Reply to post: Re: Sitting on the fence.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Sitting on the fence.

>Linus does have a valid point as far as kernel development goes.

But only for those elements of the kernel that are best written in assembler; if you can write it in C then Linus's argument starts to fall apart. I suspect part of the problem is that much of the Linux kernel is now written in assembler or in C with data structures that replicate many of the data structures used by the Intel x86 family... But then this problem was solved by Unix, which also was written in C and readily ported to many different processor architectures...

So I think what Linus is actually saying: I'm not going to work on anything other than Linux x86, if someone else wants Linux on ARM (or other) then they are free to do it. which given the effort necessary to keep just the x86 variant maintained and moving forward is probably a reasonable decision.

However, the problem with this approach is that the underlying assumptions subtly change and soon developers assume Linux is only x86 and so code that doesn't need to know about what processor it is running on, starts to include processor dependencies; making any port to a new processor architecture (or a revised x86 architecture) more difficult.

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