this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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x86, ARM, are intended to be multipurpose, right? So why tf does the OS running on it need multiple layers of abstraction and have the right drivers to support common features? Wouldn't it be possible to standardize the interfaces for audio, hw video acceleration, etc. so that you just need one audio driver for all x86 CPUs, another for ARM and be done?
The CPU might be the same, but the audio chip, trackpad, etc. might be different and require a new driver.
Yeah, but why isn't that handled in hardware or microcode?
I'm not sure how you'd handle hardware in hardware.
Microcode is usually only run on the CPU, so in that case the implementation would be called "drivers". If you ran it on the device it would be called "firmware" and the OS still has to know how it address its interfaces somehow, and implementation is again called a "driver".
I mean some kind of unified interface spec and the hardware conforms to it?
Because when there's a new hardware function, the driver has to add support for it.
I'm wondering about that too and I think that this question deserves another thread. Maybe that's because, as there are no (or are there?) PCs with other architectures than x86, vendors don't see a need for standards like device discovery and UEFI.
ARM, as mentioned. and RISC-V