Red Hat opens its ARMs to Enterprise Linux... er, wait, perhaps it's the other way round Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM reached general availability Monday, underscoring the growing competition confronted by Intel's x86-64 platform in the data center. The corporate Linux vendor first presented a preview of Linux for ARM in 2015, although the software has been in the works for a number of years. Since that …
The problem is not supporting ARM per se but device enumeration and other "nice standards" that in the ARM world are solved by vendor producing binary blobs that only work with one kernel version and tables of magic numbers to make the hardware work.
The problem with the ARM SOC industry has always been their attitude of "use and throw".
I do not see that changing now.
This isn't just "ARM". In order to compete with Wintel in the server space, ARM have now defined (and are in fact still working on) various specs (SBSA, SBBR), which describe a common 64-bit ARM server system architecture in (hopefully) enough detail that OSs such as RHELSA will Just Work on a variety of different hardware vendors' offerings.
Unfortunately, this means the dreaded ACPI has now spread to ARM systems, but if that's what it takes, then...
Is some vendor to make nice form factor compatible motherboards with ARM CPU chips. Throw in a couple of PCI (or whatever buss is popular) slots and there you have it.
Given this, just plunk down a Linux distro and you are in business.
Works for me. Arm & Linux, a nice alternative to "wintel".
But you KNOW the vendors would make a hash of it.
My netbook came with an abomination of Linux that had to be nuked before it became anything like usable.
My Acer nettop came with Linux, but sadly they had not been able to stretch to a wireless driver for the wireless hardware it actually contained, and was advertised on the box.
Sometimes I think they set themselves up to fail so they can say "Well, we tried and noone liked it" so they can go back to the easy Wintel formula.
@Herby, Nick Kew:
Such things already exist:
micro ATX, 8 DIMM sockets for 128GB of ECC RDIMMs, 4x SATA, 2x PCIe x16
http://b2b.gigabyte.com/Server-Motherboard/MP30-AR1-rev-11
Samsung Chromebook 2 is superbly well made, especially the 13" 1080p variant, with an 8-core CPU and 4GB of RAM, and quite cheap especially for the build quality (far, far better than the flimsy Samsung Chromebook 1 of 5 years ago)
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/computing/chrome-devices/chromebook-2/chromebook-2-13-3-xe503c32-k01us/
Both have been around for at least 2 years.
Anybody else remember the StrongARM chip, which incorporated Intel proprietary memory cacheing technology? ISTR DEC made it and Acorn bought them back for its later RiscPCs. Then Intel embraced, extended as XScale and exting... sold off.
Meanwhile ARMLinux was also migrating to StrongARM and ARM was moving on anyway.
The problem system designers face is that ARM is not a hardware product line, it is a box of bits that chip designers dip into and play with, so few ARM chips were compatible at the OS level. For many years, ARMLinux became a fragmented pile of incompatible bad smells.
The success of Android forced a massive push to clean it up and standardise chip architectures, never mind incorporate the garage-hack ARM-but-not-X86 OS options into the main kernel tree. That is at last beginning to pay off across the board.
Let's hope the wait was worth it.
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