It's a bummer that the library and utilities are GPLv3 - really limits adoption, because it means that product developers can't build it into the kinds of small embedded Linux systems where it would really shine.
Readit Newsnrclark commented on GNU recutils: Plain text database gnu.org/software/recutils... · Posted by u/polyrand
nrclark commented on Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/fork-bomber
Yea, this to me signals that Qualcomm is starting to hedge its ARM bets. Given all the kerfuffle around licensing they have had with ARM already, I suspect that they are signaling to ARM that they have options and so ARM's leverage is a lot lower than it might be. That said, there are also huge switching costs to Qualcomm's customers, so this is not a move it takes lightly. In the mean time, I'm sure those Ventana engineers can also help them improve their ARM designs, too.
Maybe Ventana's software engineers can also help Qualcomm fix its BSPs.
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nrclark commented on Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/fork-bomber
Ventana's cores were 15 instruction wide, massively out of order cores that on paper compete with the application cores in Apple's M series SoCs.
They're a totally different gate count niche than a Cortex-M equivalent.
Fully agree - Ventana's cores are more like Cortex A76 kinds of things, and are on a completely different scale from typical Cortex-M cores.
But switching to RISC-V would shut Qualcomm out from QNX and would limit its Android compatibility. And on the Qualcomm chips that I've seen so far, they're really bought in on both QNX and Android. That's why I think this is probably an aquihire more than a desire to ship Ventana's CPU cores.
nrclark commented on Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/fork-bomber
Could be good if a large firm stabilized the RISC-V version fragmentation with a massive standard SoC product boost in the Android space.
But more likely, the early product line will meet the same fate as the dog in "Old Yeller" (1957) in a market consolidation push. =3
I'd be surprised if Qualcomm replaces their application processors (the cores that typically run Android/Linux or QNX) with RISC-V any time soon. Aarch64's ecosystem is huge, and Qualcomm would cut their customers off from it by moving fully to RISC-V.
They're more likely to replace the smaller CPU cores imo.
nrclark commented on Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/fork-bomber
Most SOCs on the market today have a mix of various CPU cores. It's common to see designs with a few big ARM Cortex-A cores running an OS like Linux or Android, and then some smaller Cortex-M microcontroller cores that do housekeeping things like security checks, power management, realtime features, peripheral management, etc.
If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility. Ventana is probably more of an aquihire to get their designer team.
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." -Qualcomm, probably
nrclark commented on Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 qualcomm.com/developer/bl... · Posted by u/mfilion
> And don't even get me started on Gunyah and
Gunyah is disappearing from new chips, slowly but surely.
X2 doesn't have it anymore, the IoT range has it as optional now. And it's going to be deployed less from there
Awesome, that's great to hear. Now if Qualcomm would only relax the walls between their business units, their other customers could benefit as well.
Who benefits from having separate BUs maintain fully separate software stacks? It's duplicated, wasted effort on Qualcomm's part. Maybe it lets them double-charge their customers for this duplicate effort, but that feels short-sighted. It leaves a bad taste in their customers' mouths. And there's certainly no benefit in delivered software quality.
Qualcomm should be making it easy for everybody to buy and use their chips, not artificially segmenting every single customer. They could sweep the market so hard if they were just a little less greedy.
nrclark commented on Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 qualcomm.com/developer/bl... · Posted by u/mfilion
> ... Also your boot-chain is still closed and proprietary, and completely different than the one used by all other ARM vendors. Being the special snowflake is not helping your business or your customers. ...
Why does the boot-chain matter? Can't we just have a custom U-Boot implementation that interacts with the bespoke boot chain while providing standard UEFI support to the rest of the system? Isn't that how Asahi works?
It matters when you're doing custom hardware, or when you're designing a product where boot speed matters, or when you need to implement something special.
A full-featured U-Boot implementation would be fine IMO. But for the generations that I've used, that's not on the table. What we get is a proprietary flow through a proprietary hypervisor into a fork of Android's bootloader (even if vanilla Linux is the target OS). There's no way to control startup boot options, and no way to use KVM, Xen or any hypervisor except the proprietary one that's also part of the boot chain.
This doesn't lend itself to flexible products, or to products that are easy for a company to design or support. That is why things like this happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008156
nrclark commented on Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 qualcomm.com/developer/bl... · Posted by u/mfilion
If anybody in Qualcomm leadership is reading this thread: this is a good start, and I applaud you for it. There is also a lot more to do if you're serious about growing your market penetration beyond phones.
The drivers might be up on LKML, but they're not mainlined yet. And this is just gen5. It would be great if you could fix your gen4 and 4.5 drivers, so that people building products with your chips weren't stuck on an orphaned vendor kernel that doesn't even upstream to your public fork.
Also your boot-chain is still closed and proprietary, and completely different than the one used by all other ARM vendors. Being the special snowflake is not helping your business or your customers.
And don't even get me started on Gunyah and GearVM, or on the proprietary, locked nature of your BSP, or how far behind TI and NXP you are on software quality and ease of use. Maybe also consider releasing some actual documentation on your chips.
I know multiple developers who have sworn off Qualcomm and will never design with your chips again at any price point. Your closed-off support model is 100% the culprit, and it hurts your core business. Any software support revenue that you managage to extract comes at the cost of goodwill and future chip sales.
Your chips are good - best in the industry. If you can up your software game to match, you'll really meet your potential.
nrclark commented on I don't care how well your "AI" works fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-d... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.
That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.
I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away" from superintelligence for the forseeable future. All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.
Ironically, the actual luddites weren't anti-technology at all. Mechanized looms at the time produced low-quality, low-durability cloth at low prices. The luddite pushback was more about the shift from durable to disposable.
It's a message that's actually pretty relevant in an age of AI slop.
Game theory is inevitable.
Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.
The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited.
If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.
Brains can and do make straight-up mistakes all the time. Like "there was a transmission error"-type mistakes. They can't be modeled or predicted, and so humans can never truly be rational actors.
Humans also make irrational decisions all the time based on gut feeling and instinct. Sometimes with reasons that a brain backfills, sometimes not.
People can and do act against the own self interest all the time, and not for "oh, but they actually thought X" reasons. Brains make unexplainable mistakes. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there to do? That state isn't modelable with game theory, and it generalizes to every aspect of human behavior.