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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Raspberry pi works fine with linux, cutiePi also. my iomega nas is an arm board running debian…i don’t see the issue
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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.
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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
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Linux, and much of the open-source software that goes with it, has been multi-architecture for a long time. If you take something that already runs pretty decently on x86, x86_64, PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, and Intel Itanium CPUs, porting it to yet another architecture is, while not trivial, at least mostly a known problem.
Windows, by contrast, was built for descendants of the Intel 8088, period. It’s unsurprising that porting it is a hard problem and that results aren’t always satisfactory.
(Apple built on top of a modified BSD kernel, and BSD has also been ported around quite a bit, so they also have a ports-are-a-known-problem advantage.)