Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and various arm based embedded systems played a much higher role in getting most linux, BSD tools working under arm.
Same thing that’s happening now with RISC-V and SiFive’s boards.
It’s not apple M1 that’s making this migration possible, its just the cherry on top of a cake.
The cake was all those consumer arm boards and dev kits which got in the hands of various OS developers, software maintainers. Who put in their time to port their codebases to arm and ensure compatibility.
It was pioneering in how low-cost and mass market it was at launch, but before the Pi there was plug computing, largely based around Marvell Kirkwood processors. There were also a variety of hackable NAS devices, I used some with Orion5x CPUS in. Then before plug computing there was the linksys NSLU2 with its Intel Xscale IXP chip, and all the hackable linksys routers going back to 2002, and that's just some of the stuff I've played with over the years. Before that I imagine there were previous generations of linux ARM support.
The Pi and other hobby boards are really great, don't get me wrong, but there's a tendency to credit them with a bit too much.
For their time (20 years ago), they certainly were cheap. $100 or so for a small power efficient box that could run almost a whole Linux distribution was an amazing bargain. Before that, you needed a good-sized desktop or server to do anything involving a Unix-like OS, or paid dearly for the convenience of a laptop.
And it wasn't much before that, that running Unix on any microcomputer was just a dream.
It's hard to comprend just how amazingly affordable computing has become in such a short amount of time.
I remember that time in my life very well. I literally had around $50 in my local currency in the coin box, and that was it. Hand me down computers were unavailable where I was.
Yes, it reached a wide audience, they did a lot of great stuff getting capable dev boards out to a lot of people. But fully functional Linux on ARM pre-dates the Pi significantly.
(I’d argue the NSLU2 and sheevaplug were both pretty affordable, at sub-$100 too, but the Pi definitely upped the game there)
It is my contention that this support was largely already present. That's all.
Pi did great work getting cheap boards out to people, and put a lot of effort into education and community building. They exposed a huge number of people to the possibilities of non-x86 computing that otherwise might not have been. So indeed let's credit them with that, it's all great stuff!
But it's quite revisionist to say they helped get linux or BSD or their tools onto the platform, IMHO.
If Pi3 was so popular, why didn't it exist as a binary?
Beyond that, I can only hypothesize that Docker on non-x86_64 (or multiarch Docker, in general), was very difficult to kick-start for whatever reason. This may have been compounded by the fact that Docker wasn't as broadly adopted by hobbyists back then, so demand for ARM builds want that great.
Getting more attention to the platform was definitely a good thing, exposing more people to a different architecture, to having a machine cheap enough to just play with, to all sorts of great stuff.
But Linux and BSD themselves were already mature on arm by that point.
Whoa, haven't heard that one in a looong time. Still have mine sitting in a storage closet, I think...
I used to run my own mail server on one and use another as a media server. I even did a small hardware mod and soldered a wifi card to one of the internal USB headers on one of them. Much fun!
I don't imagine the processing power stands up to modern devices though :)
Pi entered a mature ecosystem, it just made it a bit more consumer/newbie facing but the system level foundations were all there.
Ironically the Pi isn’t even particularly well supported in terms of drivers compared to commercial offerings.
While strongarm and others have been around longer, none had any real mass market hold. With Pi & co, you can build a (slow) server with $35. You can build a k8 cluster with $150. That's why we have cross platform packages for almost anything server related.
Fast forward to today, you can apt-get cross-compilers and build tools.
M1 probably enables the same transition for customer-oriented, proprietary apps. But it has little to do with cloud computing, except proving that performance and ARM are not mutually exclusive, thus providing more acceptance.
Well, to be honest it was probably macos+M1 platform support. Docker runs a virtual machine with Linux in it on macos and windows, not sure improvements there directly translate to server workloads. I am not sure about node, but it was surely working very well on ARM before that, although it might gain some optimizations thanks to M1.
If there are CLI ways to do this stuff I'd love to hear them.
I know sshd is controlled through systemsetup[1].
sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on
None of the paid software with a tiny userbase you're thinking of is relevant to the server market, the point is that it's free and open.
I don't disagree, but going mainstream is different.
>It’s not apple M1 that’s making this migration possible, its just the cherry on top of a cake.
M1 would not exist without the Apple's App store all based on ARM.
Apples are upset their $2000+ laptop isn't the revolutionary catalyst for the Arm revolution but instead a crappy $25 computer that's been around for a decade.
Of course Pi has started a big movement and prepared the groundwork, but M1, which I also use, is something else in terms of performance, and it caused this build-up to become an avalanche. Cloud systems will inevitably ride this wave, and will seriously eat into Intel's market share.
Just provisioned a small docker-lab in an ORACLE Cloud Ampere system. This thing is seriously snappy at the first glance.
So the only thing that is new is that ARM architecture is finally starting to "spill over" into the notebook/desktop and server market and preparing to eat Intel's (and AMD's) cake. But the wide-scale adoption of the architecture already has a long history, so presenting Raspi and Apple M1 as "pioneers of ARM introduction" is a bit misleading (Apple was a pioneer, but already back in 2007).
Before that there were already ARM servers too, but they're few and far between.
So I was trying to say that, Raspberry Pi and Apple M1 made ARM "touchable" with standard development tools and utilities for the normal people out there. So, this interaction accelerated the acceptance and software porting and grown the ecosystem faster.
Everyone already had an iPhone or Android, how was it not touch distance for the layman?
OTOH, you can get a pi, add peripherals (or just network), and you have a system to be hacked and tinkered on.
This is what I meant by touch distance.
Jailbreaking was so easy someone like Justin Beiber did it. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/07/29/justin-bieber-jailb...
Saurik and the original jailbreakers did all the heavy lifting, APT, SSH, and the usual CLI tools were ported so they could enjoy their handheld Unix computers.
Pi was an image on a microSD, some computer interfaces, it was very slow, burned out the microSD card, and was discouraging for me to use when I had a much better computer, the phones were easy to invest effort in, if I had a way crappy computer I wouldn't do too much with it, most people throw PiHole and never touch it again.
Been there, done that. Doesn't matter. Tinkering with a critical life infrastructure device vs, tinkering with a device made for tinkering is different. Way different.
> Jailbreaking was so easy someone like Justin Beiber did it
Again, doesn't matter because of the reasons I've said earlier. I'm using both platforms for a decade, and won't do them to my primary devices either. Because these devices are handling a lot of stuff for me, tinkering with them is not an option.
> Pi was an image on a microSD, some computer interfaces, it was very slow, burned out the microSD card, and was discouraging for me to use when I had a much better computer, the phones were easy to invest effort in, if I had a way crappy computer I wouldn't do too much with it, most people throw PiHole and never touch it again.
Actually, with a semi-decent SD card, burning one out with a Raspberry Pi is almost impossible. If you're worried about that, you can add a ZRAM, move swap and some folders to it (as Raspbian does), and sync during reboots, or periodically. If you're downloading world on it, a USB drive can alleviate the worry too.
On the slowness side, a first generation Raspberry Pi has a comparable performance to a Pentium II - 266MHz system, with similar performance to GPUs of that era. Considering the things I've done (live webcasting for example) with a P2 at that time, A Raspberry Pi is a powerhouse for its size.
You may have a much better computer with way higher specs, but you're missing the point. A Pi is a literally unbrickable and forgettable Linux PC with decent performance and no noise for many tasks many people do. I'm running an home infrastructure on an OrangePi Zero and the bottleneck is the 512MB RAM, not the CPU. With a decent SD card, it's not slow either.
I can replace all of it with a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2, but the OrangePi is much smaller.
Just because it can't race with a specially built workstation, doesn't mean it's useless.
If you use them for a lot of things, wouldn't you want to tinker them to make them run better? I certainly do on linux.
>You may have a much better computer with way higher specs, but you're missing the point. A Pi is a literally unbrickable and forgettable Linux PC with decent performance and no noise for many tasks many people do. I'm running an home infrastructure on an OrangePi Zero and the bottleneck is the 512MB RAM, not the CPU. With a decent SD card, it's not slow either.
I don't fear my PC being brickable, and its not noisy either, you can use water cooling for desktop or use a modern laptop, many are fanless (can't say the same about the Pi4). I have for example a router I used custom firmware on that can do everything a pihole can do, and more, just works quietly, it can do also act as a smart hub but I don't see the point.
>I can replace all of it with a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2, but the OrangePi is much smaller.
I find the problem with SBCs is they are too slow to be worthwhile, Android phones are much faster, have all inputs, and just works. Its not hard to buy an extra or use an old one if you fear tinkering.
>Been there, done that. Doesn't matter. Tinkering with a critical life infrastructure device vs, tinkering with a device made for tinkering is different. Way different.
What is "made for tinkering"? A Unix phone that can run all the software I want, a linux phone with root access, or my PSP which was made to play PSP and PS1 games with excellent homebrew counts as not made for tinkering seems alien. What can't they do? Throw a breakout board if you need the pins, I don't get the issue with using them. A one click root or unlock is way less complex than buying required parts to make an SBC work.
>On the slowness side, a first generation Raspberry Pi has a comparable performance to a Pentium II - 266MHz system, with similar performance to GPUs of that era. Considering the things I've done (live webcasting for example) with a P2 at that time, A Raspberry Pi is a powerhouse for its size.
>Just because it can't race with a specially built workstation, doesn't mean it's useless.
No its just not very useful for me, its hard to want to eat ground pork when there is steak to be had, I don't see the point of it really when my computer does everything better, why would someone want to use it to webcast for instance or use the PII era GPU? Sure you can emulate games one it, but I can on my computer already.
>I'm running an home infrastructure on an OrangePi Zero and the bottleneck is the 512MB RAM, not the CPU. With a decent SD card, it's not slow either.
You aren't disagreeing with me, you use it for a purpose (like a PiHole), not as a computer. I can use slower boards for purposes like yours too, what do you use it for? I don't really understand the benefit of a smart home hub, what are you running on it for what automation/smart?
For example, consider that golang has been able to cross-compile to ARM since almost the very start. That alone has probably contributed more to actual ARM server deployment than M1 (which is by the way not available for cloud or any server systems).
Apple most definitely does _not_ support that thing. In fact, they have in past tried to shut down similar initiatives.
Even before Pi my router had DDWRT, I don't think Pi did very much.