back to article Fedora 20 Heisenbug makes ARM chips 'a primary architecture'

Fedora 20 has been released with expanded support for ARM-compatible processors and a guarantee of continued heavy development for the low-power chips. The latest version of the venerable Linux distribution was announced on Tuesday, and comes with official support for ARMv7hl (hardware floating-point, little endian) devices, …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anomalous Cowturd
    Windows

    Things are starting to get interesting...

    Intel and AMD's collars are surely starting to feel decidedly tight. The next couple of years could be very educational for them.

    Ah, nurse. My medication, if you please.

    1. iniudan

      Re: Things are starting to get interesting...

      AMD are working on their own ARM 64 bit SoC design, so I don't see them having it tight, especially since has opposed to most other ARM licensee, they already have some expertise of the server market, just not the best chip for most task, has Intel just rule by always been 2 generation ahead for their manufacturing process.

      They also have the GPU division which could give them an advantage in designing better SoC for heavy computation task.

      And the first real HSA chip coming out next year, hopefully it isn't a wet petard.

      1. James Hughes 1

        Re: Things are starting to get interesting...

        There's a difference between having a GPU division, and having a GPU division that has something that will work ok at the power levels required by mobile. It's a very different kettle of fish to desktop GPU's.

        1. iniudan

          Re: Things are starting to get interesting...

          AMD ARM SoC are most likely targeted at server (would be an interesting SoC for HP Moonshot, for example), not mobile, but if people are interested in putting their product into mobile, I am sure their semi-custom design will not say no.

  2. SVV

    Heisenbug?

    You don't want the word "bug" in your OS name.

    And even ignoring this typo, there is some uncertainty as to whether I can support this in principle.

    1. Pypes

      Re: Heisenbug?

      I read it as Fedora Heidelberg and got excited about a new press technology.

    2. foo_bar_baz

      Re: Heisenbug?

      Heisenbug is old school geek jargon.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Coat

        Re: Heisenbug?

        That would be NetworkManager, wouldn't it?

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          Re: Heisenbug?

          But Gnome 3.10 will collapse your stuff, so it's all good.

          1. Nigel 11

            Re: Heisenbug?

            Gnome 3.10 ... hopefully yum install cinnamon still deals with that. (Or you could have picked KDE in the first place).

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Heisenbug?

              Did an upgrade to Fedora 20 this morning, and Cinnamon is still working fine. Never used the "fedup" process before, but it was pretty much painless. The only curious thing is that it left behind the Fedora 19 version of Libreoffice - manually removing and reinstalling those packages sorted things out though.

        2. coredump

          Re: Heisenbug?

          Not quite: NM is pretty broken pretty consistently.

          Good one, though.

      2. wdmot

        Re: Heisenbug?

        Heh. I was confusing "Heisen" with "Hinden" ...

        Hindenbug would not be the best nickname name for an OS.

  3. Salts

    2015 Year of the Linux Desktop

    And yes I do mean 2015 not 2014.

    OK, so it's been predicted for years, for nearly as many years as I have been using Linux and for me, to be honest I don't actually care if Linux never becomes a main stream desktop OS, it works for me as a desktop OS(as well as server and other good stuff) and that's enough, for me.

    But look at the difference now to just 5 years ago, the mobile OS is pushing up the stack, but the old guard of wintel has not managed to push down and gain in the mobile or tablet market.

    What made Windows the dominant desktop was because we all used it at work and probably got our first PC's from there, with probably a none licensed copy of what we needed, also Windows had the games, well DOS did at first, but that's another story.

    Now the mobile market is key and Linux/ARM is the dominant player with all the major distros of Linux supporting ARM and ARM/Linux is a mature product, far more than Windows. Kids who got their first smart phone a few years back are teenagers now, they are not worried about a new laptop or desktop being, Chrome OS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian or SteamOS based, in fact, said teens probably view Windows as that old fashioned OS Mom & Dad use at work, much like a few old hands here would have viewed the old Main Frame or Mini back in the day.

    Yep 2015 year of the Linux desktop, the betting is on the flavour of the distro, hence to my mind why the big Linux distros are pushing what they already have, a versatile OS.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. defiler

      Re: 2015 Year of the Linux Desktop

      Problem is that outside the workplace, desktops are dying a death. Laptops less so, but tablets are where the domestic market is these days.

      Linux has matured to the point where it can be a realistic option on the desktop for most people, just as most people are getting rid of the desktop.

      (And this from someone who uses Ubuntu on my desktop.)

      1. P. Lee

        Re: 2015 Year of the Linux Desktop

        The issue isn't desktop maturity, its app availability and migration cost that is the problem.

  4. chivo243 Silver badge

    Either or...

    a Heisenberg compensator or the Eyes of Heisenberg? but Heisenbug?

  5. Jim 59

    Linux desktop

    We Unix/Linux people long for Linux to take the desktop away from MS. But if that actually happened, our salaries would go down and work become much more boring.

  6. launcap Silver badge
    Go

    So now all we need..

    Is someone producing low-cost ARM-based servers that can be easily scaled (so I can afford a baby one at home and work can afford a rack-full).

    Then I can ditch the expensive and noisy Dell 2950 I have at home and put in some nice quiet ARM servers to suit all my virtualisation needs,,

    Well - one can dream!

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: So now all we need..

      At the small end you could try a Cubieboard, with 1 x SATA on board. BTW Linux supports SATA port multipliers (forget the exact right term - but like SCSI LUNs on SATA, can attach four or more drives to one SATA port). Might be a fun project.

      At the bigger end you could stick with Intel and get an Avoton server with 12 SATA ports. http://techreport.com/news/25703/asrock-combines-avoton-soc-12-sata-ports-on-mini-itx-mobo

      There are plenty of whisper-quiet Intel solutions. Start with a low-wattage CPU (think 35W TDP is the lowest). Then research all components with fans. Typically you use a large case with a 12cm fan running at minimum speed and a large-fan CPU heatsink which again will result in the fan running at minimum speed (or off most of the time, if the motherboard is chosen to be capable of running the fan at zero rpm when the CPU isn't in need of any cooling). You can get completely fan-less PSUs. You'll also want to choose hard disk drives with care lest they be the noisiest part of your system. WD "Red" aren't the fastest, but they may be the quietest. I can't hear them seeking at all!

      I've been trying to find a mini-ITX board with an Intel i3-4210U soldered onto it and passively cooled (15W TDP) but nobody seems to make that. Annoying. (I have an Atom-based home server which I'd like to speed up, but not at the expense of starting again with an Intel NUC and a 3rd-party passive-cooling case and not at the noise cost of even whispering fans).

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Complexity is now going through the roof

    Goddammit!

    I'm currently getting owned by systemd. WHY!

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like