7 Apr
2021
7 Apr
'21
3:52 a.m.
Fortunately, we were once again saved from a monoculture by....mobile
phones.
Now it has to run on Linux on x86_64 *and* arm64. And because Apple has
managed to nail down its brand as The Lifestyle Phone For Rich People, it
also has to build in a vaguely-BSD userland for arm (disclaimer: writing
this on an M1 Macbook Air, with an iPhone beside me on my desk--but all my
real work happens on Linux/x86_64 on Someone Else's Computer, usually
Google's but sometimes Amazon's or NCSA's).
Adam
On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 6:46 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 07:23:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy
wrote:
I'm the biggest SunOS 4.x fan boy and I agree. It was ~30 years ago.
Back then, all the open source stuff, or closed source stuff, took a
ton of work to make it work. It just worked on SunOS. I can't tell
you how many times I've brought up X10 or X11 on all sorts of systems
(it was a good learning experience, you learned to figure out that this
is part of my graphics card, this and that and that and that is not,
just ifdef that out and keep going).
To be fair, a lot of that was because there's a lot of crappy
userspace software out there who assumed that all the world's a Sun
(running SunOS). Previously it was Vax running BSD 4.x, and it's been
superceded these days with "all the world's Linux (running on x86_64)".
I'm a big Linux fan boy, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that
that there's a lot of cr*p that uses slow, maddening autoconf and
automake build systems, yet have so many Linux'isms in it that won't
build anywhere else.
The fact that a lot of software easily brings up on a particular OS
doesn't mean that it's inherently better; just that it has the
dominant mindshare.
- Ted