On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 01:31, Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

The long-term situation should be that you should be able to have ONE
binary kernel "just work". That's where we are on x86. Really.

But X86 is peanuts. ?Really. ?There was one machine called the IBM PC at
some point that everybody cloned, and the rest was totally irrelevant.
Then came that thing called Windows that reinforced this hardware
monoculture as it was used for the ultimate conformance testing. ?This
is damn easy in that case to produce a kernel that works virtually
everywhere.

On ARM there is simply not such thing as a single machine design to
clone, and a closed source test bench to design for.

There are other architectures that didn't start from a single root platform,
but still support multi-platform kernels.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert at linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?? ?? -- Linus Torvalds