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)?

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 months ago

          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

        • Bene7rddso@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 months 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