Help me understand this better.
From what I have read online, since arm just licenses their ISA and each vendor’s CPU design can differ vastly from one another unlike x86 which is standard and only between amd and Intel. So the Linux support is hit or miss for arm CPUs and is dependent on vendor.
How is RISC-V better at this?. Now since it is open source, there may not be even some standard ISA like arm-v8. Isn’t it even fragmented and harder to support all different type CPUs?
USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It’s Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zurich
https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo
At 19:22
examples he gives are what you’d expect:
Many systems on the chip that Linux doesn’t have control over, and could be compromised by a cross SoC attack
Thank you for pulling the image out.
This talk surprised me at the time. I was starting the eye opening experience of design hardware. Linux more orchestrates the hardware than controlling it.
For me it opened my eyes to the idea that all you really need is some CPU time and a little RAM space to have a full-fledged performative system. Sure, there will be a large attack vector for remote spying, but if you just want to code and play games then it’s pretty amazing how little you need :-)