Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux Running on Apple M1

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 282 posts

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#101

Post by my123 »

titzer wrote: post #99
meibo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on old + modern thinkpads it feels like a lottery which hardware feature will stop working at a particular time, with the distros i've worked myself through. Ethernet, waking up from sleep mode, brightness adjustment... take your pick.

I discovered last week, to my chagrin, that the RAM on my x1 carbon Stinkpad was starting to fail--memtest x86+ confirmed it. Memory corruption is insidious, so I rushed to the internet to buy new DIMMs, opened the sucker up...and there's no DIMM. The RAM is just soldered into the motherboard. No upgrade, no fix. This is now a pile of unreliable junk that randomly flips bits in memory. So data evac commences, with MD…

If you can pinpoint which pages are affected (in most cases you can), you can just add that range to the blacklist.

Can work in the meantime, before you have a new machine.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#102

Post by arghwhat »

midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac.

I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads.

I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn't support displayport MST), dock connectivity problems (macos freezing or crashing when connected except when it suddenly works for a day, Windows playing disconnect/reconnect sounds in a loop when the machine goes idle), and more, including just today out inexplicable crashing.

Install Linux or plug all the "made for windows/macOS" hardware into a Linux box, and all the problems went away.

My conclusion, supported by having been a proprietary kernel driver developer for Windows, FreeBSD and Linux, is that any hardware and driver combo tends to be a coin toss, irrespective of platform.

But with Linux, drivers that would otherwise be abandoned after a project was shipped, get a chance at being fixed and improved that their proprietary counterparts can never even dream of.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#103

Post by swiley »

titzer wrote: post #99
meibo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on old + modern thinkpads it feels like a lottery which hardware feature will stop working at a particular time, with the distros i've worked myself through. Ethernet, waking up from sleep mode, brightness adjustment... take your pick.

I discovered last week, to my chagrin, that the RAM on my x1 carbon Stinkpad was starting to fail--memtest x86+ confirmed it. Memory corruption is insidious, so I rushed to the internet to buy new DIMMs, opened the sucker up...and there's no DIMM. The RAM is just soldered into the motherboard. No upgrade, no fix. This is now a pile of unreliable junk that randomly flips bits in memory. So data evac commences, with MD…

Buying a mac after complaining about how you can't replace ram seems a bit odd.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#104

Post by varispeed »

iSnow wrote: post #60
acomjean wrote: post #38

I understand there is a thing with trying to run Linux everywhere, and it’s a fun exercise. Even if Apple does do some open source support, Even if that hardware isn’t quite as nice, I prefer to buy/support hardware and vendors that support Linux at this point.

Understandable and I was ready to buy a Dell XPS as I like the "small and light" form factor. I was just waiting for the COVID buy spike to subside and see how my financial situation would evolve. But I have pushed the decision back to see how Linux will be running on the M1. From first reports, it is simply tailor-made for a laptop computer that doesn't get burning hot or dog slow because of thermal throttling. I ho…

I have fairly recent XPS and indeed it is a shame how poorly it runs in terms of throttling and getting hot. On Linux when you launch Teams, forget about being able to keep it on your lap for too long. Teams eats the CPU for breakfast and probably you could fry an egg on it if you closed the lid. Of course it has to be plugged in at all times as battery life is a joke after few months.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#105

Post by midrus »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #88
midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

I have confidence in the parallel efforts being spearheaded by Marcan. He knows what he's doing and he's working on it full time.

And that's why this has no long term future. There are not that many people able to achieve this. One single person can't do it forever.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#106

Post by glitchc »

Until the Linux kernel leverages instructions specific to Apple M1's extended ISA, this is a waste of time. The whole point of the M1 experience is that out of the box, it's fast, silent and runs for days. Yes, Linux will run, as it would run on any ARM processor, but it will be slow, hot and run the battery down in a couple of hours.

It will take years for the open-source community to reverse-engineer the ISA and write kernel code that optimally utilizes it. There's no shortcut here. Until then, it's not worth buying a Mac just to run Linux on it.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#107

Post by midrus »

simonh wrote: post #95
midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

On the contrary, this could be fantastic for a headless server running on an M1 Mini to build and test ARM code before deploying to AWS Graviton. It doesn't all have to be about laptops.

Agree, this could be a good use case.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#108

Post by swiftcoder »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #94
iSnow wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understandable and I was ready to buy a Dell XPS as I like the "small and light" form factor. I was just waiting for the COVID buy spike to subside and see how my financial situation would evolve. But I have pushed the decision back to see how Linux will be running on the M1. From first reports, it is simply tailor-made for a laptop computer that doesn't get burning hot or dog slow because of thermal throttling. I ho…

>I hope intel and to a lesser extend AMD are looking at this thing red-faced. But they will need some time to play catch-up. I think it raised their eyebrows a bit, but don't agree that they need some time to play catch-up. Bottom line is the vast majority of Intel and AMD chips are running Windows. You can't even buy Windows 10 for an ARM processor. Microsoft flirted with the idea at one point, but has pretty much a…

Their catch-up need not be in the form of an ARM chip. If they can get an x86-compatible chip to match the M1's performance at with similar thermals/battery, that's even better.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#109

Post by izacus »

glitchc wrote: post #106

Until the Linux kernel leverages instructions specific to Apple M1's extended ISA, this is a waste of time. The whole point of the M1 experience is that out of the box, it's fast, silent and runs for days. Yes, Linux will run, as it would run on any ARM processor, but it will be slow, hot and run the battery down in a couple of hours. It will take years for the open-source community to reverse-engineer the ISA and wr…

What specific instructions? I've been told by Apple fans on this site before release that Apple doesn't use non-standard instructions in their ISA and doesn't need special compiler treatment?

Who's right now?

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#110

Post by CharlesW »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91
midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

No one should be purchasing a brand new M1 Mac with the expectation of perfect Linux support any time soon. However, I’m optimistic that these will be mostly usable on Linux before they’re too obsolete or outdated. The platform is so popular and iconic that it’s drawing a lot of attention from Linux devs and reverse engineering crowds.

> No one should be purchasing a brand new M1 Mac with the expectation of perfect Linux support any time soon.

That's sound advice.

As someone who doesn't use Linux as their daily driver, can I expect Linux to run perfectly in a VM on an M1 Mac?

Post reply on HN