Re: Linux Laptop
Reply #7 –
Yeah, 4GB is pretty much a minimum. But isn't most ARM hardware poorly documented and therefore poorly supported? (Outside of junk like Android.)
Yes and no. Many SoCs come with decent documentation for the CPU, clock generation, power management, peripherals like USB, ethernet, SATA, SPI etc. but most of the time the graphics part is proprietary. Sometimes it's only the drawing engine, sometimes the whole thing. ( Like with the OMAP family - the video output circuitry is documented but the SGX is not. We can still get simple acceleration by abusing the DMA controller, which is what RISC OS and NetBSD ( yes, we stole that idea wholesale ) do. )
Linux ( and therefore Android ) support usually comes in the shape of binary blobs that talks to the hardware and a just as closed source OpenGL library sitting on top of that.
One problem with those SoCs is that it's much harder to write portable drivers than with buses like PCI - you can't really probe peripherals, your kernel has to know which SoC it's running on and from that information deduce what's where.
It would be awfully nice if some company made a mainboard with an ARM SoC ( preferrably 64bit ARM ) that just contains a CPU ( or more than one... ), interrupt, clock, memory controller, a PCIe host and maybe USB, SATA and ethernet, with a Radeon hooked up via PCIe, a handful DIMM slots and maybe some PCIe slot(s). That would get around the proprietary on-chip graphics controllers and add a whole lot of flexibility.