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Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

• yoz-y 8y ago
  Besides talk about ARM Macs, there are already ARM Windows and Linux laptops here. Also there is no need for anybody to "win" anything. ARM and Intel servers could be just used for different purposes and each find their own niche.
• tracker1 8y ago
  As mentioned in TFA... every time I've looked at ARM server offerings, it was always much more expensive than x86 options, and most of the time far less compute power.
• jpeg_hero 8y ago
  > By: Linus Torvalds February 21, _2019_ > This is true even if what you mostly do is something ostensibly cross-platform like just run perl scripts or whatever. Please tell me this is irony.
• mbrodersen 8y ago
  Linus used to believe that his former employer would defeat Intel. He was wrong. And now he is wrong again.
• armboy 8y ago
  I think the most important question here isn’t whether Arm will win servers. The assumption would be there, that the cloud market will continue to grow at its current rate and continue to be the valuable market it has been. What scares intel most is that a new market will emerge for middle and high power compute spread more broadly, and this market will grow explosively faster than data center ever did. The question is whether these new cores will bring about a new way of structuring the data center, where it is decentralized and spread out more instead of stuck in one building. A good example is the infrastructure that must go into place to support 5G and self driving cars. Every lamppost will have a server on it. Arm winning servers becomes irrelevant in that world. If fog / Edge / infrastructure combo blow up the way mobile did, Intel’s little data center slice won’t matter. Developers will only adapt when there is a big new market to write software for. Data center by itself not sufficient to motivate the change needed.
• majewsky 8y ago
  So RISC-V CPU designers should aim for the developer market then? First win the hearts and minds of developers, then everything else will come.
  • epx 8y ago
    Absolutely yes!
  • dkersten 8y ago
    I guess if nobody wants to develop for it, then it becomes a more difficult business proposition too.
  • amq 8y ago
    But if there is nothing to develop for... Chicken and egg problem. However, I think that Windows on ARM will soon become a real thing, this could bring the developers, it will also help the ARM devices spread among Linux users. Regarding what Linus wrote, I do not buy it. There is so much stuff can run without cross-compilation: js and other scripts, java, c#. Also look at things like Android and iOS, you are already happily developing for ARM, you can develop for servers with the same approach.
    • rjsw 8y ago
      I do buy Linus' argument, you need to be able to do native development. My ARM64 development machine is a Pinebook, ARM32 a Cubietruck. Both have only 2GB of RAM and could really do with more. At least the Cubietruck has SATA so mine has a SSD.
      • scarface74 8y ago
        iOS developers develop on x86 computers and deploy to ARM computers all of the time. But, most developers don’t need to do native development.
      • sam_lowry_ 8y ago
        I am pretty happy to develop on ODROID-C2 as well. But we are a minority.
• rvwaveren 8y ago
  Interesting theory. I wonder then what will happen when Macbooks start shipping with >A12 CPUs [1], will we see more ARM based servers then? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X
  • Shivetya 8y ago
    I am so not looking forward to Apple leaving the x86 space behind. I really do not want to wait years for software to catch up nor leave behind the options I have today for "an improved user experience" which is just walling the desktop off too.
  • abitoffthetop 8y ago
    It literally won't matter, as Linus explained. As the infrastructure will be x86. This is what he's saying. Unless a new paradigm emerges on drastically different tech, ARM has too far to go to catch up to create an isomorphic environment where the code is created. A few tenths of a percent of mac developers won't make a jot of difference.
    • readittwice 8y ago
      Not sure that's what he was saying. I understood that instead of targeting the server-market directly first, he recommends that it would be better to target the developer market first. And if it's popular there, it will naturally bubble up from there into the server market. Sure it will take more than a few tenth of a percent of mac developers but it won't need total domination like x86 either. But just imagine if Apple really just switches its MacBook (not even the Air or Pro ones) to ARM64 that would already be millions of users. A lot of devs will at least try to compile their app for that platform for the first time. Quite some developers will be curious and get one just to test their software on it. I am pretty sure this is going to help the adoption of ARM64 way more than a slightly improved CPU or another experimental support by a cloud provider. Personally I don't care too much about ARM64's success (although more competition would certainly be great), I am more rooting for RISC-V and I hope they follow a more developer-first strategy.
  • 8y ago
• alanfranzoni 8y ago
  Site is down. Anyone's got a mirror/outline?
  • gghootch 8y ago
    http://web.archive.org/web/20190222120214/https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183486 http://web.archive.org/web/20190222120214/https://www.realwo...
• amelius 8y ago
  > Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). But developers can ssh to the cloud, and develop there, right?
  • oblio 8y ago
    And he's wrong. In the enterprise, the vast majority of devs are on Windows, for Java for example. That doesn't mean that their deployment target is Windows, most of the time it's Linux. And the development differences, chance of bugs, performance profiles are way different between OSes than they are between CPU architectures.
    • MaulingMonkey 8y ago
      I can install a reasonably performing x86 Linux VM on an x86 Windows host. If the same can be said for an ARM VM on an x86 host, please share how, I'd love to learn that trick.
      • oblio 8y ago
        Most of those enterprise devs don't even get to touch the test/staging/prod environment, yet they still do their jobs. Regarding the VM, today I guess it would be a bit ugly through Qemu but tooling is always solved if there's a need.
        • MaulingMonkey 8y ago
          > Most of those enterprise devs don't even get to touch the test/staging/prod environment, yet they still do their jobs. They can usually run at least some part of the stack locally. Maybe not the full thing, at least part of it. > Regarding the VM, today I guess it would be a bit ugly through Qemu but tooling is always solved if there's a need. Tooling doesn't magically fix perf. Have you actually tried that specific setup? Searching online I get results like https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/12144 https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/12144 which aren't impressive, and I don't count as "reasonably performing". Those results also jive with my experience - the meager demands of mobile apps are outrageously slow inside an ARM emulator running on x86 every time I've tried it, although I'll admit I haven't tried it on Qemu specifically. I can only imagine the horror of trying to run a full ARM server stack on x86 via emulator - perf is bad enough when it's native. For mobile, the first thing I do is fix the x86 builds (so I can use an x86 device emulator), buy a real ARM device out of my own pocket, and/or educate and/or fire my employer for their outrageously wasteful use of my time if they're serious about me and my coworkers using mobile ARM emulators on x86 for any serious length of time (that kind of waste of expensive resources like developer time can't possibly be a sustainable business decision.)
• enragedcacti 8y ago
  I disagree with Linus for a couple of reasons. The main one being that not every service in a product needs to be running ARM for it to be useful. There is nothing preventing heterogenous solutions in the cloud and if third parties vet their code on ARM then deploying your DBMS on ARM and your web server on x86 (or whatever services most of your business logic is in) is totally valid for cost or performance reasons. Secondly, it seems likely that there will be ARM MacBooks by 2020, that kind of instant market penetration for arm in the dev space might mean the exact opposite of what he's saying; why would I deploy on x86 when all of my development is on my ARM machine already?
  • seotut2 8y ago
    For your second point, Linus has already mentioned it here : https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183500 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpost...
  • Spooky23 8y ago
    Apple hasn’t touched the Unix parts of MacOS in a long time. I’d assume whatever they ship will be some sort of hybrid that may not make developers happy.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      UNIX is not a synonym for developers. Developers on the Apple eco-system care very little for those UNIX parts.
  • rythie 8y ago
    Your second point is just re-enforcing what he said. If MacBooks move ARM, they will have solved developer piece. Since so many developers use Apple stuff, ARM will be native and servers would follow. In the 90s you could see a shift from people having a SPARC workstation in their office for service development, to just using a x86 PC with Linux or Windows on. Then after while developing for Linux/x86 and deploying to Solaris/SPARC made little sense, so you just put it on Linux/x86 in the end. The thing is maybe 95% of things just work and you spend all your time sorting the other 5%.
• k_bx 8y ago
  Same reason why Ubuntu became so popular on servers. Good point.
  • cm2187 8y ago
    And the whole point of docker.
  • bunnycorn 8y ago
    No, Ubuntu became popular on the servers because of the immense documentation, and better maintained repositories.
• fersab 8y ago
  Man, he STILL, sounds like an angry teenager....
  • rat9988 8y ago
    He doesn't use any injure, but still doesn't know how to answer without being agressive.
• mangecoeur 8y ago
  Well all the kids are learning programming with ARM-based RPis so...
  • mtgx 8y ago
    That's probably the strongest counter-argument. New generations will learn programming on Arm and RISC-V (whether it's something like an iPad or a Raspberry Pi). Linus very much sounds like a grumpy old man saying "get off of my lawn!" (as he usually does).
    • deng 8y ago
      Well, it's difficult to not get grumpy when you hear the same promises for many years. It's not like "ARM for servers" is something new. The exact same things were already promised over a decade ago, and somehow, it never really came to pass. And I think his reasons are spot on: aside from very specific workloads, it just did not make sense to buy ARM-based servers. They were usually not much cheaper, and they usually did not save much power, compared to x86-based machines. Combine that with cross-development, and you have a loser.
      • AstralStorm 8y ago
        Exactly. Modern X86-64 chips got improved power saving, more cores to increase density at reduced power cost, much more powerful GPU for running compute. Plus, server space buyers are conservative, they want support of a big company behind their hardware. Someone the size of Cisco, Dell or HP. Or hardware that is used by Google or Microsoft. Combine that with anticompetitive long term agreements and you get the picture. Somehow network routers have a variety of architectures inside and nobody has a problem - because they have a bunch of reputable companies behind each of them. (Variants of MIPS, ARM, ARM64 and x86 are in the wild.)
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Yeah, but it seems unlikely that many of them are learning in languages or environments where the arch really makes any difference. If the dominant OS on RPi was RiscOS (a man can dream...) it might be a different story.
• deng 8y ago
  He is right. I'm still waiting for that ARM-based laptop with awesome battery life, which can run a proper OS with good speed and hence is not just a toy. Apple switching to ARM won't make much difference since I gather it will only run OSX, which will probably be pretty much iOS at that time. Yes, you will probably be able to run Linux on that thing, but almost nobody will actually do it because it makes much more sense to buy a cheaper x86-based machine instead. Yes, there are ARM-based laptops running Windows, and they are a joke. For instance, c't just tested the Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS, and it's a disaster, plain and simple.
  • clouddrover 8y ago
    Apple's A12X CPU is competitive with the Intel CPUs they're currently using in their laptops: https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/01/ipad-pro-a12x-benchmarks-rival-macbook-pros-with-intel-core-i7-cpus/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/01/ipad-pro-a12x-benchmarks-... You'll probably be able to run Windows 10 on a future Apple ARM-based laptop, though I imagine the problem will be getting Windows drivers for the GPU.
    • ferongr 8y ago
      Lol at using Geekbench to compare different architectures.
      • MikusR 8y ago
        https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...
  • AstralStorm 8y ago
    If Apple makes such hardware, it will be just a matter of time to port Linux to it. Probably easier than getting it to run on yet another weird internal architecture of a smartphone. And you can run Linux on that Yoga. It's just Windows for ARM that is the disaster...
• acomjean 8y ago
  linus worked at a 'failed' intel competitor "transmeta", which was trying to make low powered chips. intel/amd are tough competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta
  • rbanffy 8y ago
    They still aimed to run x86 binary code through an emulator layer on a VLIW CPU.
  • pickle-wizard 8y ago
    I remember the Transmeta processor, they were neat. I only ever saw 1 Transmeta PC in the wild. IIRC it was a Sony sub notebook. Of course it was running in x86 mode and running Windows. I got to mess with it a bit and for the time it was a pretty good machine.
    • mempko 8y ago
      I saw an insane amount of Transmeta PCs in Japan circa 2005 during the "netbook era" running Windows. It was quite a surprise.
• wallflower 8y ago
  Lest we forget, ARM has problems with instruction ordering not happening the way programmers might assume in certain cases. https://preshing.com/20121019/this-is-why-they-call-it-a-weakly-ordered-cpu https://preshing.com/20121019/this-is-why-they-call-it-a-wea... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4673458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4673458
  • jchb 8y ago
    ARM doesn't ”have a problem” with the ordering. Rather, those CPUs take advantage of the re-ordering allowed by the specified ordering constraints. The behaviour is entirely expected. The default option for those c++ atomic operations is the strongest constraint (memory_order_seq_cst) - a programmer who specifies a more relaxed constraint better have a good reason for it.
    • AstralStorm 8y ago
      Usually the problem is that it exposes latent software bugs hidden by x86 strong guarantees on memory access ordering and cache validity. Not that someone misused atomics, butt rather does not use them at all and "it works".
• swebs 8y ago
  >If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment) ... This is true even if what you mostly do is something ostensibly cross-platform like just run perl scripts or whatever. Simply because you'll want to have as similar an environment as possible Eh, Android's existence is a pretty big counterpoint to that. And you could just run an ARM VM on your desktop if it's that important to you.
• xoa 8y ago
  It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones. That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit >"This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened" right? I mean, I can see arguing that going up into the cloud is different in some ways then going down to smartphones (although the high end ones are now going to outperform plenty of old dev machines in burst power). There are certainly differences in scaling and such. But the maturity of the tech for cross development of high level software isn't the same as it was in that era either. And if we're talking about bottom-to-top revolutions, embedded and smartphones seem to be at a lower level and much higher volume then PCs. Finally there is clearly an upcoming disruptive fusion event coming due to wearable displays. When "mobile" and "PC" gets merged, it certainly looks like ARM is in a strongly competitive position for some big players, and having more powerful stuff up the stack will matter to them as well. None of which is to say he won't be right at least in the short term, but it still is kind of odd to not even see it addressed at all, not even a handwave.
  • disiplus 8y ago
    but with smartphones you don't have a choice. so it's different.
    • deng 8y ago
      > but with smartphones you don't have a choice. so it's different. Exactly. Linus' point is that Arm has no real advantage in the server space to compensate for the problems with cross-development. That's completely different for smartphones, which is why Arm won that space.
      • pjc50 8y ago
        When Apple replace Intel with ARM in their laptops, that goes away too. (See my argument elsewhere in this thread)
• wyldfire 8y ago
  > as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable. I tend to agree that it will suffer. But you can get ARM chromebooks, a bunch of vendors offer ARM-based Windows laptops, and Apple is planning on leveraging their SoC on OS X computers. So it may not necessarily be cross-development for long.
• jacknews 8y ago
  Except that doesn't quite explain why soo many developers use macbooks (OS/X), yet deploy on Linux. Personally I think ARM could be leapfrogged by RISC-V, though it will take longer than people predict.
  • lugg 8y ago
    The ops guys use Linux.
    • rbanffy 8y ago
      After SSH was invented, I can use anything (my corporate laptop is a Mac, my personal ones are Linux-running x86's). To be fair, I was using anything when telnet was not considered suicidal.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I'm curious why you believe that. Aside from the hype and the association with the word "open", I honestly can't think of anything interesting or important about RISC-V.
    • rbanffy 8y ago
      It'll be big in embedded, where IP licensing is a significant part of the end price.
    • jacknews 8y ago
      There seem to be a few indications that there is opportunity for change, and RISC-V could make gains, eg https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/02/05/the-era-of-general-purpose-computers-is-ending/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/02/05/the-era-of-general-p... https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful/ https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful...
  • yaantc 8y ago
    > ARM could be leapfrogged by RISC-V For the low-end deeply embedded space, I could see RISC V becoming a significant player in the next 5 years. ARM is relatively expensive there (it's cheap compared to Intel for servers, but at the low end it's more the IBM of Microsoft of old), and there's less need for their ecosystem (most 3rd party software is open source). The Cortex M are less flexible then some competitors in their configuration, and designing good small CPU IP is doable at the low end. So all the small custom designers (Andes, BA semi, Cortus...) can rally around RISC V and have cheap and flexible design, with a good shared software ecosystem. Today it's still one or the other. At the high-end it's very different. To be competitive one has to take advantage of the latest process nodes, and work well ahead of time with fabs and EDA vendors on the next node(s). This is highly labor intensive, and it takes deep pockets and a lot of resources. ARM is already there, and well entrenched. Getting enough money to replicate this on the RISC V side will take a loooooong while, if it ever happens. Unless a deep pocketed company decides to use RISC V and go their own way, but it seems very unlikely. Look at how even Qualcomm reduced its work on custom ARM cores for their high end, and now do tweaks on ARM designs. But personally I'm fine with this. It's mostly at the low end / embedded that I feel there's a need for more competition.
• titzer 8y ago
  > Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. > That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). This is why having a compilation target that works the same way everywhere would be so valuable. We're some ways away from this, but I think WebAssembly offers hope here. As for the rest of the article, it'd be best if we could have a discussion style where people don't preemptively paint people who disagree with them, or who have a different perspective, strategy, or end goal, as "idiotic" and "stupid", or posit that people have a "total disconnect to reality." This is known as poisoning the well. It does not advance the discussion. In fact it is specifically designed to limit and stop the discussion. The reality is that it simply makes people angry and polarized, amps up the stakes, and ultimately leads to a toxic culture. Thankfully, I think HN has a better culture. Linus can do better, IMO.
  • jeremyjh 8y ago
    > This is why having a compilation target that works the same way everywhere would be so valuable. We're some ways away from this, but I think WebAssembly offers hope here. Why does WebAssembly offer more hope than the JVM, or interpreted languages that we already have? It will still have to interop with native libraries to get work done.
    • titzer 8y ago
      It's lower level than the JVM and more of an abstraction over hardware. So native libraries can be compiled directly into it, so everything can interop on top of Wasm.
      • rat9988 8y ago
        >>more of an abstraction over hardware Same can be said for jvm.
        • 8y ago
• glenrivard 8y ago
  The services in the cloud will be what moves to ARM and eventually RISC-V. So things like Spanner or AWS Aurora. Everything changes when you have huge cloud providers that have skin in the game to lower cost. Why you see things like TPUs already. We have barely even got started with the big cloud providers creating their own chips to drive down cost. I do hope RISC-V continues to come along. It does have the momentum right now to get there.
• nailer 8y ago
  > And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on". Linus is overestimating the amount of native code being produced.
• _ph_ 8y ago
  I agree with Linus so far, as that the old RISC vendors got killed, because there were only a few, if any, offerings for consumers. Less so because of the code migration issues, but rather, because the volume of processor production was to low to compete with Intel back then. However, there is an elephant in the room today: smartphones. ARM processors are suddenly a huge market, allowing for higher R&D expenses. And basically everyone already owns an ARM-powered device, most developers are actually developing for ARM today when they build apps. So, and there I agree with Linus again, what is a bit missing is ARM-based desktop hardware. The best thing ARM could do to push their cloud processors would be to make affordable motherboards with their processors available to hobbyists and enthusiasts. But ARM is coming to the desktop anyway, be it through the ARM-based Windows laptops or that Apple builds an ARM-based Mac. And then the x86-architecture will come under severe pressure.
  • rbanffy 8y ago
    It'd be great if Sun had a Niagara box priced like a PC when that chip was first launched. I bet our software would be running much better on multicore machines today. Maybe languages such as Rust would have been created sooner. I remember joking that writing code for the Xeon Phi would be useful because that was probably what a Core i15 would look like. Now we have Xeon Platinums with similar core/thread counts, but only on the very high end while 8-thread machines are mainstream with 12 being seemingly the next step. On ARM we have something interesting with the asymmetric cores, something Intel has only hinted they plan to pursue. Some tasks can go to slower cores that sip power while others may be better suited to beefy cores that can do speculative execution on deep pipelines and that could heat a small house.
• throw2016 8y ago
  Lots of users mucked around with arm boards years ago untill most realised this wasn't something Arm was interested in with no drivers and those that existed not optimized for performance. It was all a hack with open source developers being kicked like footballs from ARM to SOC vendors and back. Interest waned. A NUC can be had for about $120 that sips power and has full hardware support for storage, pcie, graphics and is seamlessly compatible with the entire software ecosystem. ARM is more comfortable with vendors ie soc, routers, nas vendors than supporting an open platform with access to optimized drivers and off the shelf parts. Thus the entire mobile ecosystem is closed and tightly controlled. Even early devboard makers like Odroid have moved to an Intel platform for their latest N1 dev board.
  • imtringued 8y ago
    I've come to the conclusion that neither ARM nor the actual SoC vendors are interested in desktop or server hardware. The majority have canceled their server projects or sold them off.
• mgamache 8y ago
  Well AWS/MS might disagree as they are adding arm servers: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/amazon/aws-launches-cloud-instances-powered-custom-arm-chips https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/amazon/aws-launches-clou... https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/03/13/arm-servers-can-soon-power-half-of-microsoft-data-center-muscle https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/03/13/arm-... right now these are niche servers (much like the first x86 servers years ago)
• cyberpanther 8y ago
  This is why if Apple ever did a legitimate server offering with virtualization they would kill it. How many devs, develop on Mac and deploy to linux? And also now use VMs for containers. Imagine if MacOS supported containers natively. They leave so much money on the table.
  • sfifs 8y ago
    Very unlikely. "My way or the highway" is ingrained in their corporate DNA. Can't think of an attitude less suited for server side work where optimization to custom workloads makes massive cost difference
  • musicale 8y ago
    Are you arguing for native macOS containers (like Windows containers but for the Xnu kernel rather than NT kernel?) or for macOS to somehow support Linux containers (and system calls) "natively," more like BSD's Linux system call emulation and Windows' so-called "Windows Subsystem for Linux?"
• hawski 8y ago
  For this to happen we would have to use our phones as workstations - just connect monitor and input devices. That's current mission of Rob Landley with his Toybox project ¹. Years ahead of us, but probably will happen. Makes projects like Librem 5, Pinephone and Pinebook crucial in the long run. ¹ http://landley.net/toybox/about.html http://landley.net/toybox/about.html - see the Why section
• stunt 8y ago
  When reading it, please keep in mind that the HN title is not part of his message or what he actually mentioned. He is talking about cross-development issues in ARM ecosystem. He has valid points and good suggestions.
• alexandernst 8y ago
  Vast majority of "cloud" user develop and deploy code written on languages that have "no idea" what architecture the CPU is running on. Eg, I code on Python/Django. Why would I care even a little bit about what set of instructions the CPU of my EC2 instance has? I don't. Because Python/Django will run exactly the same way on x86 and on ARM.
  • rbanffy 8y ago
    Now imagine some non x86 vendor adds a couple instructions that make Python code miraculously faster. Wouldn't you want that server?
    • alexandernst 8y ago
      Sure. But that's not my point. My point is that the entire argument that Linus has about users willing to test and deploy code on the same arch is flawed. I'd understand and agree with that argument if we we're talking about developing and deploying C (which is what Linus is used to), but that's just not how "the cloud" is used.
• solatic 8y ago
  I disagree with Linus here, in large part because modern system architectures are so distributed. There are so many parts of modern deployments which are not developed in-house anymore. Databases, organizational productivity software, monitoring systems... the list goes on. So let's say the developers of PostgreSQL or Prometheus or JIRA or Mattermost or any one of numerous others were to come to their audience and say, "we support ARM 100%, you can run our software on ARM in production with no issues, and in fact it's the favored deployment model because it'll cut a significant slice off your operating costs." Does Linus seriously think that, what, customers aren't going to run ARM servers because they can't run the vendor's binary on their development machines? Maybe there's a chicken-or-the-egg problem here. But just off the bat, PostgreSQL and Prometheus are both supported and built for ARM. There are non-official binaries available for many other projects. Developers are using cheap Raspberry PIs as local desktop development platforms. The more development the ARM ecosystem sees, the easier it'll be for enterprises to justify moving away from x86.
  • readittwice 8y ago
    > Developers are using cheap Raspberry PIs as local desktop development platforms. IMHO this is still a problem, it is easy to get RPi-style devices but for development a more powerful device would be great, however this is much harder to get. Sure, cross-compilation works but is usually tedious to setup and work with. I've had the chance to work on one of these powerful ARM servers for some time. I was connected via ssh and mostly working with tmux+vim, I could compile natively with all these available cores and memory - development was a breeze. Nevertheless there were some pain points compared to x86: Often no ARM64 binary packages, except for the packages provided by the distro. No precompiled binaries. Software wasn't working/building e.g. because Fedora on ARM64 uses 64K page size. perf didn't support as many performance counters as on x86. Sometimes I would've really liked to use rr (the reverse debugger) but it only supports x86. Pretty sure I've encountered more pain points that I don't remember and also I think I didn't discover all of them. Development is almost exclusively done on x86. So it is only natural that x86 is the most tested and optimized architecture. This wouldn't be a problem if your offering would be much better/cheaper in some way and although I think ARM servers can compete in certain areas it doesn't seem to provide enough benefit to be worth the trouble. I agree with Linus that they should be focusing on developers and software and let the machines bubble up into the server segment.
• reacharavindh 8y ago
  The corollary of what Linus says may be true for newcomers as well. If you're selling ARM/RISC-V laptops, developers will not care because their prod apps are deployed on x86....
  • urmish 8y ago
    typo - devastated -> developer
• johnklos 8y ago
  Linus has been wrong before, but here he is clearly and unambiguously wrong. You don't - you NEVER - develop to the details of an architecture. The only exception is when you're doing OS development. Since things that people want to run in the "cloud" are exceedingly rarely OS development, the idea that you'd care about the architecture is quite silly. We have vendors ardently trying to get us to commit to their specific environments, like NVIDIA, but they've been dropping bricks on their feet by not actively encouraging software developers to not target specific versions of CUDA. Anyone running TensorFlow knows how much this sucks. After a while, people are going to get fed up with the problems that come from a poor yet popular implementation and are going to start preferring less popular, yet less proprietary, more deployable solutions. The idea that Intel and AMD can continue to keep the x86 platform performance advantageous forever is pretty ridiculous. We are already seeing Arm CPUs which are significantly better than x86 in performance per watt. How long will it be until we have high end consumer Arm and low end server Arm that completely overlap x86? One year? Two? Three? Possibly four? x86 isn't over - that's not what's happening here. But it certainly hasn't "won" forever.
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    > You don't - you NEVER - develop to the details of an architecture. You don't try to develop to the details of an architecture. You even try not to. Then you try to run it on a different architecture, and you find (some of) the places you developed to your specific architecture even though you didn't mean to. And that's why Linus is right. It's easy to be architecture-specific by accident. It's really hard to not. And it's going to take time and effort to go to a different architecture. In the real world, few people want to waste their time doing that.
• pdpi 8y ago
  The fact that my local CPU is a different ISA from the server is barely a consideration after I've already had to account for the fact that the database is local instead of remote, that I'm using PCIe-attached storage instead of a network-mounted volume, that my local workload is wildly different from the deployment environment's... Ultimately, cross-development is much more meaningful as a software problem than it is as a hardware problem — but, given the popularity of macOS as a development environment, it seems clear that we're happy developing on something unix-y and deploying to another brand of unix-y something-or-other. Linus is then ignoring the single biggest factor in this equation: performance-per-watt. ARM offers better performance/watt numbers than anything Intel can provide right now. Recent offerings on the server space suggest ARM is managing to scale up without sacrificing too much on that front, and Intel doesn't seem to be keeping up. If you're operating a data centre, power supply is the single hardest limit to your capacity to scale up. Putting up another building at a pre-existing site is cheaper and easier than finding a way to pipe more power into it, so it doesn't even matter that much that servers are individually less powerful. Google is investing in ARM, Facebook is investing in ARM, and I can only imagine several other big players are looking into it too. I wouldn't write it off this easily.
• gok 8y ago
  Native development is interesting to kernel developers much more so than the average server software developer. Most server code is CPU architecture independent, and largely operating system independent. It's written in Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP. Most of it is also already cross-developed on macOS or Windows, then deployed on Linux. The fact that all 3 run x86 doesn't make this much easier. Increasingly it's also targeting server-specialized hardware that isn't practical to carry with you (8 GPUs won't fit in a laptop, and Google won't even let buy their TPUs) If CPU-native development is important, that's actually a good sign for ARM servers. Laptops and desktops are increasingly going to be ARM powered over the next few years.
• antirez 8y ago
  It's extremely hard to agree with Linus on that. One problem in his argument is that he believes that everybody has a kernel hacker mindset: most today's developers don't care about environment reproducibility at architecture level. The second problem is that he believes that every kind of development is as platform sensitive as kernel hacking, and he even makes the example of Perl scripts. The reality is that one year ago I started the effort to support ARM as a primary architecture for Redis, and all I had to do is to fix the unaligned accesses, that are anyway fixed in ARM64 almost entirely, and almost fixed also in ARM >= v7 if I remember correctly, but for a subset of instructions (double words loads/stores). Other than that, Redis, that happens to be a low level piece of code, just worked on ARM, with all the tests passing and no stability problems at all. I can't relate to what Linus says there. If a low level piece of code written in C, developed for many years without caring about ARM, just worked almost out of the box, I can't see the Ruby or Node application to fail once uploaded to an ARM server.
  • mcv 8y ago
    I'm a web developer, and for years now I've been developing on either Mac or Windows, but deploying to Linux servers. Or possibly totally different kinds of servers. I don't care much about the architecture of the server as long as it runs my code. Give me Apache, JVM, node, and the necessary build and deploy tools, and there's nothing I can't run on it.
  • fmajid 8y ago
    Linux' point is that there is hardly any developer-class ARM machines available, just RaspberryPi-class SBCs that use mobile SOCs with the performance of a 2012 vintage smartphone, nothing with the grunt of a Qualcomm Centriq or Cavium ThunderX.
  • 013a 8y ago
    It seems likely that, simply, times have changed. There was a time when being on the same platform as the deployment environment was super important, but nowadays the tooling has gotten so much better that it matters a lot less. The proportion of people still writing C code on a day to day basis has dropped... well to pretty much a rounding error. The bigger issue is really that ARM servers aren't that much cheaper than x86 servers today, and its very likely a lot of that difference in cost is just Intel's synthetic market advantage that would disappear if ARM actually started becoming a threat (which has already started happening due to AMD becoming a threat). Phoronix did a synthetic benchmark of AWS's A1 instances, versus the C5 Intel and C5A AMD instances [1]; they're nothing special at all, even with price taken into account. Maybe that'll change in the future, but now that AMD is in a competitive state, that's pushing Intel into high-gear and its hard to say that ARM will have any effect on the server market in the short-term. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-graviton-performance&num=5 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-grav...
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  Ok. Perhaps ARM won't. But what about RISC-V? Aren't RISC-V laptops and servers going to start conquering the markets soon?
  • lunchables 8y ago
    I really encourage you to read his entire post. There's a critical part of it where he says: > And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on". So sure, if RISC-V laptops become inexpensive and accessible for developers so they can develop and target the same platforms, absolutely, it _could_ take over.
    • qwerty456127 8y ago
      I've read it. And as far as I knos RISC-V systems are meant to be inexpensive.
• justaaron 8y ago
  ...except that ARM laptops and desktops are the next wave, as ARM dominates mobile devices and tablets already, it's sneaking up on Linus from behind. Additionally, Linux is the server platform, abstracting the ISA to a large degree, particularly with regards to what most people consider web applications development, tooling, etc. Docker and Kubernetes serves as this paper for many, as well. This all will matter in the coming rise of Risc-V devices, as this ISA begins to eat parts of the ARM empire. Linus would know a thing or two about challenging X86 (transmeta) and this probably shows in his display of his emotional wounds. I don't think his fear holds for all time nor in the coming decade.
  • yalogin 8y ago
    He is right though from a historical perspective. All he is saying is x86 won over the server space because its where people develop. If the arm development platform becomes a thing, then he will be proven right again. I have a slightly different take. Arm on the server has a chance now because cloud and thin clients are increasingly common and so even your "at home" machine, as he calls it, could be in the cloud, the same arm machine used for deployment.
  • linuxftw 8y ago
    From the post: > I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable. He's saying that until ARM platform arrives on desktop, it's unlikely to be successful in the server market. He's not making any assumptions about whether or not PCs are going to turn to ARM.
• YUMad 8y ago
  The Age Of Linus ended last year. I am not taking him seriously after the sjw debacle. He refused to switch to gpl3 back in the day because 'it would be impossible to contact all contributors and get their permission' but last year he suddenly didn't need the same.
• reacweb 8y ago
  I am in the mindset that arm servers are the future. I have already some sites on arm. The issues with IME give a bad image of Intel. Monopolys are never good... But when Linus says: "And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on"." It matches my mindset. I am also looking for the good arm laptop. I do not need anything fancy: 4GB of ram (or better), 64GB SSD, wifi, bluetooth, usb (3 if possible), audio jack, good screen, usable keyboard, good touchpad.
• Proven 8y ago
  And last time he thought Transmeta was a good idea.
• thecompilr 8y ago
  I have to strongly disagree with Linus here. While he got the history up to this point right, in the present it is very easy to develop for multiple platforms at once. CI platforms make it super easy. Cloudflare made a big effort to make all software run on x86 and aarch64, and it wasn't that hard at all. Most things today work out of the box. Many things that don't work, were not very robust to begin with, and fixing them to work on both platforms only made the software better as a whole. Cloudflare could move to ARM servers in a days' notice, and would already do that if Qualcomm hasn't closed the Centriq shop. The only real advantage I see for Intel today is AVX512, which can't be beat for some workloads, SVE would be able to compete for some workloads, but not all. However most workloads don't use vector processing instructions anyway. Still, I hope ARM improves their SIMD architecture further. As for the ALU performance difference, it is very easy to bridge. As evident by Apple's CPUs and Qualcomm Centriq simply having four ALU units gets you to about the same ALU performance as Intel. Branch prediction, cache performance and the interconnect are still much better at Intel processors. However Intel already peaked branch prediction performance, so the difference can only get smaller with time.
  • jlouis 8y ago
    The CI angle was my first bet as well. You build and test in the cloud nowadays. Heck, you might develop on MacOS, and deploy on Linux. There are places where it matter, SIMD processing for instance, or low-level kernel development. But if you are on any kind of VM system, or ecosystem with a good compiler history, you are likely to have a smooth ride. If, in addition, the price point of the ARM machines are at 2/3 of the X86-64 ones, you are in trouble. x86 had another important point up its sleeve: price. And I might expect this was a confounding variable in Linus argument. Not only did you have the x86 at home. It was also like 1/8th of the price of an Alpha, PA-RISC or Sparc machine in price point. And at the time, x86 was dog slow compared to Alpha, and its I/O was laughable compared to HPPA/Sun. If you have a sizeable invoice at AWS, and you can shave the EC2 price by 2/3rds, you are going to have a lot of wiggle room to make sure your system runs on that aarch64.
• nfriedly 8y ago
  I just read something this morning that Apple is looking at switching Macs to ARM. So, if that happens, an ARM server will match what at least some developers are using.
• bni 8y ago
  People will run their Java Scripts on whatever architecture AWS provides for them. Do Linus really think the bulk of developers, the line of business developing kind, cares or even knows what CPU architecture is running beneath it all?
• ken 8y ago
  > That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). I know lots of developers who work on macOS, and deploy to Linux. Back when Mac was PowerPC, I knew lots of developers who worked on PowerPC, and deployed to x86. Or worked on 32-bit, and deployed to 64-bit. Or worked on single-core, and deployed to multi-core. Or green threads to kernel threads. Or big RAM to small RAM. Or the opposite of all of these. This disaster he anticipates just doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. It's nice when your server is exactly the same as your workstation, but it's never been required. Even today, I have x86-64 on my desk and x86-64 on my server, but they're not the same CPUs, and they don't have the same features (or core count, or RAM, or OS, or ...). > Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which means that they'll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff). Are databases also "mindless dregs"? There's a lot of Postgres/MySQL/Mongo/... instances out there, and even if you're worried about the costs of porting, you only need to port those once (which AFAICT is already done for all of the major ones). If my database service told me they could cut my price by moving my Postgres instance to ARM, I'd click that button in a heartbeat. I have zero fear that anything would be fishy due to it being a different architecture than my workstation. > Do you really not understand? This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened, and what killed all the RISC vendors, and made x86 be the undisputed king of the hill of servers, to the point where everybody else is just a rounding error. I've worked with many companies, and in every case, going with x86 was 100% because of price. We didn't avoid SPARC or POWER or Itanium servers because of endianness or any other technical reason. It was just a lot more expensive. Likewise, we switched the servers to 64-bit when it was cost effective, not at the same time that our workstations switched.
• alkonaut 8y ago
  I think this ignores the fact that these devs just write some js and push it to some cloud server and it uses APIs for storage on some other server. The person running the infra for S3 or GitHub needs to think like Linus because they need to worry about that system level compatibility. But if I write an app using say node+s3 I trust that even though I develop on x86 I can run it under node on Arm.
  • judge2020 8y ago
    I think he tries to address this but fails to acknowledge it elsewhere. > This is true even if what you mostly do is something ostensibly cross-platform like just run Perl scripts or whatever. Simply because you'll want to have as similar an environment as possible, I guess if you're doing stuff with low-level packages using node-gyp or C++ bindings then sure, but pure node-based workloads don't care about the architecture and, as you said, are expected to work everywhere.
• chubot 8y ago
  I feel this is why Ubuntu is one of the most popular server distros. Ubuntu is pretty unsuited for servers IMO. It's just complex and error-prone, IMO. The packages aren't always server-quality. But it's great for the desktop IMO, because Canonical actually tests against real hardware for you. So the fact that people use Ubuntu for desktop/laptop development makes it popular in the cloud, which I've always felt was unfortunate. You could do some extra work to test your web app on a more minimal distro or on a BSD, but why bother? Ubuntu works to a degree, so you save that step. Same with x86.
  • doublepg23 8y ago
    Can you expand it on this? I agree that I use Ubuntu on server because I use it on the desktop, that makes sense. However, when I installed Ubuntu Server 18.04 recently it was delightful. There was this simple feature they added which automatically pulled down my ssh key from my GitHub account. During the install it asked me to enable the semi-recent kernel livepatching (and old fashioned unattended-upgrades) it even suggested plexmediaserver as a snap package - which was my goal. Of course installing actual servers is a bit archaic in the age of docker, but it made me feel like I made the right choice of OS.
    • chubot 8y ago
      I guess I'm making an argument around predictability and stability. To be honest I haven't used Ubuntu as a server in several years. Maybe they have improved things. But I think they can mostly improve things "on top", but not the foundations. Patching over problems by adding layers on top generally isn't great for stability, and is bad for debuggability. I'm comparing Ubuntu to BSDs, where there's actually a manual, and files are put in consistent places. (as far as I understand, I have less experience with them.) It's also most of the same reasons that Docker switched its default image from Ubuntu to Alpine some years ago. Alpine is just smaller and makes more sense. Ubuntu does a lot but it's also sprawling and inconsistent. Off the top of my head: - Starting services is a weird mix of init scripts and Upstart. And now they're switching to systemd. When they switch they don't update all the packages. There are some weird compatibility shims. - When you apt-get install apache2, it actually starts the daemon. (This is a problem with both Debian and Ubuntu.) This is bad from a security perspective. A lot of people don't know what's running on their systems in practice and what ports are open, and then they have to set up an extra firewall, which is more complexity. - the file system is generally a mess, e.g. /etc. There seem to be multiple locations for everything, e.g. bash completion scripts. I think this is a function of the packages being old and patched over. In general the documentation feels scattered and incomplete. The common practice seems to be googling stuff and pasting things in random files until it works. And then automating that with a Docker container. That's now traditionally how servers were administered pre-Google :) System administration knowledge / quality seems to have taken a nosedive with the rise of the cloud and cheap hosting. I'm not saying that it's all bad, but it's a downside. The great thing about Debian and Ubuntu is that there is so much software packaged for it. I think that's generally the reason that people use it. There is a network effect in the package ecosystem.
• ypolito 8y ago
  My phone is more powerful than my previous decade server. If smartphones came with display ports, many more people could have a PC experience without having a PC.
• purplezooey 8y ago
  The mixing in of reader abuse is really off putting. "do you really not understand?" etc. I know, I know, it's been discussed a thousand times, but still.
  • stevep98 8y ago
    Seems like he didn't change his tone much after his time-off. https://gizmodo.com/linux-founder-takes-some-time-off-to-learn-how-to-stop-1829105667 https://gizmodo.com/linux-founder-takes-some-time-off-to-lea...
  • timmytokyo 8y ago
    I find that it makes him less persuasive. When a writer resorts to personal invective to make an argument the way Linus does, it's a tacit admission that he can't do it solely with evidence and sound logic. He's beating the reader over the head with insults to "win". In the process, he undermines the strong points he does make.
  • Tistel 8y ago
    Yeah, he just sounds like an angry "get off my lawn!" guy. Even if he has good points, he losses you because its all so rude. I don't understand why he has so much anger. He made a huge impact on the tech world, has a family/kids. I hope he made some loot of linux. He needs to learn to meditate or something. Dude, just be happy. Hardly anyone cares about the CPU anymore (I have been writing code for > 20 years, 13 of which was low level C/C++) outside of OSes and drivers. Its like 98% high level, warm and fuzzy, languages now. It's great.
• jlarocco 8y ago
  > I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable. Even if that's technically true, there's no reason there can't be ARM workstations. There aren't many because they're still generally slower, but there's no fundamental reason (that I know of) why an ARM workstation can't work just as well as an x86 workstation in almost every case.
  • numbsafari 8y ago
    Intel is already anticipating Apple moving to ARM for “desktop”. Chromebooks already run a mix. He’ll be right until he is wrong.
    • cthalupa 8y ago
      He'll still be right, even then. His core argument is that until there are ARM computers that developers are working on in some real quantity, ARM in the server space has no chance. If that happens, then by his argument they now have a chance.
      • yoz-y 8y ago
        It seems that the title gives a different meaning to the words he actually said.
  • 51lver 8y ago
    Does your boss have a neice that can fix your arm bootloader? He probably has one that can fix your windows bootloader. This stuff was "dark arts" that we committed to muscle memory in the 90s, and no normal mere mortal will ever learn why the safe mode menu existed, how to hotkey into a boot selection menu, or to boot up a live disk to restore system files. None of that is possible with, say, u-boot. You need to know the kernel load addr, the partition layout, and a ton of crap that just isn't portable from one device to another, and that that's AFTER your done fighting the thing for root access! Arm workstations Just Won't Work the same way those super permissive x86 workstations did, and that will make them crap for developing on.
  • 8y ago
• randomsearch 8y ago
  Companies care more about price than replicability. Almost all the processor market is ARM already. Scale wins. ARM desktops are likely if not inevitable. X86 is not one unified platform. Cloud hardware will become specialised and not like the hardware in your desktop.
• shepardrtc 8y ago
  Modern DevOps and CICD should be able to abstract this away. Devs can develop on whatever they want and then push to ARM or x86 servers.
  • the8472 8y ago
    That's assuming you're not using any libraries that contain hand-optimized SIMD where one platform is better supported than the other.
    • shepardrtc 8y ago
      Well, if https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS is any indication, you can just recompile the library for ARM. A proper pipeline would recompile everything on the appropriate platform without any developer intervention.
• microcolonel 8y ago
  While it's not strictly the case, I'll tend to agree that I have a big productivity advantage by sharing an architecture between my workstation and my server. I want a RISC-V workstation, and if the counterpart on the server side existed, that'd probably be the change I'd make (if any).
• dfabulich 8y ago
  Linus is right that ARM won't win "as long as everybody does cross-development." And that's why ARM will win. Apple will ship MacBooks on ARM in 2020, which will have comparable performance with superior battery life. Windows-based laptop vendors will switch to ARM to catch up; the desktop market will follow the laptop market, as it already does. ARM's performance-per-watt advantages already make it a compelling cross-compile target today; when everybody's developing on ARM, it will be a no-brainer.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  With serverless, language VM's and other abstractions, I suggest this argument is going away. People are not generally writing platform specific anything these days, this would be an exception not the rule. That said, there are a lot of things that need to be done under the hood to facilitate 'our view on the world on ARM' ... and it might take time. Once AWS starts to release a bunch of stuff on ARM - and the stacks we love and need are solid on them ... I suggest that could be the ARM wave that changes serverland.
• jammygit 8y ago
  Honest question: why is it not viable to run an ARM virtual machine for your development purposes - is it not accurate enough?
  • snarfy 8y ago
    Not fast enough. Performance is king during development.
• acd 8y ago
  If developers switches to ARM/RISC in their laptops then arm will win. Arm is also power efficient and there is global warming.
• hyperman1 8y ago
  Does someone know why ARM servers try to behave like intel servers. ARM's forte is in tons of lightweight cores, compared to intel's small number of powerfull cores. There are tons of small mom n pop websites that have short burst of usages, followed by long bursts of calm. So why not give every site on a big server it's own small core, say for 60 seconds? After that you shut the core down, zapping all caches etc... Things like meltdown and spectre simply disappear if the attacking code runs on a different core, so such an architecture would be good at isolating security sensitive data. In these GDPR times, it seems a good match for small sites, and one that Intel can't provide with their good but power-hungry cores.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• zero4ll 8y ago
  ARM laptop and machines are here. Windows on a RaspberryPI is going to make the ARM processor more appealing to the dev market and once more people buy super cheap ARM processors ARM will show up in servers. People will dev for ARM and want ARM servers. Netflix uses pfsense wich is BSD and it runs like a champ on ARM and netgate even makes an ARM based unit that is for small offices and is amazing. ARM laptops also last for like 25 hours so I think people will be switching.
• nickpsecurity 8y ago
  I thought the main reason x86 won was the tie in with Windows PC's and servers. Microsoft took the market. The apps were written for x86. So, most servers are x86. Intel and PC makers also charged less for hardware. I always wanted one of those RISC systems. They cost upper four to five digits. On the high end, NUMA machines cost around six or more digits. People started building Beowulf clusters out of Intel boxes to knock off digits. Clustering got big. So, it was cheaper on small and large end to run Intel. Compatibility with dominant system and low cost. Maybe add that they kept optimizing for workloads like gaming on top of that.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  > and how stupid your argument is Didn't Linus recently go to sensitivity training or something? I think he missed out on the bigger picture. It seems like his argument is more about shaming anyone who disagrees with him, instead of expressing an opinion.
  • nabla9 8y ago
    Calling argument people have stupid is not insensitive or offending (in the love people but hate their ideas sense). People may be offended if they identify their ideas too much, but that's insensitivity from their part.
  • jzl 8y ago
    Was about to say the same thing. Seems like he's slipped right back into his long-established form of discourse. It's always entertaining to read, I'll say that much.
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  ARM is pretty much universally used on mobile these days and also in a fair bit of low end windows and chromebook laptops. With Apple being rumored to launch ARM on desktop and new OSS risc-v chipsets becoming a thing a lot of the arguments that Linus Torvalds is making ring more true looking backwards than forwards. Also WASM is becoming a thing. I don't think it's as black and white as wanting the same CPU and OS on your deployment platform and development platform. When it comes to mobile development, having those two be completely different is the norm. It's not much of a problem in practice. The differences between different platforms with the same cpu architecture and OS from different vendors is a much bigger headache than the difference between each of those and the windows or mac + intel laptops the software is being developed on. The difference between windows and macs still causes some headaches of course but is mostly managable. If it works on Linux it generally also works on mac. And if it doesn't that's a good sign of immaturity. All I'm saying here is that most mainstream technologies work across all three of those without much headaches.
• bboreham 8y ago
  In the version of history I remember, x86 won because it was 2-5 times cheaper than RISC for the same performance, then in performance per Watt once that became the limiting factor. All devs had SPARC machines and no intention to move to x86 on the desktop, until after Intel steamrollered the performance contest.
• Animats 8y ago
  AMD-64 won in the server space. At this point, x86 is just a legacy mode that's still in AMD-64 CPUs.
  • bunnycorn 8y ago
    This, AMD64 killed Ithanium, and that's why "x86" won the server.
    • icedchai 8y ago
      x86 was already on plenty of servers before Itanium. 64-bit hardly mattered until servers with >4 gig RAM became common in the mid 2000's.
• bunnycorn 8y ago
  This will be Linus "640kb ought to be enough for everyone", except that Gates didn't actually said that, and Linus actually wrote this. Someone please tell him what LLVM bytecode is, probably he doesn't know because he uses GCC, Apple showed recently how that can leveredged in scale, with Apple Watch's architecture change overnight. ARM and RISCV are here.
  • jzl 8y ago
    LLVM bytecode is very cool, and arguably evidence that a more generic system could be successful, but it is not considered to be instruction-set agnostic. Yes, it allowed Apple to tweak the cpu in new Apple Watches without requiring updated app submissions, which is great. But it would not support a transition from, for example, x86 to ARM. I've seen this topic discussed multiple times, best summary I could find is from a quora post: Everyone's first thought (including the other two answerers here!) was that this would allow Apple to change processors entirely: if they wanted to make an Intel iPhone, for instance, they could just tell the App Store to start converting apps' bitcode to Intel machine code instead of ARM machine code for the new phones, and every app would instantly be "updated" for the new processor. But in practice, this doesn't seem likely. Even with LLVM's unusually clean separation between frontend and backend, the frontend actually does know certain things about the processor it's targeting (mainly details about its memory layout, or special processor features it can use to make certain code faster). These things get baked into the bitcode, and in practice ensure you can't really mix-and-match frontends and backends as freely as you would like. So suddenly switching processors entirely probably isn't in the cards. What's more likely is that it will allow Apple to make smaller improvements to their processors and then roll them out to existing apps. ...
• flying_sheep 8y ago
  However this does not apply to consumer product, e.g. iOS. When building iOS app for simulator, it is running x86_64 natively in the macOS. When building iOS app for device, it is compiled into ARMv64. Cross-compilation happens every day of iOS development. And the process is 99.9% problem-free. The 0.1% problem comes from missing physical feature (e.g. touch screen / gyroscope) rather than instruction set / system issue.
• blackflame7000 8y ago
  I always thought the RaspberryPi was the exact device Linus claims doesn't exist.
• lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  I remember SteveY explaining that Jeff Bezos has an enourmous advantage as a CEO because he had been at the top for so long that he had points of view no one else got. Torvalds seems to me in a similar position
• uniformlyrandom 8y ago
  But if you run your dev environment in the same cloud, doesn’t it void this argument almost completely? The onlything i would run locally would be the frontend, and it is web/mobile anyway.
• avodonosov 8y ago
  People developing on tablets (it's real, quote [0]: "Since 2015 I do most of my software development on an Android tablet. I am a bit fed up with PCs and notebooks, as they are tedious to handle and have too many mechanical parts. A tablet is more convenient, it can be held in one hand, and usually survives if coffee is spilt over it."), have ARM as their development environment, so if the Linus' argument is true, ARM has chances. 0 - https://picolisp.com/wiki/?TermuxPentiPicoLisp https://picolisp.com/wiki/?TermuxPentiPicoLisp
• blinkingled 8y ago
  He didn't even discuss the every ARM board being a snow flake needing its own BSP, custom bootloader, OS distro etc. I am fine with x86 being successful - there are good reasons for it. I don't get why there's this ARM push in the PC and servers market. It's not making anything better.
  • nfriedly 8y ago
    Yea, ARM really needs some standardization around that area.
  • kllrnohj 8y ago
    > I don't get why there's this ARM push in the PC and servers market. It's not making anything better. What push? There's a rumor that Apple might make an ARM-based laptop, and there's a bit of dabbling with ARM-based servers, but there doesn't seem to be any real push for it. More like hedging bets if Intel continues to shit the bed on 10nm. Except AMD's Epyc looks to be the real contingency plan for that now anyway. I don't see any reason to expect Apple's motivations for using ARM (more control over hardware) would apply to anyone else, and Apple is the only one with an ARM CPU design that is even worth discussing in a laptop anyway. So... I wouldn't expect the other 90% of the laptop market to follow, much less any of the desktop/workstation market.
    • blinkingled 8y ago
      Push might have been a little strong word - but I was referring to server vendors selling ARM based servers (HPE Moonshot), Amazon making ARM instances available, MS having Windows Server for ARM etc. Looks like it's just a plan B type thing or throw it out there and see what it does thing.
• miohtama 8y ago
  In early 2000 Java promised to be write once, everywhere. By the time it was between Windows and Sun. 20 years later we have finally reached this point for business applications, be them in Java, Python, PHP or some other VM based SDK. The mainstream development future is in Lambdas and other such containerised technologies. If you can run Docker or similar "home" you can also deploy. Our DevOps models have radically changed and not sure if he realises this.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    When I left C++ for managed languages, it was when the OS became irrelevant to me, with FFI being the only occasions where it still matters. As you mention lambdas take it to the next level, and in such future Linux might not even matter anymore, hence his point of view.
    • kazinator 8y ago
      When I left C++ for managed languages, operating systems and C didn't stop being relevant; what stopped being relevant for me was the grotesque extensions of C dialect desperately trying to be a high level, managed language in increasingly irrational ways.
      • pjmlp 8y ago
        C++ is still the best tool when my managed languages need some extra native help. Maybe it will be eventually replaced by Rust one day on my toolbox, but surely not for C. I left that in 1993, only using it instead of C++ when university professors required me to do so, and on my first job (until they also moved into C++/C#).
  • kazinator 8y ago
    > In early 2000 Java promised to be write once, everywhere. Latter half of 1990's, by my recollection. The history is well-documented. JDK 1.0 shipped in 1996, and that's when The Java Language Specification was first published also. The "write once, run anywhere" started to be heard soon after.
• magoon 8y ago
  His argument doesn’t hold up to iOS and Android development.
• zackbloom 8y ago
  I have a fundamental question. Do people think the move towards 'serverless', this desire for some percentage of developers to not have to worry all that much about the low level infrastructure their code is running on) to die? To accelerate? It seems somewhat clear that some percentage of developers are interested in a fundamentally higher abstraction than what operating systems have classically provided. In a world where that's true for not just a small few but for most developers, it seems that something like processor architecture could be abstrated away. It's not like it's particularly easy to replicate serverless deployment environments on developer machines today, and yet it persists.
• zwieback 8y ago
  Flashback to 1999: Corel Netwinder tried to bring Linux to an ARM developer box. Still have one in my drawer. I guess we're still working on it...
• greymeister 8y ago
  The only disagreement I have with his statements is that I think the Itanic and blind vendor buy-in is what sunk non-x86 processors. amd64 is what actually brought x86 ubiquity while ia64 never reached any relative market share.
• spamizbad 8y ago
  Linus is absolutely correct, despite how it feels like ARM should be winning in the datacenter. If you want to win servers, you basically need to win developers too. So in the ghost world where ARM is dominating on the server, we're all writing code on ARM desktops.
• overgard 8y ago
  Wouldn't the potential counterargument be that ARM desktops/laptops could potentially still come about? Probably more likely in the laptop space. I mean, I think about something like the latest raspberry pi, and yeah, it's slow as heck right now but it seems like something like that could gain a lot more ground if it was higher priced but gave you performance like an iPhone X or latest Galaxy. (And btw: from what I've read the iPhone X costs about $400 in parts, and $110 of that is in the OLED screen, and then there's other costs like sensors that you might not need. So let's say you get the cost of that down to $250 and make the price like $500. That seems like a competitive machine) We already saw Apple (successfully) transition from PowerPC to X86; it seems totally plausible that they could do the same thing with ARM at some point down the line, or someone could be a raspbery-pi style machine with a lot more horsepower.
• crb002 8y ago
  Translated from Linus speak: ARM servers will gain adoption if there are more ARM laptops.
• lsllc 8y ago
  I build Go, Rust, C/C++ code for ARM/ARM64 (and MIPS) and it's completely transparent. 99.9% of the code just works, occasionally I need to worry about some details, but just once in a while. Go definitely is the easiest, it's built in: GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm go build Rust is almost as easy to cross build (as long as you have the right GCC toolchains installed!): cargo build --target aarch64-unknown-linux-musl Sooner or later, Intel's hegemony on the server CPU market will end and it'll likely be some combo of ARM and maybe RISC-V (not sure about POWER). Cloud vendors like AWS and Google are looking closely at the margins and as the AWS a1.* [Graviton] shows, they're even willing to make their own CPUs if necessary.
  • ithkuil 8y ago
    That's all fine and dandy for the software you build, but then if it happens that the easiest way to get some job done is to extend an existing docker image or using an existing docker image in a multistage build, you might trip over the fact that the authors of those other images didn't care enough about your arch of choice to cross compile their stuff.
    • lsllc 8y ago
      I've build & run docker on arm and used it to build my own arm based docker containers from scratch, but yeah, 99.9% of containers intel only. Having said that, docker is perfectly usable on arm, just no one bothers to.
      • ithkuil 8y ago
        Yeah docker was just an example of modern binary dependencies. We tend to forget that kind of pain since many modern languages strongly favour source dependencies (every user of a library ends up compiling it from sources).
• throw2016 8y ago
  Its like Linus, Stallman and others create a free public pool where before only restricted private pools existed. Now 20 years later the private pools have faded into the background and the public pool is a lake but its inhabitants are disconnected from the past, only vaguely aware of the era of private pools and couldn't care less how the public pool came to exist. Their reality takes for granted this huge public pool's existance on which they can build and sail their boats, so Linus's arguments are unlikely to resonate. Users will gladly wade into a private pool this time by cloud providers and that suits closed vendors like Arm who maintain tight platform control - billions of phone socs with zero open drivers - just fine. It's like every generation has to make the same mistakes and go through the same cycle of pain or it slips generational memory.
• bitwize 8y ago
  Linus will have major egg on his face when devs are issued 7nm ARM Macs that blow anything x86-based out of the water.
• ecabuk 8y ago
  > Why? Same exact reason, just on the software side. In both cases. Where did you find developers? You found them on Windows and on Linux, because that's what developers had access to. When those workloads grew up to be "real" workloads, they continued to be run on Windows and Linux, they weren't moved over to Unix platforms even if that would have been fairly easy in the Linux case. There are lots of developers who developing on MacOS so why BSD server usage is very low than?
• walrus01 8y ago
  Linus is saying basically the same thing I said in HN comments some time ago. This was regarding the Qualcomm Centriq server processors. I asked where I can buy right now a standard ATX motherboard + CPU combo that I could mess around with at home. For any sort of reasonable price. The answer was deafening crickets. As compared to how easy it is to buy a decent quality $119 motherboard + $179 AMD Ryzen quad core CPU. Not just that it was literally impossible to buy a motherboard+cpu for any reasonable price, for a midtower desktop PC format. Also near impossible to buy a 'cheap' 1RU server or similar for any sort of reasonable price, as compared to $400 Dell R620 with two-socket, 8-core-per-socket older Xeons I could buy on eBay. There is a very real chicken-or-egg problem with economies of scale. If the top ten Taiwanese based motherboard manufacturers don't think it will make money to build boards for it, they just won't. Super low quantity of 'evaluation' boards that you have to 'contact a sales rep' to acquire are not going to gain widespread adoption.
• Solar19 8y ago
  For a time Intel had PCs on a stick – it was like a large flash thumb drive, with a Celeron or something. (Maybe they still offer these.) Are there any thumb drive ARM computers? (Preferably with 64-bit ARMv8 processors to match emerging server platforms.) With pluggable ARM mini-computers it might be easy to develop for ARM. Raspberry Pi would be interesting, but they have old 32-bit processors and I'm not sure how well they interface with a normal computer. Servers are using 64-bit ARMv8. Maybe smartphones would work as pluggable mini-computers? I heard that OnePlus devices were explicitly root-friendly, but I've never tried it.
• karakanb 8y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this whole dev-prod hardware parity argument contradict with the rise of Docker? I don't know much about ARM or CPU architectures in general, but I have never heard companies testing their Dockerized applications with Docker on different CPU architectures just to make sure that the application works as expected; it can be because everything is on x86 already, but at this point Docker is assumed to be a cross-platform dependency that will be the same between different hosts / OS / architectures. What prevents an abstraction layer like this to be used when it comes to ARM, hence making the whole "If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86" argument incorrect?
  • Slartie 8y ago
    x86 Docker containers will not run on ARM, even if you install Docker for ARM. Docker is an entirely useless layer to support cross-architecture deployment. Heck, even full-blown VMs (the real ones, that docker partially replaced) are mostly useless, for performance reasons.
    • karakanb 8y ago
      The question was not specifically around Docker. What I wonder is, why wouldn't there be a seperate layer that abstracts away these platform differences, just like Docker did for operating systems?
      • timmytokyo 8y ago
        Like the operating system?
        • karakanb 8y ago
          Exactly, but I am not well-versed about the challanges and potential difference that might surface in kernel level and since Linus thinks it is not applicable, I was wondering if there is / would be an equivalent in the user space that would allow reproducibility for different architectures, something like architecture independent containers maybe. I would like to believe that we have come to a position where we can consider the application and platform as completely independent entities, which would eliminate these concerns regarding dev/prod parity possibly. All these questions are mostly out of my ignorance though, I am trying to understand why the architecture change would require a huge effort as long as the underlying stuff is well abstracted.
• nerdile 8y ago
  For massive scale SaaS and non-native-code PaaS hosts, cost and perceived Intel lock-in risk will be the factor that drives them to deploy and evaluate these servers side by side with their Intel hosts. And, yes, those devs will have access to this hardware in their offices.
• tytso 8y ago
  War story time. File based encryption[1] (which used ext4 encryption) was supposed to have been released with Android M. It slipped by a full year because of this issue which Linus identified. At the time, we didn't have xfstests ported over so it could run in an Android/Bionic environment. So the only way I could test it was by taking the SOC kernel to which we had backported ext4 encryption, bashing it hard enough so it would compile on x86 again, all the while cursing the SOC vendor who had added "value added features" to their SOC kernel in a completely broken way such that the kernel would no longer build on x86, let alone boot on it, and then test the ext4 encryption feature backported to the Android kernel on x86 using kvm-xfstests (this was before gce-xfstests[2]). Unfortunately there was an ARM specific bug that we couldn't catch while testing on x86, and it showed up only when we were dogfooding the feature on two testers' phones. We couldn't reliable repro it on our development phones before the ZBB deadline. So we ultimately ended up having the pull the feature and wait a full calendar year for Android N because we could launch it. As a result, a colleague developed android-xfstests[3] so we could actually do the necessary testing on an ARM platform. If we had this at the time when we were first trying to launch File Based Encryption for Android, it would have avoided a huge amount of hair pulling. [1] https://source.android.com/security/encryption/file-based https://source.android.com/security/encryption/file-based [2] https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests [3] https://thunk.org/android-xfstests https://thunk.org/android-xfstests
• yaleman 8y ago
  Linus' post reminds me of the Slashdot thread where people were saying the iPod would never catch on. Saying there's no ARM "at home" is closed-minded to say the least - it's already here - clusters of ARM boards are everywhere, laptops are rapidly gaining ground and I'm currently buying the parts for my first desktop-class ARM machine.
• known 8y ago
  Please note that Linus is talking about SERVERS, not mobiles
• cjiph 8y ago
  The vast majority developers I know of who are targeting the cloud, do so using MacOS or Windows and then deploy to servers running Linux. It is clearly not the case you need the same environment “at home”, as you have in the data center. I do agree with the idea that a cross-compiled environment makew your target environment “more distant” and this is less efficient. However I don’t think that’s at all what’s limiting ARM from cracking the server market.
• think_free 8y ago
  "I often find black-and-white people a bit stupid, truth be told" - Linus Torvalds, 2005 (not on the subject of race) https://www.linux.com/news/linus-compares-linux-and-bsds https://www.linux.com/news/linus-compares-linux-and-bsds
• think_free 8y ago
  "I often find black-and-white people a bit stupid, truth be told" - Linus Torvalds, 2005 (not on the subject of race/ethnicity) ^ https://www.linux.com/news/linus-compares-linux-and-bsds https://www.linux.com/news/linus-compares-linux-and-bsds
• craftoman 8y ago
  Why is he still coding in Perl? Am I missing something? Shouldn't we upgrade to python or something? Do I have to learn Perl and code x86 software on a 15' CRT monitor while running Slackware to get it?
• pankajdoharey 8y ago
  Why do i feel he is dead wrong, the stability of a system in dependent on Kernel Writers more than the system builders. ARM would make it for a very important reason the electric bill, more and more Data-centers are geared towards saving on their electric bills to be highly profitable, many are already using renewable sources like Apple and Google. Also if he isnt willing to support ARM for Server-space some other kernel will make it. Also most X86 host these days run in Virtualised environment, there is no difference if it actually runs on x86 or ARM.