Hacker News Reader

Comment by pezezin | Hacker News Reader

After playing around with some ARM hardware I have to say that I don't care whether ARM is more efficient or not as long as the boot process remains the clusterfuck that it is today.

IMHO the major win of the IBM PC platform is that it standardized the boot process from the very beginning, first with the BIOS and later with UEFI, so you can grab any random ISO for any random OS and it will work. Meanwhile in the ARM world it seems that every single CPU board requires its own drivers, device tree, and custom OS build. RISC-V seems to suffer from the same problem, and until this problem is solved, I will avoid them like toxic waste.

View on HN

ARM systems that support UEFI are pretty fun to work with. Then there's everything else. Anytime I hear the phrase "vendor kernel" I know I'm in for an experience...

nah when i hear vendor kernel i just do not go for that experience. it is not 2006 get your shit mainline or at least packaged correctly.

Fun Fact: Your Qualcomm based Phone may already use UEFI.

In general, most modern ARM 8/9 64bit SoC purged a lot of the vestigial problems.

Yet most pre-compiled package builds still never enable the advanced ASIC features for compatibility and safety-concerns. AMD comparing the NERF'd ARM core features is pretty sleazy PR.

Tegra could be a budget Apple M3 Pro, but those folks chose imaginary "AI" money over awesomeness. =3

nah. if they do not work on their extensions to be supported by general software, that is their problem

Check out ARM SBSA / SBBR which seems aimed at solving most of these issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur... I'm hopeful RISCV comes up with something similar.

https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-server-platform/blob/...

But those initiatives are focused on servers.

What about desktops and laptops? Cellphones? SBC like the Raspberry Pi? That is my concern.

This is also supposed to be for desktops/laptops afaik, idk about phones.

Edit, this part of the server platforms spec certainly: https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-brs/blob/main/intro.a...

> BRS-I is expected to be used by general-purpose compute devices such as servers, desktops, laptops and other devices with industry expectations on silicon vendor, OS and software ecosystem interoperability.

Thank you, I had missed that part.

It would be great indeed if there is a standardized boot process that every OS can use, I think it would greatly help with RISC-V adoption.

I could not agree more. I wanted to love ARM, but after playing around with numerous different pieces of hardware, I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole anymore. The power savings is not worth the pain to me.

I hope like hell that RISC-V doesn't end up in the same boot-process toxic wasteland

Reply on news.ycombinator.com