For projects like these, I don’t know why Apple doesn’t just step in and help. What have they got to lose?
What they got to win? It is probably quite small userbase.
Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
121–130 of 414 posts
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#122This is good of course but it's an uphill battle - just reverse engineering the Apple GPU and making a decent driver for it in itself is going to be a huge problem. Look at nouveau - we still don't have any way to reclock NVidia GPUs. Getting good experience and good battery life with reverse engineered hardware is impossible. Then there's going to be new gen hardware and firmware updates for existing ones to keep up…
Thankfully, Apple loads most firmware for us in the bootloader, so we don't have the blob problem that Nouveau does. This includes parts related to power management.
Nouveau has an uphill battle because Nvidia is actively hostile, and because they have to support dozens of chips. We are starting with one. I do not expect for us to end up in a Nouveau situation with poor performance/PM over time. It will take time, of course, but I fully expect we will make it happen.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#123Very interesting overall. > Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? > Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Do…
> Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? I would point out that Apple has permitted booting alternative operating systems throughout their m68k (at least the m68ks that could meaningfully boot Linux or a BSD derivative) [1], PowerPC [2], and Intel [3] phases. It's only on Intel they actively made this a feature, because Windows Bootcamp probably allowed to sell them a certa…
And at that Bootcamp is a BIOS emulation layer. You don't need to go through the bootcamp process to run operating systems with native EFI support such as Linux, Windows 7+, etc.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mac hardware is just so damn good though. And everywhere. I absolutely agree with what you're saying... but man, Linux working well on an M1 Mac would be my ideal machine.
Would it be materially different than Linux running in a VM on m1? Because you can have that now
It doesn't feel "right", there's resolution issues, and I never got real-time, low-latency sound running in any VM ... so, I'd say yes, by all means.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#125A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a platform whos creator is unwilling to provide support. I think it's part of the Linux ethos to run on everything, but I also think this kind of effort is ... not wasted, but I feel like it could be spent more efficiently. Still looking forward to hear about the first successful boots and the epic reverse engineering feats. Just wish this kind of stuff wouldn't be…
> A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a platform whos creator is unwilling to provide support.
If Linux only ran on hardware which the creator was willing to provide support, Linux would not exist. Linux was created in spite of Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc etc. Support from the makers only came later.
Linux was originally an OS created by people who wanted to do things the OEMs and commercial vendors didn't support. While it's cool that a lot of manufacturers support Linux now, that's not where we came from.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The engineers who did that probably don't make the decision on things like this. When have Apple been open about anything recently?
This took time and resources to make happen. This isn't some switch a rogue engineer pulled while management wasn't looking. Not only did it take time and effort to implement, they've also documented it. > When have Apple been open about anything recently? Darwin, WebKit, Swift, LLVM, This effort. Apple keeps iOS fairly tight the Mac, not so much.
Apple aren't upstreaming their backends to LLVM, for example
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#127It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story. Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there. We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken of…
Yes, Microsoft locked the laptop to avoid Linux to be installed.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's outright said it's a matter of Microsoft agreeing to license Windows on ARM for consumers. Right now putting Windows on an ARM Mac is about as legal as Hackintoshing.
I don't think that's what Apple said at all–they just said the ball is in their court, which means that they want Microsoft to write Bootcamp essentially.
Yeah. Someone - cough cough Microsoft - would need to be convinced to write a Boot Camp Assistant app equivalent (okay), a Windows bootloader (okay), various device drivers for Apple Silicon hardware revisions for Windows (big ugh), graphics drivers for Apple Silicon GPUs for Windows (VERY big ugh). Microsoft will need to very motivated to distribute Windows on ARM for this to happen, even if Apple gives them access to all the info they need which is not a given by any means.
...I don't think this is going to happen, and Apple probably doesn't either.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
is it? my 2016 macbook was the worst apple product i've ever owned...
Worst apple product is still far ahead of most non-apple alternatives. At least laptops wise.
My previous ThinkPad X1 is a superior device to my 15 inch i9 MBP (2018) in every way - thermals, keyboard, touchscreen, issues with 5k display for over a year, Bluetooth issues.
I needed a Mac for iOS development so I went all out since I do all sort of development - and this is by far the worst premium device I owned.
With that said M1 Macs look really good and I'll probably upgrade if they refresh the 16 inch.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#130Interesting project and wish them best of luck. On the claim: >However, no modern device is “fully open” - no usable computer exists today that has completely open software and hardware (as much as some companies want to market themselves as such) Doesn't RaptorCS[1] offer a fully open modern device? Or is there a closed part I'm not aware of? [1] https://www.raptorcs.com/
Is their silicon design open? Their internal boot ROM? Their microcode? :-)
What I'm trying to say there is, there is always a line. There is always some secret sauce. Even if you have fully open HDL, you won't have documentation for the proprietary fab processes required to implement it in a way that performs. Even if the fab process were somehow fully open, you may not have public documentation on how to manufacture some of the required chemicals and raw materials available. And so on and so forth. The rabbit hole always goes deeper, and the lines between parts aren't entirely bright, and so making some kind of blanket statement that one is "fully open" is usually a marketing tactic and not actually truthful.
That said, yes, Raptor stuff is pretty much as open as it gets, today, in the high-end space. They are pretty much the only modern platform which doesn't use blobs to train RAM on boot, for example. They are not perfect - for example, their motherboard schematics are only available to owners, so I assume they are not redistributable under an open hardware license.