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Why does Linux run so well on ARM
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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Linux, and much of the open-source software that goes with it, has been multi-architecture for a long time. If you take something that already runs pretty decently on x86, x86_64, PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, and Intel Itanium CPUs, porting it to yet another architecture is, while not trivial, at least mostly a known problem.
Windows, by contrast, was built for descendants of the Intel 8088, period. It's unsurprising that porting it is a hard problem and that results aren't always satisfactory.
(Apple built on top of a modified BSD kernel, and BSD has also been ported around quite a bit, so they also have a ports-are-a-known-problem advantage.)
This is not quite true. Windows NT was built to support multiple architectures from the start.
NT is not the majority of windows code though; for windows to be multi architecture, all of windows needs to work with the new architecture; NT, drivers & userspace.
For Linux, if an existing userspace application doesn't work in aarch64, somebody somewhere will build a port. For windows, so much of their stuff is proprietary that Microsoft are the only ones able to build that port.
Not because "windows bad", just a consequence of such a locked down system which doesn't have anything open source to inherit.
It is true tbh.