HP & ASUS Rollout Their ARM-Powered Laptops

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HP & ASUS Rollout Their ARM-Powered Laptops

Being announced from Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit today is the HP Envy x2 and ASUS NovaGo, interesting ARM-powered laptops...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASUS-HP-Snapdragon-Laptops

[emptythevoid]

I'm not familiar with running Linux on ARM other than loading an image to an SD card for my Raspberry Pi. Do Linux distros need specific builds for each ARM device (or at least each ARM platform)? Or can a generic installer be made for ARM that would work on all ARM devices?

[KellyClowers]

I have a might need!

invader_zim.gif

[edwaleni]

I'm not familiar with running Linux on ARM other than loading an image to an SD card for my Raspberry Pi. Do Linux distros need specific builds for each ARM device (or at least each ARM platform)? Or can a generic installer be made for ARM that would work on all ARM devices?

Up to now you needed a kernel compiled for your flavor of ARM, usually by the chip or board maker. The recent kernel updates are beginning to include more ARM CPU's, so flexibility (we hope) is growing.

The ASUS NOVA Go is interesting because it has the Qualcomm X16 1Gbps LTE modem. 22 hour battery life is great, but running that modem at 1Gbps will take that battery down to 4-5 hours lickety split.

[emptythevoid]

Other than arm64 platform varies. Debian has binary packages for many arm platforms. Embedded devices needs special image because they use u-boot or other than PC bios boot mechanism. Armbian has shell scripts that easy to modify to make your own Debian distribution. Kernel and drivers needs to configure for every device.
https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-G...d-Preparation/

That's what I was thinking, and afraid of. If Windows 10 ARM takes off, and more computer manufacturers take note and start making more ARM-based computers over x86/x64, would that not make it more difficult for an average Linux user to install their favorite distro on one of these? Instead of having a generic installer, you'd need to get (or make) a pre-built image for your specific hardware. That's only a mild annoyance with the SoC boards like the Pi, because they've got a good community and culture behind them (and you can tell which ones are popular and supported). The thought of having specific builds for (mostly) each different ARM computer would be a huge barrier to entry.

[r_a_trip]

Seeing as these are ARM platforms, will Windows be "Secure Boot" locked to them?

[anarki2]

That's what I was thinking, and afraid of. If Windows 10 ARM takes off, and more computer manufacturers take note and start making more ARM-based computers over x86/x64, would that not make it more difficult for an average Linux user to install their favorite distro on one of these? Instead of having a generic installer, you'd need to get (or make) a pre-built image for your specific hardware. That's only a mild annoyance with the SoC boards like the Pi, because they've got a good community and culture behind them (and you can tell which ones are popular and supported). The thought of having specific builds for (mostly) each different ARM computer would be a huge barrier to entry.

"Good community and culture" is far from being sufficient to maintain good quality builds for many platforms. It's sufficient to have pipe dreams tho.

[davidbepo]

would NEVER buy

[pigpen]

I'm not familiar with running Linux on ARM other than loading an image to an SD card for my Raspberry Pi. Do Linux distros need specific builds for each ARM device (or at least each ARM platform)? Or can a generic installer be made for ARM that would work on all ARM devices?

With the rise of "device tree", there can be one build for each ISA (armv7, armv8). This explains it well : https://youtu.be/NNol7fRGo2E

Fedora does a great job : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archi...M/Installation . The trick is that Fedora builds a unique "uboot" for each board (and packages them in uboot-images-armv7 & uboot-images-armv8). The best way I've found to find which boards are supported is to install uboot-images-armv7 and then look in /usr/share/arm-image-installer or /usr/share/doc/fedora-arm-installer/SUPPORTED-BOARDS .

FYI, I run Fedora on a "BeagleBone Black" and "Orange Pi One" ($20!).

In my opinion, the big problem with Linux on ARM is the most of the graphics drivers are closed source (or reverse engineered). The exception is the the "VC4" (Open GLES 2.1 ) on the Raspberry Pi 2 / 3. There is also work on the VC5 (OpenGL & Vulkan).

[AndyChow]

u-boot is a pain to deal with. You need to connect it to a serial port, typically through the headphone jack, a uart chip, just to configure the bios to install linux.

That said, 20 hours battery life sounds like something worth going through the trouble of it all.