Why AMD APU tablets beat t hell of ARM devices: PC/BIOS arch

from:luke.leighton@gmail.com
to: fedora-arm@lists.fedoraproject.org

 the situation that all arm-based gnu/linux distros face is the stark
reality of ARM systems having absolutely no concept of a BIOS of any
kind in any way.  having repeated this enough times in enough forums i
think it's finally beginning to be recognised.

 there isn't going to be a "solution": the sooner that's accepted the
easier things will become for people.  they can e.g. pick a particular
SoC or a particular piece of harware and get that up-to-scratch for
example, rather than going "wtf??".

 in the x86 world, the problem goes away by virtue of the x86 world
being effectively a total design monopoly: external peripherals,
monolithic BIOS and so on.  the hilarious irony is that as intel tries
to cross over into the ARM world (e.g. the Quark X1000) they apply
those "external peripherals" design rules with what will turn out to
be disastrous results.

 i never thought i'd say that a monopoly is actually a good thing, but
it is.  the alternative is that in any two near-identical bits of
ARM-based hardware even when they use the exact same CPUs and even the
exact same ICs the chances of them being able to use the exact same
kernel is absolutely zero.  all it takes is for the designers to have
used a different GPIO pin for a different purpose than the other
design and that's it, you're f*****d.

now multiply that across 650 ARM licensees each making in total
thousands of different SoCs, now multiply that across tens of
thousands of peripheral ICs many of which do not have
publicly-accessible datasheets, and then multiply that across the
number of products.

... is it any wonder then, that when reverse-engineering 9 HTC
smartphones we ended up with *TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY*
platform-dependent files?  the only reason there were *only* as few as
250 files was because the designs all used the same Intel PXA 270
processor and they all used the same external peripheral-extender IC
(we called it "ASIC3").

basically what i'm trying to get across is that if you, fedora-arm,
continue to wait until this situation "stabilises", you are going to
be waiting for a very very long time.
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