ARM as a primary architecture

[drago01]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 11:31 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>> Peter Jones wrote:
>>> In yesterday's FESCo meeting I told you I'd make a list of specific issues
>>> I have with the current proposal for ARM as a primary archictecture. There
>>> are some places where I think the current proposal fails to deal with some
>>> necessary aspects of becoming a primary architecture, and some places
>>> where I don't think the approach is quite right.
>>
>> How about: "support for the main hardware features on commonly-used hardware
>> is Free Software, and included in the upstream software (kernel, X.Org X11,
>> CUPS, SANE etc.) where appropriate"? Right now, this is clearly NOT the case
>> for OpenGL on ARM, so by promoting ARM, we'd promote proprietary (graphics)
>> driver use.
>
> No, we've never said that ever! But then there are a lot of desktops
> that run just fine without OpenGL.

Even though I disagree with Kevin that we should block on "does not
have 3D drivers" .. OpenGL is imo
even more important on ARM (non server systems) then on x86.

A tablet or smartphone without hardware accelerated rendering is just
useless (slow, short battery life).
But this should get better over time as more general purpose
distributions try to run on such devices.