisingly we had latency problems...
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    I believe MIPS is a popular choice with internet routers too (at least the ones designed for domestic use). Out of interest, what did you use for your base OS when you were doing MIPS development? Did you reuse an existing distro? Does Linaro support MIPS? EDIT: Just found out there's a Linaro-like organisation for MIPS called Prpl. Is that what you used? http://linuxgizmos.com/mips-supporters-form-a-linaro-like-collaboration/ http://linuxgizmos.com/mips-supporters-form-a-linaro-like-co...

protomyth 11y ago

"Have a look at all free operating system projects: they really only support amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Gee! Sometimes they pretend to support a few other experimental platforms. Or other platforms which have not been tested in years and are only cross-built because they are not self-hosting anymore." I'm pretty sure the NetBSD[1] and OpenBSD would dispute that statement. OpenBSD even compiles its ports directly (not cross compiled). Both projects benefit from these architectures by finding bugs. Also, although not a popular company, Oracle just introduced a new SPARC and given Oracle's behavior, they wouldn't do it unless it had a profit and a future. 1) look at one of their exhibits, these folks believe in running on anything including toasters

rc4algorithm 11y ago
This was written by Miod Vallet a couple days ago. He was the main nonstandard arch developer for OpenBSD and resigned last week. So, the context is that the author was one of the few leaders of the Luddites and considers it a lost cause.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Kinda of figured, and for a lot of stuff, I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I still think it has value. My biggest frustration with the alternate chip vendors is the total lack of a simple ITX / ATX motherboard with a chip, expandable memory (preferably ECC), and a standard set of ports. Even ARM is problematic at this. I am mystified at how hard it is for a chip vendor to produce a motherboard.
ant6n 11y ago
Of course toasters run ARM these days.
- cwyers 11y ago
  ARM's probably the processor architecture least suited to making toast.

eveningcoffee 11y ago

This view gets rather dim at the end. From where is this from?

wolfgke 11y ago
> where is this from? From the (ex-)OpenBSD developer Miod Vallat (ex according to https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u7z6c/todays_world_is_amd64_armv7_and_soon_aarch64/cxcxh7f https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u7z6c/todays_world_...): > https://twitter.com/MiodVallat/status/669253976261570561 https://twitter.com/MiodVallat/status/669253976261570561
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
  Thanks!

VMG 11y ago

Gist mirror: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e61cf7590d8dfa0ebf3 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e61cf7590d8dfa0ebf3

nine_k 11y ago

I'd like to notice that Google recently invested significant effort in using power8, including building their own servers based on it. I hope these guys have enough motivation and resources to keep the platform alive. They use a huge lot of open-source software so I suppose the support will not be locked out in-house.

qihqi 11y ago
I think it is merely an effort to not give Intel the monopoly over Google's datacenters. Because otherwise, Google will not have any negotiating power regarding prices of the chips.
- pag 11y ago
  This. I think a side-benefit is that it lets them evaluate alternatives to x86 on a larger scale, and that if anything, the effort will lead to more portable code.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy some AMD chips ? Are they that behind ?
  - nine_k 11y ago
    I think power density and performance per watt are more important for Google than chip price. Power8 has greater density than Xeons with comparable Mips/W or Mflops/W.
    - moonchrome 11y ago
      I'm not talking about chip price but the cost of migrating and maintaining systems for separate architectures.

4ad 11y ago

Actual readable version: http://sprunge.us/cFDM http://sprunge.us/cFDM

thinkpad20 11y ago
Thanks; trying to read that on my iPhone would have required a magnifying glass.

anuraaga 11y ago

Old news? When even game consoles, the standard for going proprietery for performance, went amd64/arm, the consolidation of platforms was a foregone conclusion.

mhkool 11y ago

Mill Computing will release a new CPU with much potential since it will be fast and consume 1/10 of the energy of an Intel CPU. I hope that they will be successful and I plan to buy a Mill computer one day. BSD is a better OS than Linux so it will be my preferred choice. I wish that the author would be able to accept the world how it is: like a priest, one does a lot of good work and receive little appreciation. That is how it is. If you are able to get satisfaction from the fact that you do something good, you keep on doing good for the rest of your life.

pkaye 11y ago
I think there is lots of inertia in staying with existing platforms (x86, ARM.) Even Intel got their ass kicked with Itanium even though they tried to undo a lot of mistakes there.
wolfgke 11y ago
> I wish that the author would be able to accept the world how it is: like a priest, one does a lot of good work and receive little appreciation. That is how it is. If you are able to get satisfaction from the fact that you do something good, you keep on doing good for the rest of your life. Doing good things usually does not pay bills. :-(
Jerry2 11y ago
>Mill Computing will release a new CPU Their CPU is years away. There isn't even an FPGA prototype of it anywhere. And once they reach prototype stage, it will take around 5 to 10 years for it to reach consumers.
PeCaN 11y ago
I think even clockless designs are going to be here sooner than Mill. Mill is cool and all but it's probably going to end up like countless other fascinating designs, which is to say quite irrelevant.
ris 11y ago
"Mill Computing will release a new CPU with much..." (insert recycled hype of a product that has yet to have a HDL implementation, let alone silicon) "BSD is a better OS than Linux..." I think you've built your world out of dogma where it's a lot more fun to have "an opinion" and express it than to deal with the nuance involved in the real world.

frik 11y ago

"aarch64" is the new 64-bit ARMv8, I had to Google that name. There are various other minor and not so minor platforms like Power, Mips, OpenSparc, etc.

masklinn 11y ago
> "aarch64" is the new 64-bit ARMv8, I had to Google that name. It's not exactly new though, it first shipped in the iPhone 5S a bit more than 2 years ago. > There are various other minor and not so minor platforms like Power, Mips, OpenSparc, etc. Which is exactly the platforms the author (Miod Valaat, who recently resigned as OpenBSD nurturer/implementer/maintainer for many of these) is talking about considering he explicitly lists them in the first paragraph: > Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips, power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.

corysama 11y ago

Methinks the commenters here are having too much fun contending the amd&arm claim because it's in the headline and it's fun to call articles stupid. But that detail is only incidental to the message of the statement. And at this moment, I don't see anyone discussing the meat of this resignation letter. > So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses, key chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting as EFI which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE 1275); and reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. This issue at hand is that a minority of oss developers sometimes fight very hard to keep a long-term architectural vision maintained. But, an overwhelming majority just swoops in and does the minimal work necessary to get what they need running today with little consideration for tomorrow. Eventually the long-term minority gets frustrated by being eternally overwhelmed and resigns. This is such a case. So, questions seem to be: Is this really inevitable or can something realistically be done to improve the situation? Is it going to bite us in the ass or is it actually "better" in a worse-is-better kind of way?

yuhong 11y ago
I think this is partly because of how Android devices are commodities. You will notice that on the server side there is ARM SBSA with UEFI and ACPI.
cwyers 11y ago
I think that statement is missing an "and." So he's disgusted by EFI. What impact does that have five layers up the stack? Computing has moved from being bespoke to commodity. In a very real sense, cheaper is better - more people can afford it and the people who could always afford it can afford a lot more of it. I suspect that the benefits of cheaper is better vastly outstrip thia guy's grievances about EFI booting.

mschuster91 11y ago

> No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. today's stable Linux tree? Shit people still ship 2.6.x kernels these days because they don't want to invest the engineering resources to keep their vendor-specific customizations accumulated over YEARS in the same processor family up to date.

sklogic 11y ago

Big iron is very much alive and kicking. And we're likely to see a raise of RISC-V soon.

scott_karana 11y ago
> Big iron is very much alive and kicking. > Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips, power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.
- sklogic 11y ago
  My point is that there are far more than "a few people".

rahulb10 11y ago

And then I heard about RISC-V.

rahulb10 11y ago

And then I heard about RISC-V

bjwbell 11y ago

With the cost in multiple billions to build a fab and the consolidation of semiconductor manufactures the reduction in # of architectures isn't surprising.

coderdude 11y ago
You can go fabless for a few million. The cost barrier isn't very high for a serious contender.

djcapelis 11y ago

As one of the people who has done work to keep Linux running on an neglected hardware platform (OpenSPARC T1 with an FPGA target) I agree with this article. The patches for supporting various functions in the FPGA version of the T1 chip were never mainlined and have diverged from the current version of the kernel. The old version of the kernel they originally applied to no longer compiles without a number of changes. Automake doesn't work with the old makefiles anymore. So if you type make, you have to rewrite the makefile. Then if you do that, they still don't compile because of behavior changes in gcc. Some of these are the fault of the kernel developers making bad decisions, like including both -Wall and -Werror in their flags which cases compilation to fail with newer compilers when new warnings are introduced. (Compilers are always allowed to add warnings later, and indeed they do.) Along with a few other things that fail. Since I didn't want to develop on a years old kernel anyway, I forward ported Sun's old patches to a newer version of the kernel and successfully moved the newest kernel code available for the platform forward a few years. But was never able to get the latest kernels working, because the newest kernels all fail on that platform during initialization. I'm sure it's something I could fix if I needed to, but tracking down why a kernel crashes on an entire platform before it starts init is just no fun. Maybe someone else fixed that bug and pushed it forward again, but as far as I know the current status of running Linux on an FPGA with the OpenSPARC T1 core is that the latest kernel available is 3.9 from my tree on github. [1] Which is a shame, this is one of the very few open cores for a truly fast and well designed processor available in the world. [1] https://github.com/djcapelis/linux-kernel-opensparc-fpga https://github.com/djcapelis/linux-kernel-opensparc-fpga

ddebernardy 11y ago
> I'm sure it's something I could fix if I needed to, but ... So in other words, no demand, no work. Had your job depended on it, you'd have done so. For everything else, if no hobbyist is willing to work on it then it gets de facto deprecated at some point down the read. Plus, OpenSPARC T1 has been around for what... a decade? For all of its technical merits, that's about as old as dinosaurs in IT time. Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997 and was the size of an oversized US fridge. Smart phones packed the same amount of computing power 13 years later. :-)

tambourine_man 11y ago

Replicating content here since it's impossible to read it on mobile at pastebin.com Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead, Jim. Noone is investing enough money and brain power in the other architectures. Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips, power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway. Keeping an obsolete platform alive is fun because this reminds you of the '90s, when there was a large choice of hardware platforms, with roughly similar cost/power rations. Eventually, the cheap PC killed almost all competition, and the smartphone market gave ARM an unhealthy market share in the embedded systems world. Then, after a while, it's not fun anymore, because noone is writing code with your platform in mind, because it's not deemed powerful enough, because modern compilers no longer support your platform (or they produce broken code for it, which is even worse). Does your platform have a hardware limit of a few hundred MB of physical memory? You won't be able to run a web browser or even a PDF viewer on it. Does someone still run today's gcc's testsuite on your platform? No? Sorry dude, here's a nickel... Keeping a platform alive is a real team work. This requires a serious commitment from all the ``building block'' projects: a not-too-bug-ridden toolchain (as/ld/gcc), as well as support in the flagship projects (emacs, python, X11, mozilla, libreoffice...), and accurate, up-to-date documentation available free of charge. None of this is true of platforms, except for amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Because of this, trying to keep a platform alive is really going against the tide. Have a look at all free operating system projects: they really only support amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Gee! Sometimes they pretend to support a few other experimental platforms. Or other platforms which have not been tested in years and are only cross-built because they are not self-hosting anymore. Of course, you'll still find a few looneys which will do an incredible amount of work to prevent the decay of their platform of choice, and give the impression that these platforms are still first class citizens. But these guys are the same as ten years ago. And eventually, they get tired and give up. Just like me. The worst part in this, is to look back and realize that, after all those years, free software has lost. Companies working on non-free software have been smart enough to get the momentum of the free software developers to work on embedded platforms in order to tremendously shrink they software engineering costs, yet getting positive press. So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses, key chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting as EFI which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE 1275); and reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. I've spent 20 years in my life trying to promote a certain view of free software, its values and its ethic, fighting for it, getting involved, trying to lead by example, and on this day, I get the feeling that all I did was wasting my time and that nothing I did has been useful. It's a hard pill to swallow. Better resign now than keep trying and only get bitterer in the process.

jwatte 11y ago

I think this is what we get because we've successfully evolved the business model up the stack, and the bottom is largely solved. This id a good thing, except for those who enjoy innovating (or reinventing) at the bottom layer.

jondubois 11y ago

I can relate to the stuff about free software losing the battle against commercial software. I've maintained 2 open source projects over the part 10 years and for both cases, I saw an 'as-a-service' alternative which did the same thing come up and get a massive amount of traction. The worst part is that the attitude towards open source projects has degraded. One time I mentioned one of my (somewhat popular) open source projects in a pubic chat room (just a single post) and I was accused of spamming! Even though the project was relevant to the chat and it was completely free and open source. People don't value free software anymore. It's all about ridiculously expensive SaaS services with massive lock-in nowadays. So I've had enough. I'm joining the dark side. I'm going to start building services and help make the world a worse place. I'm not going to be one of these poor old FSF guys who keep fighting for software freedom for their whole their lives. Things are getting worse - You just have to accept it and move with it.

rbanffy 11y ago

Any platform that's not on enough programmers' desks, being actively used, becomes legacy. Once it becomes legacy, it dies. It can survive long periods as a niche product, but, then, it won't run new software, the compilers won't target it, new applications won't be written for it and, ultimately, the last machine of its kind will be turned off, replaced by the current incarnation of something that is actually used.