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Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

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Re: Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

#131

Post by ndesaulniers »

DannyBee wrote: post #113
ndesaulniers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link to the WIP driver. Since you have a lot of experience in this area, I'm curious: 1. What's the __1e6 alignment? [0] I've never heard of that. 2. How is the driver author going about writing that driver? Some of the comments seem to allude to analyzing what the Windows driver is doing. Do you think they're disassembling the Windows driver and trying to re-implement a Linux compatible driver in C? I…

it's not 1e6, it's le16 Little endian 16 bit As for the driver itself, the spi interfaces are not too hard to understand. It's unlikely anyone is disassembling anything. The normal way to figure out the packets the touchpad uses are to look at the datasheets/etc you can find on whoever made the touchpad. In this case, it's a bcm5974, and if you look at that driver, you'll see the packet format is the same. Otherwise,…

ah, there's also an interesting discussion in an GH issue. They reference the data sheets of the parts mentioned from an iFixit teardown. There's also discussion of disassembling the OSX driver. And here's info on how the author sniffed SPI traffic on Windows. [1]

[0] https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/pull/1#issuecom...

[1] https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/issues/3#issuec...

Re: Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

#132

Post by rconti »

aikah wrote: post #50
chadgeidel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build quality. It's difficult to find a computer that matches the quality of a MacBook for fit and finish, trackpad quality, and battery life. I haven't used the new one, but the 2015 models were among the best hardware on the market - regardless of what OS was installed.

I Bought a MacBook a few years ago, the keyboard broke a few times, and the frame was full of cracks even though I was really careful with it. I don't believe one second the quality of the MacBook is better, especially for the price I paid at the time ( + Apple Care cost ). It might be easier to find spare parts for Apple devices but that's it.

Yikes. I don't have much experience with the MacBook line, but I wouldn't call myself careful with my machines and have never seen anything like that!

Re: Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

#134

Post by ntauthority »

dogma1138 wrote: post #111
_0w8t wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presently one can use MacBook 2015-2016 on Linux only with an external keyboard/mouse. The progress with driver has been made, but it is far from there.

Doesn't the 2015 mac comes with a USB mode for the keyboard for the UEFI interface?

Apple has shipped their UEFI with a number of drivers for 'weird' things integrated, such as wireless card support for network booting.

It wouldn't be too much to assume that they support this keyboard controller as well.

Re: Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

#136

Post by ilaksh »

21 wrote: post #90
ilaksh wrote: post #66

I think they said they spent like $2800. For that amount of money you could get 2 Chromebooks ($179 each), build two decent gaming PCs ($900 each), and rent 5 Digital Ocean VPSs ($5 per month) for two years.

And for the price of a Ferarri you can get 5 Toyotas, 2 scooters and monthly passes for the subway for a year. I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

MacBooks aren't Ferraris.

Re: Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

#138

Post by bluedino »

astrodust wrote: post #96
_opc6 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have incredible amount of cash reserves. An investment in Linux drivers would go against their mission of OSX penetration. It has nothing to do with being unable to do it.

You can't just throw money at a problem and it magically gets solved. Adding additional requirements puts strain on your core team, there's no way around it. If you could 100% compartmentalize this, have people working on it independently, maybe you could minimize impact, but how can you justify that spending? They know the open-source community is capable of working to fix problems like this.

They could sponsor a developer or provide hardware to willing developers.

Re: Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux

#139

Post by derekp7 »

mwambua wrote: post #115
mjg59 wrote: post #97

The three primary issues here are: 1) The input devices are on SPI, not USB. Apple's ACPI tables don't provide the GPIO mappings for these things via the standard mechanisms, so the chipset driver won't bind. You then still need another driver for the SPI controller, and there's an out of tree one at https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/ . Longer term, the kernel needs to be able to parse Apple's ACPI tables…

Tangential Question: Would you say that Thinkpads are still the safest bet if you're looking for good RHEL/Fedora support & updates?

For the Thinkpads, yes. Lenovo is one of the companies that maintains a list such as this: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd031426 (This is a list of computers that they have certified one or more Linux distros against -- typically RHEL and Ubuntu).

Any of the problems that you usually hear are typically on their non-Thinkpad lines.

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