Also the ARM vendors need to get their shit together and make useful hardware abstraction layers so they don’t have to tailor their OS and driver suite to a particular chip.
But no, there’s no profit motive for keeping older chips alive. They enjoy being able to ship a proprietary blob that only works on one generation of chip and then forget about ever updating it again.
However, the Linux ARM community (mostly driven by reverse engineering and community efforts, not the companies making these chips) have shown that you absolutely can have a sane kernel, driver, and OS setup on ARM hardware. Mobile Linux is getting good because we have proper ARM Linux drivers like panfrost and freedreno now. Work is being done to standardize mobile camera hardware with libcamera.
The big corps could’ve made these frameworks, they could’ve upstreamed their ARM drivers in mainline Linux so that the maintenance burden was lessened. They didn’t, and then they whine about how difficult it is to maintain old devices. It’s entirely a burden of their own making.
Meanwhile my PinePhone, running on an ancient Allwinner A64 SoC from 2015 with a GPU core from 2010 or so, is running the latest Linux 6.4 kernel with a fully updated stack. Thank you Linux community for doing what the shitty corps could not.
Also the ARM vendors need to get their shit together and make useful hardware abstraction layers so they don’t have to tailor their OS and driver suite to a particular chip.
But no, there’s no profit motive for keeping older chips alive. They enjoy being able to ship a proprietary blob that only works on one generation of chip and then forget about ever updating it again.
However, the Linux ARM community (mostly driven by reverse engineering and community efforts, not the companies making these chips) have shown that you absolutely can have a sane kernel, driver, and OS setup on ARM hardware. Mobile Linux is getting good because we have proper ARM Linux drivers like panfrost and freedreno now. Work is being done to standardize mobile camera hardware with libcamera.
The big corps could’ve made these frameworks, they could’ve upstreamed their ARM drivers in mainline Linux so that the maintenance burden was lessened. They didn’t, and then they whine about how difficult it is to maintain old devices. It’s entirely a burden of their own making.
Meanwhile my PinePhone, running on an ancient Allwinner A64 SoC from 2015 with a GPU core from 2010 or so, is running the latest Linux 6.4 kernel with a fully updated stack. Thank you Linux community for doing what the shitty corps could not.