this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Why is RISC-V significant? I'm completely out of the loop and have only heard of it in passing.
Because it's an open Instruction Set Architecture.
Many different companies used to design their own CPU IS architectures in the past like (MIPS, AVR, PIC, ...) and of course the most popular ARM. Downside of this is that the software and ecosystems between these architectures are not compatible. Effort wasted in porting a library to one architecture cannot be always reused for another.
Recently we see a lot of companies adopting RiscV, and there is a big collaboration between them to ratify the specification and provide software support. This will in turn accelerate the development, and software and hardware support will hopefully overtake ARM in the future.
And Apple will get to do a fourth architecture migration
*fifth
I'm not really counting the 6502, since I don't think Apple ever bothered with emulation or backwards compatibility for it once they moved to 68000.