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Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

This is true, don't know why you're getting downvoted.

Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and various arm based embedded systems played a much higher role in getting most linux, BSD tools working under arm.

Same thing that’s happening now with RISC-V and SiFive’s boards.

It’s not apple M1 that’s making this migration possible, its just the cherry on top of a cake.

The cake was all those consumer arm boards and dev kits which got in the hands of various OS developers, software maintainers. Who put in their time to port their codebases to arm and ensure compatibility.

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I can confirm, the RPi is the only reason I provide armhf and aarch64 builds of all my projects. It really helped accelerate the long tail.

Same, I only added ARM Docker images for my stuff because I'm an avid Pi user.

It's probably because linux on arm has been around longer than the Pi, but a lot of people seem to hold this idea it was pioneering.

It was pioneering in how low-cost and mass market it was at launch, but before the Pi there was plug computing, largely based around Marvell Kirkwood processors. There were also a variety of hackable NAS devices, I used some with Orion5x CPUS in. Then before plug computing there was the linksys NSLU2 with its Intel Xscale IXP chip, and all the hackable linksys routers going back to 2002, and that's just some of the stuff I've played with over the years. Before that I imagine there were previous generations of linux ARM support.

The Pi and other hobby boards are really great, don't get me wrong, but there's a tendency to credit them with a bit too much.

Plug computing and Linksys routers weren't cheap, and the Pi was. That's the entire difference when your target audience is kids with a couple of dollars worth of allowance or broke college kids.

> Plug computing and Linksys routers weren't cheap, and the Pi was.

For their time (20 years ago), they certainly were cheap. $100 or so for a small power efficient box that could run almost a whole Linux distribution was an amazing bargain. Before that, you needed a good-sized desktop or server to do anything involving a Unix-like OS, or paid dearly for the convenience of a laptop.

And it wasn't much before that, that running Unix on any microcomputer was just a dream.

It's hard to comprend just how amazingly affordable computing has become in such a short amount of time.

Do you realise that a $100 is a fortune to the demographic that I specified? For that price, those devices are so out of reach that they might as well just not exist.

I remember that time in my life very well. I literally had around $50 in my local currency in the coin box, and that was it. Hand me down computers were unavailable where I was.

Everyone had one anyway because they needed a router. It was "free". Used ones were common too.

Ok, but that doesn’t mean that the Pi was important in getting most Linux or BSD tools working under ARM, as was the claim above.

Yes, it reached a wide audience, they did a lot of great stuff getting capable dev boards out to a lot of people. But fully functional Linux on ARM pre-dates the Pi significantly.

(I’d argue the NSLU2 and sheevaplug were both pretty affordable, at sub-$100 too, but the Pi definitely upped the game there)

In the chicken and egg problem of getting support for ARM software, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was the one that unilaterally plopped a ready-to-go (if very weak), low cost chicken in front of everyone. For that, I think they deserve some credit. Sure they built in top of the work of others - so let's acknowledge everyone involved in the process rather than pretend that one party deserves fame exclusively. It was a community effort :)

> getting support for ARM software

It is my contention that this support was largely already present. That's all.

Pi did great work getting cheap boards out to people, and put a lot of effort into education and community building. They exposed a huge number of people to the possibilities of non-x86 computing that otherwise might not have been. So indeed let's credit them with that, it's all great stuff!

But it's quite revisionist to say they helped get linux or BSD or their tools onto the platform, IMHO.

The wide audience itself is a big motivator to get them working on Arm.

This. The ARM ecosystem didn't get a good prebuilt Docker container story until the Pi4, but it was somewhat doable on the Pi3 if you were willing to recompile 80% of containers from scratch. I can only guess that additional adoption fueled the critical mass of incentives for building for ARM as a rule rather than as an exception.

>it was somewhat doable on the Pi3 if you were willing to recompile 80% of containers from scratch.

If Pi3 was so popular, why didn't it exist as a binary?

The pi3 CPU used an older ARM spec, which had issues with producing good binaries for e. g. Go-based builds (I remember that quite vividly).

Beyond that, I can only hypothesize that Docker on non-x86_64 (or multiarch Docker, in general), was very difficult to kick-start for whatever reason. This may have been compounded by the fact that Docker wasn't as broadly adopted by hobbyists back then, so demand for ARM builds want that great.

https://gist.github.com/tyrell/2963c6b121f79096ee0008f5a47cf... looking at this, it seems that debian added it at least 3 years ago and even in 2016 there was a binary, unless you knew about it and it sucked.

But the systems already worked on Arm, that's the point!

Getting more attention to the platform was definitely a good thing, exposing more people to a different architecture, to having a machine cheap enough to just play with, to all sorts of great stuff.

But Linux and BSD themselves were already mature on arm by that point.

Indeed. Debian had full ARM support for years before the Pi, very mature, and was really the only reason the Pi project could even choose ARM. If not for Debian's work, which the Pi relies upon, they'd have never been able to bootstrap.

Debian project also deserves some credit - so let's credit them. There's enough credit to go around got everyone who helped to bring this about.

> Then before plug computing there was the linksys NSLU2 with its Intel Xscale IXP chip

Whoa, haven't heard that one in a looong time. Still have mine sitting in a storage closet, I think...

They were great little machines!

I used to run my own mail server on one and use another as a media server. I even did a small hardware mod and soldered a wifi card to one of the internal USB headers on one of them. Much fun!

I don't imagine the processing power stands up to modern devices though :)

This started long before Pi. StrongARM existed 20 years ago and the new generation of application processors which pushed forward ARM started around 2005 (Atmel, TI, Freescale, Qualcomm and others) with the ARM9 core.

Pi entered a mature ecosystem, it just made it a bit more consumer/newbie facing but the system level foundations were all there.

Ironically the Pi isn’t even particularly well supported in terms of drivers compared to commercial offerings.

No, but pi is what gave us the software!

While strongarm and others have been around longer, none had any real mass market hold. With Pi & co, you can build a (slow) server with $35. You can build a k8 cluster with $150. That's why we have cross platform packages for almost anything server related.

You could do just that before. Cross compiling for ARM is an ancient, dark craft. All that changed for the better (and admittedly much better for the hobbyists) is getting prebuilt binaries in the major distributions.

Before pi & co, cross compiling was a black art. You often needed to build your own toolchain and the target environment were often not standardized either so you would need different compilers for each target.

Fast forward to today, you can apt-get cross-compilers and build tools.

While it was a hassle, you could use pre-built cross compilers on debian before the Pi came along, as I was in 2010/11. Multi-arch helped a lot when it was introduced too.

Was that so hard? Arduino was easy.

M1 brings large customer base paying for stuff. Raspberry Pi doesn't have that big of a $$$ splash.

Are you going to run Apple software on your servers? Most servers leverage the Linux ecosystem, most of which is open-source and maintained by developers who do not have big $$$.

M1 probably enables the same transition for customer-oriented, proprietary apps. But it has little to do with cloud computing, except proving that performance and ARM are not mutually exclusive, thus providing more acceptance.

A lot of stuff got prioritized for Arm/M1 compatibility... and fast as soon as the first M1 Macs released. Docker, node, in addition to Apple software.

> Docker, node, in addition to Apple software.

Well, to be honest it was probably macos+M1 platform support. Docker runs a virtual machine with Linux in it on macos and windows, not sure improvements there directly translate to server workloads. I am not sure about node, but it was surely working very well on ARM before that, although it might gain some optimizations thanks to M1.

Although Node.js existed for ARM, often there wouldn't be pre-built binaries for whatever version/native dependency you needed. M1 has significantly changed that picture.

Tons of java tools did nothing, until tickets started appearing that X does not work on my dev env.

Huh? I am developing natively in macOS for a Linux server using Rust. Everything just runs fine on both. Unless I need to go really low into syscalls I have no reason to be writing and testing my code on Linux.

You’re supporting that point though. A big initial move for ARM in rust was raspberry pi.

The post I replied to said M1 only gonna help user applications, not servers, I claim that it helps both.

Just wait 1.5 years and enjoy the apple cloud..

As someone who has worked with Apple "Enterprise" / "Business" / "Pro" products before..... I'll wait. It will start half decent, get a push to 90% of everything you need and then slowly get rewritten simplified to a level that is too basic to do any real work or just abandoned.

Yeah no. There was a time (early 2000s) when Apple made half-decent server hardware and operating systems. Those days are over. Apple has vocally abandoned the server market, and trying to use MacOS as a server today is an exercise in futility. Too many things require the GUI, and Apple's intense focus on security theater makes everyday server operations a nightmare.

I'm not talking about macos.. I'm talking about becoming an energy efficient cloud vm provider.

What is the criteria to meet energy efficient?

What's an example of something that requires the GUI?

Allowing full-disk access, turning on sshd, repeatedly clicking "OK" when you're asked "Do you want <freshly-compiled yet unsigned app> to accept incoming connections?"

If there are CLI ways to do this stuff I'd love to hear them.

I think there probably are.

I know sshd is controlled through systemsetup[1].

    sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on

[1]: https://ss64.com/osx/systemsetup.html

Bluntly put, I'm not gonna be running my business-critical application in Apache running off an M1 MacBook.

Ha, large customer base of very expensive laptops, that's actually tiny compared to the customer base of arm servers, Rpis.

None of the paid software with a tiny userbase you're thinking of is relevant to the server market, the point is that it's free and open.

>Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and various arm based embedded systems played a much higher role in getting most linux, BSD tools working under arm.

I don't disagree, but going mainstream is different.

>It’s not apple M1 that’s making this migration possible, its just the cherry on top of a cake.

M1 would not exist without the Apple's App store all based on ARM.

It makes sense, we build for what we play with. You gotta give us the nails if you want to sell a hammer.

> This is true, don't know why you're getting downvoted.

Apples are upset their $2000+ laptop isn't the revolutionary catalyst for the Arm revolution but instead a crappy $25 computer that's been around for a decade.

Please don't post in the flamewar style. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When are the new n-gate posts coming out?

N-gate has no love for pis either. The article would’ve been like, Apples and Pis fight over whose shitty processor paved the way for more underpowered devices , while intel continues war against its users.

I am not the n-gate maintainer, just someone who enjoys the humor. Last I heard the maintainer has been busy and unable to dedicate enough time. They hang out in in #cat-v on oftc.net.

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