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The biggest issue of ARM to me is the fact that ARM hardware never seems to have good or updated drivers. If I pull an x86 machine or even laptop off the shelf

The biggest issue of ARM to me is the fact that ARM hardware never seems to have good or updated drivers. If I pull an x86 machine or even laptop off the shelf, I'm like 90% sure I can perpetually support that machine for 30 or so years with the latest linux kernel. For arm, I'm almost guaranteed that the only kernel support I can get is their custom kernel, which I'd have to scrape out of their custom OS. That means being locked into a vendored 3.10 linux kernel forever because there was never any real effort to upstream drivers into the kernel. It's frankly a bit bizarre that it's so bad. x86 just works even with the latest CPUs. ARM doesn't.

kimixa 1y ago
From my experience working on GPU drivers, the ISA is one of the least important parts of porting. 99% of the time, it's just changing a compiler flag. Thankfully, the era of "Ancient Quirky Proprietary Toolchain" is a thing of the past, even on small embedded platforms. Sure, you might have have a little "optimised" ASM for some specific conversions, but that's always just performance, and a driver even touching bulk data on the CPU means you're already in the slow path. Stuff like how the busses are enumerated, cache coherency specifics, and interoperability with other devices (some mobile SoCs can be a grab bag of different GPU/Display block/Video encoder/Image processing/whatever else) is waayyyyy more important from what I've seen/. And while we all hate on stuff like PCI and ACPI, at least it's (kinda) standard and (somewhat) works.