Back in December 2017, Microsoft and Qualcomm announced a partnership to pair Windows 10 and Snapdragon Arm processors for ultra-thin LTE-connected netbooks with a 20+ hour battery life. This Windows-on-Arm initiative has faced several stumbling blocks, with the the first-generation HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo criticized for poor performance and app compatibility in Windows 10, due in large part to an inline x86 emulator for apps written for Windows on Intel or AMD processors.
Now, a group of programmers and device hackers are working to bring proper support for Ubuntu to Arm-powered Windows laptops, starting with first-generation Snapdragon 835 systems, like the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo. The aarch64-laptops project on GitHub provides prebuilt images for the aforementioned notebook PCs, as well as the Lenovo Miix 630.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jbruchon on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:52PM (3 children)
x86-compatible systems have standards like PCI[e], ACPI, DMI, and more recently UEFI, all of which give an operating system the basic configuration information it needs to know what hardware is in the computer and roughly how to communicate with it. ARM systems tend to have a lot of hardware attached to I2C/GPIO pins and require all kinds of system-specific knowledge in the OS just to boot to a working console. The list of supported ARM systems for any given distribution is tiny compared to the number of ARM platforms that exist and the lack of standard embedded configuration data is probably THE reason behind that. We basically need "ACPI for ARM." Until we get that, every ARM device is special, needing a special kernel just for that platform, and the ARM section of the kernel forever remains a horrid mess.
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:14PM
yeah, i recently bought my first arm dev/tinkering board (orange pi r1 i think) and found this out the hard way. it's been sitting here ever since and i'm not exactly looking to buy more arm stuff. alpine and alarm don't seem to want to support the cheap little board either, even though it would make a perfect firewall. low wattage, passively cooled, dual ethernet and not vulnerable to the latest CPU vulns b/c it's arm7, IIRC. what a waste...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:47PM (1 child)
64-bit arm doesn't have as many problems as 32-bit. 64-bit is pretty much just like any other architecture.
(Score: 1) by jbruchon on Friday February 15 2019, @01:38PM
It still has all the issues I mentioned, it's just less inconsistent with supported instruction sets.
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.