On Thu, 28 Nov 2013 11:30:46 AM Toby Corkindale wrote:
I really like the little ARM single-board computers. I just wish the distros would manage to sort the hardware support out properly, and then continue to support previous versions for just a bit longer.
The big problem/challenge with ARM is that the hardware isn't discoverable, you need to either have a boardfile compiled into the kernel for your particular board or a devicetree file (for DT supported systems). There's a nice article on it by the chap who did device tree support for the GTA04 board on LWN here: https://lwn.net/Articles/572692/ # This is where devicetree comes in. A devicetree essentially # describes a specific device. There is no BIOS component to # the platform (which is likely a good thing given what kernel # engineers seem to think of BIOS quality) but rather a list of # devices or device-details that cannot be discovered by # poking. This devicetree (encoded as a binary "dtb" file) can # be stored in ROM on the system, or can be loaded from # wherever the kernel is loaded. The theory is that when a # system (e.g. motherboard) is created, a "dtb" can be # created for it, and it will work with all future software # releases. It is a nice theory... and part 2 of his explanation & experiences is here: https://lwn.net/Articles/573409/ [...]
Meanwhile the ARM cpu in the Nexus 5 phone can get up to 2.3 GHz on four cores! I'd love to have that sitting in a cheap, low-powered server the size of a deck of cards..
Just wait for big.LITTLE systems too, where you've get a combination of low- power low-energy cores and high-power cores for heavy work. The kernel folks are still working on how best to support that.. Oh, and then there's AMD's 64-bit ARM Seattle due out next year. All the best! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC This email may come with a PGP signature as a file. Do not panic. For more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPGP