> Related question Ok, I'll bite, but don't take it personnaly.
There are thousands arm-based designs available today. Every one of them tries to be better than the others in at least one area. But none of their manufacturer address the real problem. The problem is that all those ARM designs lack a non-braindead, usable, firmware interface. Every ARM gimmick you can find over the last 10 years runs either a custom configuration of RedBoot, or a custom configuration of U-Boot, or something different. There is no way to write a design-agnostic kernel which will be able to figure out its environment (firmware, configuration data, devices). Passing an FDT file to describe the devices is not an option, because there is no well-defined way to pass arguments to the kernel, due to all these conflicting and/or subtly incompatible firmwares. Compare this to the PowerPC or SPARC world, where every decent system can expect to have an OpenFirmware interface. The OpenBSD ports to the various arm devices have been trying to cover the devices developers were interested in first (i.e. zaurus), and then the devices developers *expected* to be more commonly encountered (i.e. armish). The second part turns out to be a huge farce. A few new ARM board designs appear everyday, and these new devices amazingly manage to be gratuitously incompatible, firmwarewise, with all the existing devices. This is a sick game OpenBSD developers do not want to play. If ARM wants to exist as a *platform* (as opposed to a `source of gimmicks which gets replaced every two years without any concern for the obsolete ones'), it needs to be more than just a cpu design. Do you think the x86 processors would have been so successful without every x86 vendor working hard to provide an IBM-compatible BIOS? And do not expect the upcoming 64-bit ARM chips (AArch64) to fix this. None of the ARM vendors want to use a common firmware interface, because none of them wants fair competition. A captive customer is worth so much more than a customer with a choice. ARM is about to become the PC of the 21st century, with a minor tweak. The PC world was `closed mind, crap architecture, high interoperability', while the ARM world is becoming `closed mind, not-so-crap-and-becoming-decent architecture, who cares about interoperability'. Miod
