Microsoft doesn’t need to constantly rebuild different kernels for every supported device, which is basically a necessity for Android/ChromeOS because of their Linux base.
That’s probably a big motivator for the Fuschia project.
It has far less to do with the Linux base than the shear variety of chipsets with custom loaders needed for ARM architecture.
And anything like PCI lookup on ARM.
Damn it, MS balked at offering Windows on power efficient Atoms. This because Intel had stripped PCI from the SoC to save transistors and thus power.
I suspect that if you were to poke at the ARM chips found in the Windows RT devices, they would be special variants with PCI grafted on.
ARM SOCs are a bit like firing up an old DOS PC and fiddling with IRQ and DMA setting, only that you can't pull the cover off to see what cards are inserted and what the DIPs are set to.
Re:Google quits selling tablets
by Dylan16807 on Saturday June 02, 2018 @08:22PM
(#17217187)
To add insult to injury, it's an x86 Chromebook that doesn't require any of that custom ARM configuration to run.
> I'm not sure Windows 7 being supported for a decade was intentional, but we'll see what pans out with Windows 10's incremental model.
It definitely was. XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10LTSB all start[ed] with 10 years of support, and you can install a newer version on your same hardware to reset that counter.
Something's gone wrong with the core architecture if Google needs to actively "maintain devices" instead of just making generic security patches and shipping them out, with a little bit of testing.