[kwlug-disc] about silicon

[Chris Irwin]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2020 at 02:12:32PM -0500, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
>
>What is different this time around is that there is no interest in making a
>standard hardware interface for the various RISC SOCs. Remember why the
>personal computer revolutionized the industry: standard bootloader,
>standard hardware interface (BIOS), standard peripheral interfaces (ISA,
>PCI, ATA, SATA, ...), and so on ...
>
>This time around there is no movement to standardize all of this. Linux
>will still work, but you must have a different image for each SOC, like
>Odriod vs. RPi.

Most ARM hardware itself doesn't include a firmware layer to abstract 
itself, but it is still possible to have a layer provide that 
abstraction.

For example, the UEFI projects for the Pi 3 & 4, which would allow one 
to use a generic "ARM" distro vs a "Raspberry Pi"-specific build.

     1. https://github.com/pftf/RPi3

     2. https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

Granted, each system would still need work to get a UEFI layer, but that 
only needs to happen once. It makes it easier for ongoing distro 
development and upgrades, since they wouldn't need to figure out which 
boards to support.

This isn't new, either. Windows on ARM required UEFI implementations, 
likely for the reason that Microsoft wants to support platforms, not 
particular devices (Unfortunatey, these devices were locked down via 
signing keys). I expect any serious push to get ARM into the "PC" space 
would require something like this.

Frankly, this would increase the life expectancy of ARM systems, as 
well. I have an old ARM board that has become desk-art because no distro 
ever provided upstream support, and it wasn't popular enough to gain a 
community like the RasPi units.

-- 
Chris Irwin

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