There's an alternative universe where we decided to teach the kernel about every piece of hardware it should run on. Fortunately (or, well, unfortunately) we've seen that in the ARM world. Most device-specific simply never reaches mainline, and most users are stuck running ancient kernels as a result. Imagine every x86 device vendor shipping their own kernel optimised for their hardware, and now imagine how well that works out given the quality of their firmware. Does that really seem better to you?
This sounds like an argument for a common, open definition of a bootable system architecture that multiple vendors can implement compatibility with -- roughly the same way that the IBM-compatible PC created a baseline for competition forty-or-so years ago.
In other words: a newly-developed, compatible platform created by a vendor might not be fully-utilized by an existing operating system that was developed without any knowledge of that particular platform, but nonetheless the operating system should be installable, bootable and usable on the platform given that it complies to the standard.
It took me some research to find out whether there's a standard available or in-progress for ARM-based systems that aims towards that, and whether it requires ACPI and/or DeviceTree.
Is the ARM Base System Architecture[1] that standard? (it seems to provide the option for platforms to use ACPI or alternatively for them to use DeviceTree)
(it's not a rhetorical question: I genuinely don't know)
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This sounds like an argument for a common, open definition of a bootable system architecture that multiple vendors can implement compatibility with -- roughly the same way that the IBM-compatible PC created a baseline for competition forty-or-so years ago.
In other words: a newly-developed, compatible platform created by a vendor might not be fully-utilized by an existing operating system that was developed without any knowledge of that particular platform, but nonetheless the operating system should be installable, bootable and usable on the platform given that it complies to the standard.
It took me some research to find out whether there's a standard available or in-progress for ARM-based systems that aims towards that, and whether it requires ACPI and/or DeviceTree.
Is the ARM Base System Architecture[1] that standard? (it seems to provide the option for platforms to use ACPI or alternatively for them to use DeviceTree)
(it's not a rhetorical question: I genuinely don't know)
[1] - https://github.com/ARM-software/bsa-acs/blob/2d08c94b4ab9128aeb987a57bc0461271d94460c/README.md