this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
173 points (82.4% liked)
Technology
59735 readers
2965 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The main advantage of ARM right now is that there are low power cores available. The actual instruction set is unrelated to this advantage. If Intel or AMD put more serious effort into power efficiency most of the advantages go out the window.
As for instruction set changes impacting what software you can run I think that is still a big issue. Yes porting to ARM is straitforward in more modern programming environments but most software actively developed at the moment has a lot of old cruft that won't easily port if the engineers can even be convinced to touch it. Most businesses are dependent on old software not all of which is still maintained. Most gamers are even more tied to old software that is not going to get ported and often has annoying anti-virtualization checks (see games breaking on systems with enabled intel e-cores).
I am not sure how large the modern non gaming personal pc market is (tablets, phones, works computers, and chromebooks probably took a chunk out of it) but that could be in play.
Steam. Almost all games would be impacted. On Linux we already use translation layer (Windows -> Linux), but I am not sure if it's a good idea to emulate X86_64 on top of translation layer.
Getting anti-cheat that technically already works enabled on Linux has been a lot of work and Epic still won't enable it. Piracy protection systems will also be an issue. Most EA games inspect your CPU to see if they like it on startup (I think this is using vmprotect and some non-OS x86 calls but don't quote me on that). These kinds on anti virtualization checks are really common (not just in games ProctorU and lock down browser do them too). I don't think valve running an open virtualization layer will be well received by companies and they will probably ban it from running games. MMOs (due to botting) and anything with anticheat will look particularly askance at this. I also suspect Valve won't want to try hiding the VM signatures as it borders on violating DMCA.
Newer games will probably get ported if a large part of the market buys into ARM. Unity stuff might get re-released as it is .net if the publishers can be bothered. Minecraft java edition will also always love you (the launcher might not though).
I don’t see how hiding sigs could be seen as violating the DMCA…
Anti virtualization is sometimes used in copy protection. Altering virtualization to avoid those checks might be circumvention under DMCA.
Just because something is in place as DRM does not mean it is inherently covered by DMCA. Otherwise “run in compatibility mode” would be considered a DMCA violation.