Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on February 21, 2019 8:03 am wrote:
> I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does
> cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable.
>
> Or successful.
>
> Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction
> set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud.
>
> That's bullshit.

This is a huge thing that I wish more people understood.

There's this mobile project, postmarketOS, that spent a significant
amount of time doing cross-compilation only. Building an entire phone
environment from the "comfort" of x86_64. (I consider x86_64 a horror,
but I know I'm in the minority.) Of course every phone ever made* is an
ARM handset. The amount of brokenness in those packages, some just from
autotools making bad assumptions, was astounding. Luckily they got
their act together and managed to cobble together an arm64 package
builder, and now they have far less breakage.

Personally, I won't even consider or touch a port to a platform that I
can't physically touch. That's why alpha, m68k, ia64, hppa may as well
not exist to us. I hate doing that, especially when I have seen people
begging us for m68k support, but until one of us has an m68k computer on
desk, that is never going to happen.

Qemu doesn't count, considering all the TCG bugs I've found, one of them
even indirectly leading to a Linux kernel CVE...

--arw


* hyperbole. I know of all the other different CPUs that some handsets
were made from, even MIPS and x86, but ARM won.