If the manufacturers had, y’know, provided the information needed for drivers without requiring ginormous amounts of money to be paid in, the support would be there by now. Without it, there’s an inevitable reverse engineering catch-up period.

Plus, the article was evaluating Debian, which tends to be conservative when updating packages. I’d expect support to become available in other distros first. Hmmm . . . Here we go. Someone’s got Gentoo running on one, with a note saying “sound, bluetooth and camera still need work (on 6.12.4 kernel)” (Gentoo ARM hardware list, under “Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (Snapdragon)”). So the situation is not even nearly as bad as the Phoronix article suggests—it boots, but some drivers for the peripherals aren’t quite there yet.

A tracing framework, apparently.

It should, with careful and precise setup (all needed modules built into the kernel, everything locally compiled, USE flags for all packages carefully chosen to eliminate unnecessary dependencies), be the most targeted for the specific hardware it’s running on and the specific workload it’s doing—in other words, it would be carrying less cruft around. Fewer libraries to import, fewer branches to check during code execution.

In other words, execution time should be a bit better in return for spending more setup time. Benchmarks like this tend to only measure execution time.

Theoretically, Gentoo should be the most optimized, but they probably didn’t want to take the time to install it.