
Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead - tbirdz
http://pastebin.com/W9RbUUN1
======
corysama
Methinks the commenters here are having too much fun contending the amd&arm
claim because it's in the headline and it's fun to call articles stupid. But
that detail is only incidental to the message of the statement. And at this
moment, I don't see anyone discussing the meat of this resignation letter.

> So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to
> future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy
> SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future
> allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a
> design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as
> long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses,
> key chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting
> as EFI which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE
> 1275); and reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest
> SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address
> map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here
> you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer.

This issue at hand is that a minority of oss developers sometimes fight very
hard to keep a long-term architectural vision maintained. But, an overwhelming
majority just swoops in and does the minimal work necessary to get what they
need running today with little consideration for tomorrow. Eventually the
long-term minority gets frustrated by being eternally overwhelmed and resigns.
This is such a case.

So, questions seem to be: Is this really inevitable or can something
realistically be done to improve the situation? Is it going to bite us in the
ass or is it actually "better" in a worse-is-better kind of way?

~~~
cwyers
I think that statement is missing an "and." So he's disgusted by EFI. What
impact does that have five layers up the stack?

Computing has moved from being bespoke to commodity. In a very real sense,
cheaper is better - more people can afford it and the people who could always
afford it can afford a lot more of it. I suspect that the benefits of cheaper
is better vastly outstrip thia guy's grievances about EFI booting.

~~~
yuhong
I think the main grievance is not about EFI booting though.

~~~
cwyers
But what is his main grievance? He talks about how systems aren't designed
anymore, they're just built from SoCs off commodity parts. So hardware isn't
as reusible across generations, but hardware is cheap so who cares? Cheap
solves lots of problems in the end. Compilation is cheap. VMs are cheap.
Containers are cheap. All kinds of abstractions to let 99.99999% of people
ignore the problems he talks about are cheap. What problem can bespoke
computers solve that can't be solved by enough cheap computers?

------
djcapelis
As one of the people who has done work to keep Linux running on an neglected
hardware platform (OpenSPARC T1 with an FPGA target) I agree with this
article.

The patches for supporting various functions in the FPGA version of the T1
chip were never mainlined and have diverged from the current version of the
kernel. The old version of the kernel they originally applied to no longer
compiles without a number of changes. Automake doesn't work with the old
makefiles anymore. So if you type make, you have to rewrite the makefile. Then
if you do that, they still don't compile because of behavior changes in gcc.
Some of these are the fault of the kernel developers making bad decisions,
like including both -Wall and -Werror in their flags which cases compilation
to fail with newer compilers when new warnings are introduced. (Compilers are
always allowed to add warnings later, and indeed they do.) Along with a few
other things that fail.

Since I didn't want to develop on a years old kernel anyway, I forward ported
Sun's old patches to a newer version of the kernel and successfully moved the
newest kernel code available for the platform forward a few years. But was
never able to get the latest kernels working, because the newest kernels all
fail on that platform during initialization.

I'm sure it's something I could fix if I needed to, but tracking down why a
kernel crashes on an entire platform before it starts init is just no fun.

Maybe someone else fixed that bug and pushed it forward again, but as far as I
know the current status of running Linux on an FPGA with the OpenSPARC T1 core
is that the latest kernel available is 3.9 from my tree on github. [1]

Which is a shame, this is one of the very few open cores for a truly fast and
well designed processor available in the world.

[1] [https://github.com/djcapelis/linux-kernel-opensparc-
fpga](https://github.com/djcapelis/linux-kernel-opensparc-fpga)

~~~
ddebernardy
> I'm sure it's something I could fix if I needed to, but ...

So in other words, no demand, no work. Had your job depended on it, you'd have
done so. For everything else, if no hobbyist is willing to work on it then it
gets de facto deprecated at some point down the read.

Plus, OpenSPARC T1 has been around for what... a decade? For all of its
technical merits, that's about as old as dinosaurs in IT time. Deep Blue
defeated Kasparov in 1997 and was the size of an oversized US fridge. Smart
phones packed the same amount of computing power 13 years later. :-)

~~~
djcapelis
I mean. I'm not sure what your point is trying to explain my own motivations
to me. It _was_ part of what I was getting paid to do at the time. But I
didn't need the newest kernel to run on it, so I never ported beyond 3.9.
Arguably had it been a passionate side project, I may have gone further.
Trying to use this as some kind of capitalistic example of how the market
forces just didn't motivate it enough is... missing a lot of the point around
so much of what happens here and why a lot of the people who do this work
continue to do it.

Also, while the T1 core may be somewhat dated, it is _still_ the newest
general purpose ASIC design that's ever been fabricated as a major CPU that
you can actually download the verilog for and put on an FPGA.

The advances in computing power haven't been driven by tons of changes in the
core units since the gigahertz wars. They are by no means static, but an
OpenSPARC T1 core has a surprising amount of similarity to a SPARC core
shipping in new designs today. It's an extremely valuable model and
opportunity to play with hardware modifications that is otherwise unparalleled
outside the few organizations that regularly fabricate new ASICs.

------
vonmoltke
First sentence should be, "Today's GUI-based end user world is amd64, armv7,
and soon aarch64." There are tens of millions of systems where the ability to
run a web browser, PDF viewer, or office suite is irrelevant. I'm not talking
about bare-metal embedded, either. I mean server and backend systems, HPC
systems, RTOS-based systems, and soft real-time processing systems.

I get the impression that the author of this is completely focused on desktop
and mobile software and has written an editorial based on the perspective that
those are the only realms that exist. I agree with her conclusions with
respect to consumer and office platforms, but think she makes the gross error
of then projecting that onto the rest of the computing world. Many platforms
will stay alive outside of this space with good toolchain support and poor GUI
application support.

~~~
Marat_Dukhan
>> I mean server and backend systems, HPC systems

In HPC x86-64 (in fact, Intel x86-64) is the only thriving architecture: here
is the breakdown from the last Top500:

\- 445 systems are Intel x86-64

\- 21 systems are AMD x86-64

\- 19 systems are IBM Blue Gene/Q. IBM discontinued the Blue Gene line, so
these systems would be replaced with something else as they age.

\- 7 systems are IBM Power 7. There are no IBM Power 8 systems on the list.

\- 7 systems are SPARC-based. AFAIK all of them are Fujitsu systems installed
in Japan, and they are not accessible to researchers outside of Japan.

\- 1 system is based on Chinese ShenWei architecture.

\- There are no ARM (neither ARMv7 nor ARM64) systems on the list.

~~~
sufiyan
Yeah. But the author seems to have gotten some good money from amd you write
about them rather than go out and say that, amd is also dying much like the
others.

I highly doubt if arm will ever become a serious contender in the desktop
computing market, let alone the hpc market which is even more difficult with
what Intel can guarantee.

------
protomyth
"Have a look at all free operating system projects: they really only support
amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Gee! Sometimes they pretend to support a few other
experimental platforms. Or other platforms which have not been tested in years
and are only cross-built because they are not self-hosting anymore."

I'm pretty sure the NetBSD[1] and OpenBSD would dispute that statement.
OpenBSD even compiles its ports directly (not cross compiled). Both projects
benefit from these architectures by finding bugs.

Also, although not a popular company, Oracle just introduced a new SPARC and
given Oracle's behavior, they wouldn't do it unless it had a profit and a
future.

1) look at one of their exhibits, these folks believe in running on anything
including toasters

~~~
rc4algorithm
This was written by Miod Vallet a couple days ago. He was the main nonstandard
arch developer for OpenBSD and resigned last week. So, the context is that the
author was one of the few leaders of the Luddites and considers it a lost
cause.

~~~
protomyth
Kinda of figured, and for a lot of stuff, I don't disagree with the sentiment,
but I still think it has value.

My biggest frustration with the alternate chip vendors is the total lack of a
simple ITX / ATX motherboard with a chip, expandable memory (preferably ECC),
and a standard set of ports. Even ARM is problematic at this.

I am mystified at how hard it is for a chip vendor to produce a motherboard.

------
justincormack
There are way more MIPS systems than aarch64 systems, and even more Power8
systems than aarch64. Risc-V is interesting as an open source design, with
commercial interest. GPUs are not any of those three. There is quite a bit of
work going on, it may just seem a bit niche to some people.

~~~
fredoralive
More Power8 systems than aarch64? I'm sure there's a surprising amount of IBM
servers out there, but I doubt they outsell the iPhone 5S / 6 / 6S.

~~~
ams6110
Can you really count the iPhones? They are not open in any sense of the word
and you would have to do some significant contortions to run anything but
Apple's OS on them.

~~~
Yaa101
Yes, because they are significant in taking away budget, resources and brain
power. And they make people believe that other platforms are becoming less
significant.

------
ant6n
Well, there's still some x86-32 around (some not too old Atoms), and armv6
(Raspberry Pi). And I'm hoping OpenRISC or RISC-V will be successful
eventually.

I don't really get the point about how open software lost. Sure the hardware
is disposable, but consider that the amd64 platform is only a relatively minor
modification of the x86-32 platform, and that has only seen relatively small
changes since the 386 - which is what the first linux was based on 24 years
ago. The 32 bit arm architecture, just like the 386, came out in the mid
eighties.

~~~
Matthias247
32bit x86 even got some new devices last year through the Intel Quark family.
As these devices don't MMX and other stuff, they have an even older
instruction set then the Atoms. And yet they are brand new.

~~~
ant6n
Do they even run normal linux then? Even the 32bit atoms supported SSE2.

------
mschuster91
> No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we
> can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and
> today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And
> people cheer.

today's stable Linux tree? Shit people still ship 2.6.x kernels these days
because they don't want to invest the engineering resources to keep their
vendor-specific customizations accumulated over YEARS in the same processor
family up to date.

------
nine_k
I'd like to notice that Google recently invested significant effort in using
power8, including building their own servers based on it.

I hope these guys have enough motivation and resources to keep the platform
alive. They use a huge lot of open-source software so I suppose the support
will not be locked out in-house.

~~~
qihqi
I think it is merely an effort to not give Intel the monopoly over Google's
datacenters. Because otherwise, Google will not have any negotiating power
regarding prices of the chips.

~~~
moonchrome
Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy some AMD chips ? Are they that behind ?

~~~
nine_k
I think power density and performance per watt are more important for Google
than chip price. Power8 has greater density than Xeons with comparable Mips/W
or Mflops/W.

~~~
moonchrome
I'm not talking about chip price but the cost of migrating and maintaining
systems for separate architectures.

------
anuraaga
Old news? When even game consoles, the standard for going proprietery for
performance, went amd64/arm, the consolidation of platforms was a foregone
conclusion.

------
4ad
Actual readable version: [http://sprunge.us/cFDM](http://sprunge.us/cFDM)

~~~
thinkpad20
Thanks; trying to read that on my iPhone would have required a magnifying
glass.

------
frik
"aarch64" is the new 64-bit ARMv8, I had to Google that name.

There are various other minor and not so minor platforms like Power, Mips,
OpenSparc, etc.

~~~
masklinn
> "aarch64" is the new 64-bit ARMv8, I had to Google that name.

It's not exactly new though, it first _shipped_ in the iPhone 5S a bit more
than 2 years ago.

> There are various other minor and not so minor platforms like Power, Mips,
> OpenSparc, etc.

Which is exactly the platforms the author (Miod Valaat, who recently resigned
as OpenBSD nurturer/implementer/maintainer for many of these) is talking about
considering he explicitly lists them in the first paragraph:

> Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips,
> power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.

------
jondubois
I can relate to the stuff about free software losing the battle against
commercial software. I've maintained 2 open source projects over the part 10
years and for both cases, I saw an 'as-a-service' alternative which did the
same thing come up and get a massive amount of traction.

The worst part is that the attitude towards open source projects has degraded.
One time I mentioned one of my (somewhat popular) open source projects in a
pubic chat room (just a single post) and I was accused of spamming! Even
though the project was relevant to the chat and it was completely free and
open source.

People don't value free software anymore. It's all about ridiculously
expensive SaaS services with massive lock-in nowadays.

So I've had enough. I'm joining the dark side. I'm going to start building
services and help make the world a worse place.

I'm not going to be one of these poor old FSF guys who keep fighting for
software freedom for their whole their lives. Things are getting worse - You
just have to accept it and move with it.

------
sklogic
Big iron is very much alive and kicking.

And we're likely to see a raise of RISC-V soon.

~~~
scott_karana
> Big iron is very much alive and kicking.

> Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips,
> power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.

~~~
sklogic
My point is that there are far more than "a few people".

------
mhkool
Mill Computing will release a new CPU with much potential since it will be
fast and consume 1/10 of the energy of an Intel CPU. I hope that they will be
successful and I plan to buy a Mill computer one day. BSD is a better OS than
Linux so it will be my preferred choice.

I wish that the author would be able to accept the world how it is: like a
priest, one does a lot of good work and receive little appreciation. That is
how it is. If you are able to get satisfaction from the fact that you do
something good, you keep on doing good for the rest of your life.

~~~
ris
"Mill Computing will release a new CPU with much..." (insert recycled hype of
a product that has yet to have a HDL implementation, let alone silicon)

"BSD is a better OS than Linux..."

I think you've built your world out of dogma where it's a lot more fun to have
"an opinion" and express it than to deal with the nuance involved in the real
world.

------
rbanffy
Any platform that's not on enough programmers' desks, being actively used,
becomes legacy. Once it becomes legacy, it dies. It can survive long periods
as a niche product, but, then, it won't run new software, the compilers won't
target it, new applications won't be written for it and, ultimately, the last
machine of its kind will be turned off, replaced by the current incarnation of
something that is actually used.

------
bjwbell
With the cost in multiple billions to build a fab and the consolidation of
semiconductor manufactures the reduction in # of architectures isn't
surprising.

~~~
coderdude
You can go fabless for a few million. The cost barrier isn't very high for a
serious contender.

------
jwatte
I think this is what we get because we've successfully evolved the business
model up the stack, and the bottom is largely solved. This id a good thing,
except for those who enjoy innovating (or reinventing) at the bottom layer.

------
rahulb10
And then I heard about RISC-V.

------
VMG
Gist mirror:
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e61cf7590d8dfa0ebf3](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e61cf7590d8dfa0ebf3)

------
tambourine_man
_Replicating content here since it 's impossible to read it on mobile at
pastebin.com_

Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead, Jim.
Noone is investing enough money and brain power in the other architectures.
Only a few people actually know about the rest of the ecosystem (mips,
power8...), and noone gives a shit anyway.

Keeping an obsolete platform alive is fun because this reminds you of the
'90s, when there was a large choice of hardware platforms, with roughly
similar cost/power rations. Eventually, the cheap PC killed almost all
competition, and the smartphone market gave ARM an unhealthy market share in
the embedded systems world.

Then, after a while, it's not fun anymore, because noone is writing code with
your platform in mind, because it's not deemed powerful enough, because modern
compilers no longer support your platform (or they produce broken code for it,
which is even worse). Does your platform have a hardware limit of a few
hundred MB of physical memory? You won't be able to run a web browser or even
a PDF viewer on it. Does someone still run today's gcc's testsuite on your
platform? No? Sorry dude, here's a nickel...

Keeping a platform alive is a real team work. This requires a serious
commitment from all the ``building block'' projects: a not-too-bug-ridden
toolchain (as/ld/gcc), as well as support in the flagship projects (emacs,
python, X11, mozilla, libreoffice...), and accurate, up-to-date documentation
available free of charge.

None of this is true of platforms, except for amd64, armv7 and aarch64.

Because of this, trying to keep a platform alive is really going against the
tide.

Have a look at all free operating system projects: they really only support
amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Gee! Sometimes they pretend to support a few other
experimental platforms. Or other platforms which have not been tested in years
and are only cross-built because they are not self-hosting anymore.

Of course, you'll still find a few looneys which will do an incredible amount
of work to prevent the decay of their platform of choice, and give the
impression that these platforms are still first class citizens. But these guys
are the same as ten years ago. And eventually, they get tired and give up.
Just like me.

The worst part in this, is to look back and realize that, after all those
years, free software has lost. Companies working on non-free software have
been smart enough to get the momentum of the free software developers to work
on embedded platforms in order to tremendously shrink they software
engineering costs, yet getting positive press.

So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to
future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy
SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future
allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a
design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as
long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses, key
chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting as EFI
which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE 1275); and
reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few
extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a
castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's
your ``platform''. And people cheer.

I've spent 20 years in my life trying to promote a certain view of free
software, its values and its ethic, fighting for it, getting involved, trying
to lead by example, and on this day, I get the feeling that all I did was
wasting my time and that nothing I did has been useful.

It's a hard pill to swallow.

Better resign now than keep trying and only get bitterer in the process.

------
eveningcoffee
This view gets rather dim at the end. From where is this from?

~~~
wolfgke
> where is this from?

From the (ex-)OpenBSD developer Miod Vallat (ex according to
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u7z6c/todays_world_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u7z6c/todays_world_is_amd64_armv7_and_soon_aarch64/cxcxh7f)):

>
> [https://twitter.com/MiodVallat/status/669253976261570561](https://twitter.com/MiodVallat/status/669253976261570561)

~~~
eveningcoffee
Thanks!

------
rahulb10
And then I heard about RISC-V

