• ozymandias117@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    There aren’t any ARM manufacturers that upstream their drivers, and no SystemReady support from any manufacturers

    Basically every package works on ARM, but the lack of manufacturer support for hardware means ARM effectively requires a special kernel build for every PC

    RaspberryPi has worked on upstreaming their Broadcom SoC, Collabora had worked on upstreaming the RK3588 SoC…

    None of Qualcomm’s recent chips are very usable (always missing something like audio, or other basic functionality)

    Asahi Linux worked on Apple M1/M2 support

    Unless a new ARM manufacturer comes along, general use ARM PCs are a long way away

      • ozymandias117@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        That doesn’t fix the problem of needing specific device tree files for every computer.

        So you still won’t be able to say, swap your WiFi chip in your laptop and still have it work.

        This just enables a small subset of (specifically Windows ARM laptops) to boot from an image.

        This is very different from x86, where ACPI allows you to have a single image that knows very little about the hardware.

        If ARM started using SystemReady, you could see a truly generic image, rather than having a specific list of laptops the “generic” image works with