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Linux Running on Apple M1

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Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually require any serious development or it is just mostly tweaking and changing things here and there? I am sorry if that sounds ignorant, but I thought these are just low hanging fruits to harvest. Also why Apple wouldn't do that themselves? To me it is an opposite to "nerd marketing", a big middle finger to Linux users - essentially "you are on your own".

A middle finger from Apple would be locking the bootloader–keeping it open, plus providing minimal tooling and telling people to figure it out, is about as close to "we'd love to see what you'll do with it" as Apple could possibly give. (Dealing with the GPU is going to be the majority of the work, I'd think.)

> "we'd love to see what you'll do with it"

...without the documentation that would help you.

When Broadcom act like this they're considered villains and we're recommended to stay away from their hardware. But when Apple do it, they're being benevolent?

And that's ignoring the fact that I could actually get Broadcom documentation in exchange for dollars and NDA.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A middle finger from Apple would be locking the bootloader–keeping it open, plus providing minimal tooling and telling people to figure it out, is about as close to "we'd love to see what you'll do with it" as Apple could possibly give. (Dealing with the GPU is going to be the majority of the work, I'd think.)

That would definitely be crossing the line. But I wonder if this behaviour of Apple is another avenue of stifling competition - that is how many smart people this will get involved that otherwise could have worked on a competing product? Then you can see how much resources any company dealing with Apple has to commit just to make sure their software keep up with Apple updates - that inhibits their growth and thus kee…

> Then you can see how much resources any company dealing with Apple has to commit just to make sure their software keep up with Apple updates

Apple‘s competitors have sufficient cash flows to pay whatever they need to get the best people. They just don’t want to.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#63
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more spiciness and completive things are the better the overall results. We all like to think that collaboration, harmony and love drives innovation but much of innovation is built around intense rivalry and competition as well. Don't be idealistic to a fault, much of the qualities we view as petty exist because they passed millions of years of natural selection. Those who compete, thrive. Winner takes all.

I think that's a bit zero sum. The world needs both to advance.

Obviously.

When teams of people compete intensely , the collaboration within the teams themselves must be just as intense.

I find it slightly offensive that someone would accuse me of discounting collaboration when 1. I never discounted it, 2. It's obvious that society is full of people who collaborate. In what universe are the words "zero sum" apt for my response? None. I never described a zero sum game. Obviously, the replier added the description with his biased imagination.

I'm just saying spiciness and intense rivalry and competition can lead to results beneficial to society. There are tons of examples of intense competition and rivalry leading to great results in science. The decoding of the human genome for one.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#64
post #2

Great progress already thanks to Corellium for the M1 linux projects [0][1], the PongoOS project and to all others involved. Getting GPU acceleration is now the real challenge. [0] https://github.com/corellium/preloader-m1 [1] https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1

Well. GPU, networking, power management, disk... There's more than 1 huge challenge

Networking and disk will be relatively trivial I'd expect. GPU and power management will be very hard.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#65
post #2

Great progress already thanks to Corellium for the M1 linux projects [0][1], the PongoOS project and to all others involved. Getting GPU acceleration is now the real challenge. [0] https://github.com/corellium/preloader-m1 [1] https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1

Well. GPU, networking, power management, disk... There's more than 1 huge challenge

Disk isn't all that complicated. Once people figured out that apple's NVME implementation was custom, writing a driver for it wasn't all that hard, even with the t2.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#66
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has begun digging the GPU. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html

Nice, that was a HN worthy article by itself.

You might like the discussion. It was posted 13 days ago, so many people were a little preoccupied with US events.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673631

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#67

Love to see the competition between the projects trying to get linux running on the m1. Though I think they will hit a wall trying to enable GPU support. I think opening up just enough to enable this effort also serves as some good nerd marketing for Apple. This race keeps the m1 in the news regularly, giving hope to those who want a low-power and performant ARM machine that wouldn't otherwise consider an apple machi…

Does it actually require any serious development or it is just mostly tweaking and changing things here and there? I am sorry if that sounds ignorant, but I thought these are just low hanging fruits to harvest. Also why Apple wouldn't do that themselves? To me it is an opposite to "nerd marketing", a big middle finger to Linux users - essentially "you are on your own".

The interesting thing here is that now, when they own the CPU and GPU, and when MacOS is free, they probably might be more open to letting anyone install any OS on it. You want a Linux/BSD/Windows on M1, and you're not hurting any of their possible revenue streams, so why the hell not let you buy their hardware and throw whatever OS on it.

Somebody wants to copy the hardware over and sell it for half price? Yeah, good luck reproducing the M1.

Opening the boot loader to allow for Linux is quite an opposite of a middle finger, tbh. I don't know if they will divert some guys from working on MacOS towards Linux support, but this is already looking much better than before.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#68
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually require any serious development or it is just mostly tweaking and changing things here and there? I am sorry if that sounds ignorant, but I thought these are just low hanging fruits to harvest. Also why Apple wouldn't do that themselves? To me it is an opposite to "nerd marketing", a big middle finger to Linux users - essentially "you are on your own".

The interesting thing here is that now, when they own the CPU and GPU, and when MacOS is free, they probably might be more open to letting anyone install any OS on it. You want a Linux/BSD/Windows on M1, and you're not hurting any of their possible revenue streams, so why the hell not let you buy their hardware and throw whatever OS on it. Somebody wants to copy the hardware over and sell it for half price? Yeah, goo…

Were they ever opposed to running a different OS on their hardware? They released bootcamp, to help you do it for windows at least.

They don’t want you installing their OS on other hardware, not the reverse.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#69
post #49

Love to see the competition between the projects trying to get linux running on the m1. Though I think they will hit a wall trying to enable GPU support. I think opening up just enough to enable this effort also serves as some good nerd marketing for Apple. This race keeps the m1 in the news regularly, giving hope to those who want a low-power and performant ARM machine that wouldn't otherwise consider an apple machi…

I know it’s entering (dark?) gray territory, license wise, but has anybody ever attempted to wrap a Mac OS driver in a Linux compatibility layer?

Oh, like the old ndiswrapper approach for various windows XP NIC drivers. Which worked reasonably well...I remember using it for some laptop with a Realtek chip. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually require any serious development or it is just mostly tweaking and changing things here and there? I am sorry if that sounds ignorant, but I thought these are just low hanging fruits to harvest. Also why Apple wouldn't do that themselves? To me it is an opposite to "nerd marketing", a big middle finger to Linux users - essentially "you are on your own".

A middle finger from Apple would be locking the bootloader–keeping it open, plus providing minimal tooling and telling people to figure it out, is about as close to "we'd love to see what you'll do with it" as Apple could possibly give. (Dealing with the GPU is going to be the majority of the work, I'd think.)

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