[emptysongglass]

This part is why I hope x86 has a long life ahead of it. Everybody and their dog have their own standard for things in ARM-land.

[avianes]

This is not true.

Most manufacturers take standardized IP and IP-providers provide an appropriate linux drivers. Few manufacturers are willing to develop and maintain their own GIC hardware and GIC driver, most of the time they just take the ARM standard GIC.

The fact that Apple does not provide drivers is a consequence of the Apple business model. And the fact that the ARM ISA does not stipulate a unique GIC is actually a strength. It makes the architecture more versatile and suitable for evolution (maybe Apple found out that the ARM standard GIC is not complete enough for them).

[emptysongglass]

I think that's uncharitable even if I am using superlatives to describe the situation.

We have plenty of examples in the wild. Just look at the state of Pine64 and u-boot, for example. It's a mess of standards.

And what you see as a strength others don't.

[avianes]

Pine64 is based on an Allwinner A64 which has a ARM GIC-400. ARM GIC-400 is a standard GIC IP from ARM and compliant with ARM GICv2 specification.

It seems pretty standard to me, not a custom GIC as Apple.

And yes, in u-boot there are plenty of device-trees for each target. What's wrong with that?

The device tree is usually provided by the manufacturer, the compiled device tree is usually very small and allows genericity.

[amarioguy]

for what it's worth amd64 is not going anywhere outside of Macs for at least the next decade, possibly two.

Despite the benefits ARM provides amd64 undeniably has advantages and non-trivial ones at that.

personally, I'm of the opinion it'll come to a coexistence for a time rather than one dominating the other immediately.

[avianes]

Are you confusing "amd64" with "Aarch64"? "amd64" has nothing to do with Macs/Apple products.

Anyway, both amd64 and Aarch64 are already being used outside of Macs/Apple products.

[14u2c]

Apple still sells many computers that execute the amd64 insurrection set.

[jhgb]

One can hope that RISC-V in the future will not follow ARM's past mistakes.

[als0]

The mistakes are already happening. There are RISC-V processors being shipped with unfinished extensions and weird MMUs and now Linux has to decide whether to support those or only support finished standards