Re: [9front] build iso from arm64

[Thaddeus Woskowiak <tswoskowiak@gmail.com>]

I dont think it's fair to blame Arm as no one bothered to build a
standard Arm platform in the same vein as the PC. Before the IBM PC XT
and later AT standard existed the home computer industry was in a
similar situation with random intel, wd, zilog, motorola systems
kicking about with incompatibilities between them. IBM was very
influential and relevant at the time so it stands to reason that the
PC was in a unique position to take off. Who is going to IBM the Arm
platform? Microsoft? Amazon? Google? Facebook? They're too busy
building ant farms.

The PC platform is an agreement between manufacturers to use a
standard boot firmware (bios/uefi), standard hardware interfaces (e.g.
pci, ata, vesa, etc, ac97/hda), and booting procedures (mbr/gpt).
Hardware is wired predictably so video, keyboard, com ports, timers,
etc are always on the same addresses, interrupt and dma ports meaning
drivers don't have to be tweaked or re-written between vendors.
Nowadays we have such complex (batshit even) hardware that we need to
manage it via a subsystem which we know as acpi that adds a whole
layer of abstraction to talk to fans and firmwares.

The closest we have had is the Microsoft Windows RT Surface which
bolted wintel PC baggage to Arm such as uEFI and ACPI. Basically an
Arm PC. Raspberry pi is an honorable mention by fitting their firmware
with pc like booting from usb, pxe and so on but pi firmware isn't
portable as the pi hardware is batshit wherein the gpu handles the
bootstrapping, not the Arm cpus....

It would be nice to have a platform controller, firmware and api using
9p so we can mount and walk the platform controller on boot then find
and configure what we need. Though, for anything to succeed, it would
need the weight of an IBM behind it.