Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project • Hacker News Board

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#391

Post by SomaticPirate » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

johnwalkr wrote: post #287

SomaticPirate wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just their own chip, arguable one of the highest performance ones. At Intel, the mobile division was simply trying to keep pace with Arm with Apple always a distant dream. Later at Arm, no one had any idea what the hell Apple was doing. They pay for the ISA and that is basically as far as I ever saw the collaboration going (besides poaching top engineers). Most interesting thing I ever saw was that they bought In…

Does anyone know if these EDA and other manufacturing tools are run internally on MacOS? I recall some comments when an Apple factory tour showed some tools running on Windows, on iMacs.

If it’s anything like Intel/Arm there are likely huge internal HPC Unix clusters with attached FPGAs for simulation and design.

I wouldn’t expect them to.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#392

Post by oneplane » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #334

oneplane wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really own any high-tech stuff anyway (with that interpretation). You can't boot your Intel of AMD CPU without their signed and sometimes encrypted code. You can't even initialise a single core, let alone the DRAM controllers. Everyone likes to point at Apple, because that's easy, but it's neither new nor big nor special. There are practically three things at play: - root-of-trust, if you have a better solu…

> You can't boot your Intel of AMD CPU without their signed and sometimes encrypted code. Except that Intel and AMD don't care what you run on your machine, they don't lose money if you don't run their software. When you run Linux on a MAC, Apple isn't getting money from their iCloud subscriptions and from the store so they have a motive to stop you from escaping the walled garden.

iCloud is free unless you pay for extra space or features, and most people I know of don't.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#393

Post by bsaul » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

spideymans wrote: post #275

Nullabillity wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it so. Goes in both directions. > Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on doing so at least) NetBSD and countless other things on practically every Mac they've ever released, including the latest ones. Gatekeeper wasn't a thing either, until it was, indeed, a thing. > They're doing a horrible job at communicating this strategy too, because they're communica…

>Surely that's the whole point of a trap? I've been hearing about this supposed secret Apple plot to lock down the Mac and take away third party software distribution and operating systems for a decade now. If this is indeed Apple's plot, then they're really slow at implementing it. Maybe they'll sort it out in another decade.

they never had a real advantage on the desktop / laptop that would justify locking you in, until now.

They could do it on mobile thanks to the vastly superior user experience.

When steve jobs announced itunes on windows he said "hell froze over". That should tell you how much they take openeness into consideration.

I'm still waiting for iMessage to be an open protocol, or for my iphone to be able to use a standard charging cable...

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#394

Post by anoncake » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

p_l wrote: post #290

somehnguy wrote: post #278

Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointl…

It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors. Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price com…

It may be cheaper for Apple. For society, it's a huge waste of resources.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#395

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

emteycz wrote: post #380

seba_dos1 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple never added support to boot other OSes on arm macs.

It'd be impossible to boot other OS if Apple didn't put a lot of work into opening the device. It'd be like iPhone and need a jailbreak if they didn't.

[deleted]

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#396

Post by macintux » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #385

emteycz wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vast majority of phones before 2007 supported J2ME apps, it simply wasn't much useful without 24/7 internet everywhere.

J2ME was an utter nightmare, I know because I worked in telecoms back then. Mobile app development as an utter shitshow in 2007 with no signs of it getting any better. It just seems weird to complain that the company that made mobile apps mainstream "didn't allow it" earlier. The only reason they delayed a year is because the SDK wasn't publication ready yet. They hadn't even finalised the APIs yet and they were stil…

Heck, when Jobs gave the first demo he had to execute a very specific sequence of actions because otherwise the phone would crash.

You’re absolutely right that the phone wasn’t ready for 3rd party apps on day 1, at least to Apple’s standards.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#397

Post by SXX » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 6:55 AM UTC

ungamed wrote: post #370

SXX wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why Nouveau got stuck is because Nvidia intentionally changed firmware loading process to break Nouveau and not cooperating on providing firmware. Also part of the problem is that main Nouveau developers are from Red Hat and they are limited in terms of RE of actual Nvidia code. Unfortunately some of Nouveau contributors dropped their efforts once Nvidia began to be actively hostile to the project. If you…

It would be very possible and also related to RE code from the OSX stack though.

Marcan had this topic covered on his stream. While reverse enginering is always gray area there is a lot of device drivers in Linux kernel tree that was created using RE. Also Apple never sued anyone for doing this.

Developer funded by community has more freedom than Red Hat employee. There is simply no profit for hardware vendor in attacking him.

Also OSX graphics stack is completely different from Linux one and Apple only implement their own proprietary Metal API. So even if you gonna decompile Apple drivers chances of copying Apple code are very small since the only common part would be running compilee code on the GPU.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#398

Post by lrvick » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #355

jmnicolas wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course but if you run Linux they're sure you will never earn them any money from these services. So at one point they could decide that they don't want people to use Linux on their Macs and there's nothing you could do. Look at what happened to CentOS.

If they can sell you a mac for $1500 I don't think they are very concerned that you're not spending 50 bucks a year on iCloud. I mean, if they prevent Linux you probably won't buy a mac at all, you won't prioritise using an M1 macbook over using Linux if you're a hardcore Linux nerd. Bottomline is that yes they are greedy, but they are not trying to stop people from installing Linux on macs just to perhaps earn some…

Counter point: they have no problem charging $1000+ for iPhones and lock them down to only run the operating systems and apps they approve because consumers of them were largely not technical enough to understand they don't own their own devices.

Apple is motivated to do this as soon as they feel they can get away with it and keep profits as high or higher.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#399

Post by breakfastduck » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

Nullabillity wrote: post #269

breakfastduck wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the fact they've actively stated (repeatedly, during their main presentations) that running arbitrary code on a mac will not be changing. For a company that seems sometimes to go out of its way to not give any information on anything it doesn't make sense to clearly and concisely make that statement.

While at the same time continuously tightening the noose on Gatekeeper. I wonder why people wouldn't take their word for it...

This is always trotted out.

There’s not a single piece of access I’ve lost. It’s a couple of dialog boxes.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#400

Post by neop1x » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 11:19 AM UTC

somehnguy wrote: post #278

Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointl…

It's like with iPhones. There was someone who run Linux with a framebuffer on iPhone 3GS. It worked but was useless. Additional security added in newer iPhones made it impossible to do again. And users are happy, saying that their locked out iPhone is secure and they want only apple-approved software to run on their devices...