“This morning, ARM is taking a significant step toward ironing out Android’s multiple versioning issues that Linus Torvalds himself called a ‘hodgepodge’ earlier this year. It’s releasing suites of developers’ tools, including a free community edition, of its ARM Developers Studio (DS-5), this time including a graphical debugger that it says will eliminate the need for devs to use a clunky, command-line debugger for tuning native code.”
I could be mistaken, but wasn’t Linus comments about how ARM SoC’s with all their different configurations and peripherals are miss-managed in Linux today?
What has this to do with Android “fragmentation”?? Sounds more like a embedded programming 101 problem to me.
EDIT: in any case, the free toolchain is more than welcome
Edited 2011-11-28 22:21 UTC
I’m not sure. Here’s Linus’ comments: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2102909/arm-hodge-podge-li…
To me it sounds like Linus was complaining about that lack of standardisation for ARM hardware (which creates an unavoidable mess in a “support all the things” project like Linux).
– Brendan
What Linus meant with standardized “hardware” is actually SoC components, things like DMA controller, MMU or interrupt controller.
There are no standard ARM components for these. Well, there are standard ones from ARM, but no one uses them. TI uses their own, so does Nvidia and Qualcomm. So the hardware incompatibilities are actually inside the SoC (the chip) itself.
If that is what Linus really meant, I can’t see how this new IDE is going to change this. The problem lies with the SoC vendors, not the programmers. Also, Android developers will never notices these differences since the OS will take care of them [which is why Linus is complaining].
From the article
So a small part of the Android fragmentation has been due to the ARM soc fragmentation.
So a new debugger that supports only some of the android SOC has been released!
Its left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how that is going to help reduce any kind of fragmentation.
This article makes no sense. How does ARM releasing a free version of their IDE change anything about the incompatibilities between ARM systems that Linus talks about?
I also do not understand.
Plus it is already possible to use Eclipse CDT to do exactly what the article describes.
Another wannabe journalist without any computing experience talking about what he does not know.
ARM’s tools have nothing to do with addressing platform fragmentation. They’re intended to assist with development and debugging of components written using the android NDK, which is to say components written in C/C++ for performance rather than Java.