[jabl]

> What I do know about ARM sucking is that the whole board design makes each product need a customer kernel more or less. Which is why we still don't have a "Linux for your phones". What I've read about RISC is that it's going to be roughly the same: encourage a lot of co-processors which mean custom boards to me and probably custom kernels.

FWIW, this has nothing to do with the ISA per se, and particularly absolutely nothing to do with whether the ISA is RISC, CISC, or something else.

The problem is that like so many other embedded systems, ARM systems don't have peripherals which are discoverable at boot, hence all that has to be hardcoded (or specified at boot via devicetree) into the kernel (e.g. the interrupt controller is model XYZZY and is accessible at address 0xBEEF). So you end up with a kernel binary that works only on a specific board.

The "server-class" ARM systems adhere to something called SBSA which is a specification incorporating things like UEFI, ACPI, PCIe etc. The end result being that SBSA systems can use a common distro kernel just like x86 systems can.

[fierarul]

I learned something, thank you! Considering how performant modern phones are I hope all adhere to SBSA or similar so I can install any OS on my phone just like I could on my 100Mhz PC way back.