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by afr0ck 610 days ago
What you wrote doesn't make any sense. Arm has DTB [1]. Most SoCs re-use a lot of hardware IP blocks and they require very little modifications to DTB files in the kernel and device drivers to get them working. PCIe and USB support discoverability so no issue from that side.

Arm ecosystem is cleaner in my experience and learned from the mistakes of the past. Arm CPUs are still not as fast as high-end x86 chips, but it's just a matter of time before that market is also eaten by Arm.

[1] https://community.arm.com/oss-platforms/w/docs/525/device-tr...

3 comments

> require very little modifications to DTB files

DTB only describes what blocks are present, if the kernel doesn't know what "crapvendor,lockinregulator" means it would not work. Vs ACPI that actually provides drivers, however crappy.

x86 has a a mature open source driver system especially for graphics. Although there are great reverse engineering efforts (Collobra and others), with ARM SOCs you can find yourself dependent on blobs for graphics and locked into ancient and insecure Android and Linux images.
Graphics is "fixable" as you can stick a PCIe video card into an ARM or RISC-V system that has PCIe and it will work. Integrated graphics is a mess, that's true. But then so is NVIDIA drivers (Do they ever care for graphics any more or is it just LLMs go brrr for them?).
Yet people are running games[0] on their MILK-V Jupiter boards, using the same discrete GPUs that you would on an x86 system.

Meantime, companies such as PowerVR or ARM are funding their own open source mesa3d drivers.

0. https://box86.org/blog/

DTB it's hell. A lot of devices today only work with obsolete kernel releases.
Yes, when support is not upstream.