this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I've seen people talking about it and experienced it myself with a server, but why does Linux run so well on ARM (especially compared to Windows)?

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[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Raspberry pi works fine with linux, cutiePi also. my iomega nas is an arm board running debian...i don't see the issue

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The issue with Arm is they aren't all one board/chip, you have ARM based design licenced from them and they are built to meet the criteria of what the customer requires. i.e. for my iomega NAS there isn't firmware boot, you just have to generate an empty section of 00s on the first 32bytes of the drive so the board knows that is the drive to load the kernel from (no grub no uboot) and the board is set to do the rest from the next partition.

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But all x86 instructions are the same right, thus why it doesnt matter what era your chip is from or what manufacturer, arm can be very different

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the info, I appreciate the reply

[–] Bene7rddso@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Booting isn't the only problem with ARM. Instead of saving information about builtin devices on the board and exposing it via ACPI, board manufacturers create a devicetree and ship it with the kernel. This means that if you want to run your own kernel you need to build your own devicetree

[–] pewpew@feddit.it 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Theese devices support linux out of the box. Try installing a proper linux distro on your phone and good luck finding a graphics driver that is not sotware rendering

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

As did microsofts arm device support windows, which is the point zi was replying to with skullgiver. of course windows works if the arm version was built for the hardware it runs on.