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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things that really, really make me mad internally. Phones are exactly like you describe locked down proprietary pieces of hardware. The computing world could be so much better if it everything was open.

I fear everyday that the arm "revolution" will make open computing a thing of the past. Look at the arm laptops that are released. Not a single one can run Linux.

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The pine book pro runs linux. Also, the bootloader can be unlocked on the new mac arm laptops.

It isn't the locked bootloader that is the issue with porting Linux to new ARM Macs, it's that ARM SoCs require vendor support for Linux in varying degrees, and Apple has made it clear that they won't support other OSes on ARM Macs outside of virtualization.

> Apple has made it clear that they won't support other OSes on ARM Macs [...]

That’s not completely true. They seem to be open to Windows.

Craig Federighi has stated that Windows could run on M1 hardware, but Microsoft’s licensing doesn’t allow the ARM version to be installed in a non-exclusive manner.

Source: https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/20/windows-can-run-natively-m1-m...

Bootcamp required special Apple-written drivers for Windows to work on Mac hardware. Apple has said that they will not support other OSes on their hardware outside of virtualization, so no Bootcamp.

Did you look at the source that I linked? Craig Federighi is a pretty high-level Apple employee.

He seems to be saying that the lack of Bootcamp is because Microsoft is unwilling to allow it (rather than Apple).

But Linux can run on arm just fine? I used to run my website and a bunch of other stuff on an arm64 VPS.

Yes but the instruction set is only a tiny part of conpatibility. Intel and amd have generally standardized on ACPI for hardware discovery for example. But ARM has not. This means there is no Generic way to know what the capabilities of arm system are. That's Just one of the issues though.

Arm standardized on dtb’s. It’s a static file that describes all the information ACPI lets you probe dynamically at boot.

Edit: and also uboot, which bootstraps the kernel, and hands it a dtb.

That's the entire problem. A dtb file is unique for every different soc and that also means every single device requires a kernel update or a at the very least a patches kernel.

If manufacturers would just make good datasheets available for their devices like they used to it wouldn't matter.

If it were only dtb's it would be an easy fix. Just have a database of dtb's on the boot medium that the kernel can look for. But often the mainline kernel simply lacks drivers for the hardware the arm vendors ship. Instead the arm vendors use a forked kernel that's way outdated by the time the device enters the market. In fact, as much as I love FLOSS, that's a negative consequence of FLOSS because had Linux been proprietary, they would have had to work with the entity that develops Linux instead of just forking it.

It isn't that the CPU architecture that's the problem, because that's well supported, it's the rest of the hardware configuration that isn't standardized and is almost always unique between ARM SoCs.

ARM servers use UEFI, and have enumerable buses for hardware detection, while most ARM SoCs require a custom bootloader or a forked open source one, and can't enumerate over hardware, thus requiring something like the DeviceTree in Linux.

Here's an idea of what kind of work ARM SoCs need for Linux to run on them[1].

[1] https://elinux.org/images/a/ad/Arm-soc-checklist.pdf

> Not a single one can run Linux.

My ARM Chromebook which boots into Linux would beg to differ.

Can you put stock Debian on it as easily as I can on a PC?

No. It's definitely a special distro.

Did you have to do something special which requires Google's permission, to do it?

No, I just had to put it in developer mode. Same story on a more recent Chromebook which was Atom-based. Some Chromebooks require a hardware mod before you can install Linux; you have to open them up and set a jumper (or something), but both of mine didn't require that.

Here are the directions I used for my Samsung ARM Chromebook. These directions are probably obsolete for more modern hardware, so take them with a grain of salt:

http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-scri...

Then stuff has changed recently. The last time I looked this up it was custom stuff and I couldn't just download Ubuntu or some other distro and press install.

>Look at the arm laptops that are released. Not a single one can run Linux.

Some of the earliest ARM laptops ran Chrome OS, which is an image based Linux distro (vs package based).

People have been running more recognizable distros on some of these models for a long time, with varying degrees of success.

Take it easy on the hyperbole. There are definitely options.

The vast majority of ARM SoCs' Linux support amounts to Linux forks, and not mainline Linux support. Forks eventually stop being maintained, and quickly become outdated.

Now that I look at it, it looks like this is the case for some[1] ARM Chromebooks, too, in that they are stuck having to use the specific ChromeOS kernels that ship with images for their Chromebook models.

[1] https://github.com/RaumZeit/LinuxOnAcerCB5-311

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