software is tested on x86, and may not work on other architectures

Posted Jun 1, 2008 8:10 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: why use x86 other than to support proprietary software? by drag
Parent article: Intel CEO: Smaller gadgets will expand market (AP)

yes ARM is probably the next architecture to support, but that doesn't mean that the various
developers are going to take the time to do so.

the advantage of x86 is compatibility, it doesn't matter if it's closed source or open source,
it's almost certainly tested on x86 and it may or may not work with other architectures.

this isn't limited to compiled code either. I've run into perl code that was written on AIX
(powerpc) that didn't work on Linux without needing to go in and write compatibility routines
to handle the big/little endian difference.

software is tested on x86, and may not work on other architectures

Posted Jun 1, 2008 9:06 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> yes ARM is probably the next architecture to support, but that doesn't mean that the various
developers are going to take the time to do so.

Your right. It's the users that make it work. Always has, always will. The only reason why any
free software isn't supported on a platform is because not many users use that platform.

I've used PowerPC Debian in the past and I very rarely ran into any software that didn't work
that wasn't closed source. I even shared the same home directory between my PowerPC laptop and
my x86 desktop and that worked well (except for certain programs that used sqlite in a
non-endianess safe manner)

Hell during that period time my Ibook was better supported then any x86 laptop that I ever
used.. before Intel started helping out with getting Linux centrino support up to speed.

I figure as long as you have decent Linux kernel support for a platform, and the GNU stuff
supports a platform then most open source software should be mostly just a compile away. The
most important part is just having users to compile and test the software. Without those there
isn't any point anyways.

software is tested on x86, and may not work on other architectures

Posted Jun 1, 2008 9:20 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Oh.. in terms of embedded development ARM surpassed x86 in popularity about 3 years ago.
(according to linuxdevices.com) 

According to Debian's popularitycontest Arm is now 3rd favorite behind x86 and x86-64. It beat
out the Apple-Linux crowd..

When it comes to fairly popular architectures like the ARM there really isn't going to be much
of a barrier for any open source application if the designers remotely cared about
portability. (If they didn't care much about portability then generally they didn't care much
about quality either, anyways...)