New Battlefield? > Linux on ARM

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"Will ARM-powered smartbooks make all the difference for Linux? There's no unanimity of opinion in the FOSS world, except perhaps the general agreement that the $200 units Freescale and Qualcomm debuted at Computex are, well, interesting. Unlike Windows, most Linux software is "only a recompile away from running on ARM," noted Slashdot blogger Peter Brett.

Asus notwithstanding, netbooks have received a great deal of attention in the Linux community for their role in gaining wider acceptance for our favorite operating system.

So, when Freescale and Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) recently debuted a line of what they call "smartbooks" at Computex -- prominently featuring ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY) processors and priced as low as US$199 -- the blogosphere had no choice but to sit up and take notice.

"Good opportunity here," wrote jginspace on Slashdot, for example, where close to 300 comments were made on the topic. "I hope the application availability is going to be good -- as a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Tablet user I've been running a variant of Linux on an ARM processor for some time now and I can't wait to get my hands on an ARM netbook."

"The most interesting part is that those devices have integrated CPU/GPU/Video Accel. on a single chip."

"I'm going to be watching the way this plays out with great interest," Slashdot blogger Peter Brett told LinuxInsider. "One of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) trump cards in the desktop/portable wars so far has been the large amount of existing third-party Windows software. However, much of this is for the x86 architecture, and [it] may take a while for it to be ported to ARM."

Most Linux software, on the other hand, "is only a recompile away from running on ARM, and I expect fully featured distributions for these new portables to appear very soon," Brett added. "Will the lag time allow Linux to gain a strong foothold on the platform? Time will tell."

Lower-cost Linux devices "will further force Microsoft to gut its cash cow by lowering prices," Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told LinuxInsider. "This will mean less money to throw at markets they want to buy, so the benefits on the short term will be unpredictable and widespread."

"Linux on ARM is pretty much like Linux on x86, though; frankly, even running Angstrom Linux on my iPaq H2215 is essentially like running it on a PC, except that it has a different boot loader," he added."

Still, ARM's potential could make it "a major battleground in the war for freedom in IT," blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider by email.

"While ARM has been widely used at the low end of processing power, nothing prevents its use in the higher end using clustering technology," he asserted. "I would love to see AMD produce a 1024-core server chip using ARM. I bet that would change things."

With only a few cores, "ARM would easily be able to do anything we do now with x86," Pogson explained. "I especially like that M$ has not bothered to port to it. They are in the 'first they ignore us' stage of Gandhi's paradigm."

Yet "ARM will take its place in the world without Wintel's participation," he predicted. "The world is bigger than Wintel. 2009/2010 will be the opening round with netbooks. I expect the lessons learned will make 2010 the year of GNU/Linux on ARM on all platforms."