Well, yeah – embedded standard practice is not caring about standards and expecting the kernel to accommodate you. Makes sense for Apple with their vertical integration, but even the less integrated things do that, see the entire concept of a "BSP".
But that is what sucks. That's why embedded is creating all these piles of e-waste doomed to only run crappy outdated vendor kernels unless someone invests huge effort into reverse engineering. The whole "we don't need" attitude in regards to standard things that mainline kernels Just Work with is evil.
And now – with both Apple and Qualcomm – we have this embedded crap powering general purpose laptops…
Embedded has the DeviceTree standard to serve the same purpose as PCIe enumeration. This is even supported inside UEFI (which is how we will boot standard distros, once our kernel patches trickle upstream). There's no reason why not using PCIe means "creating all these piles of e-waste doomed to only run crappy outdated vendor kernels". What does that isn't whatever choice of device enumeration you use, it's vendors not bothering to upstream anything.
(This is another difference between the Asahi Linux project and Corellium's kernel; we're going through the bureaucracy of standardizing all of our DeviceTree bindings, which takes time but establishes a common reference that other OSes such as OpenBSD and bootloaders such as U-Boot can use to also support drivers for this hardware using our first-level bootloader.)
The canonical repo is the Linux kernel tree, so you go through there (and the DeviceTree maintainers). This is mostly for practical reasons since they are the primary consumer, but the bindings are packaged for use by other OSes too.
>And now – with both Apple and Qualcomm – we have this embedded crap powering general purpose laptops…
Indeed. This is why I'm not as enthusiastic about an ARM desktop future as everyone else is and honestly I'm quite terrified. The happy accident that the original IBM PC was, is that it had and open BIOS and HW interfaces which allowed HW vendors to come up with clones that were compatible with the rest of the ecosystem allowing for a chaotic anarcho-democracy where no vendor had control over the ecosystem, so today in the PC realm we have this open garden that everyone can install virtually whatever HW and SW they want.
Now, Apple, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Nvidia(through their desired acquisition of ARM) have seen the mistakes IBM has made which got them kicked out of their own ecosystem and, instead of going through a standardized, open route, try to create their own HW+SW walled gardens where they can rule with an iron fist and lock everything in.
I don't care if they bring 2X the performance/slimness, I just don't want to be locked into a walled garden and then be monetized through rent-seeking behavior.
The IBM PC was never "standardized" in any sense. It was simply one out of many de-facto standards. Early PC's didn't even support any sort of hardware enumeration, that only came way later with "Plug and Play"-compatible hardware.
But that is what sucks. That's why embedded is creating all these piles of e-waste doomed to only run crappy outdated vendor kernels unless someone invests huge effort into reverse engineering. The whole "we don't need" attitude in regards to standard things that mainline kernels Just Work with is evil.
And now – with both Apple and Qualcomm – we have this embedded crap powering general purpose laptops…