Date   : Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:43:35 +1300 (NZDT)
From   : mjfoot@... (Michael Foot)
Subject: About ARM PC

Quoting Phil Blundell <philb@...>:

> On Tue, 2011-12-27 at 11:10 +1300, Michael Foot wrote:
> > Quoting Alan Williams <awilliams@...>:
> > 
> > > I like the idea of having a SD card image for a Raspberry pi that
> just
> > > booted to a Beeb emulation.
> > 
> > RISC OS and BeebIt can do just that. RISC OS will boot to a usuable
> state far 
> > quicker than Linux can.
> 
> That might be true (I've no idea what the state of driver support for
> Raspberry pi under RISC OS actually is today) but I have a hard time
> believing that it's so much faster as to actually matter. From the
> point where the ARM starts running code, you could probably have BeebEm
> under Linux booted on that hardware in about 3 seconds. Even if RISC OS
> did it instantly the difference doesn't seem like all that big a deal.

No, it probably does not matter in the scheme of things. There are some Linux 
boot times (to character prompt modes) listed here:
http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoardDistributions

Even on the BeagleBoard, from cold boot, Linux takes a lot longer than 3 
seconds to start up in my experience.

The other issue is that I'm not aware of an ARM Linux version of BeebEm 
existing and it would need to run under a GUI also.

Having the OSes on SD card is a bonus, because it's easy to just put Linux on 
one card and RISC OS on another and swap them as needed to have the best of 
both worlds so it really comes down to what works best for the need.

Cheers,

Mike.

--
Michael Foot <mjfoot(at)paradise(dot)net(dot)nz> *
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mjfoot/
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