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Linux Running on Apple M1

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Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#201

Post by danudey »

arghwhat wrote: post #102
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…

I'll do you one better:

macOS does support MST! It actually does! But it only supports it for splitting one display image over multiple streams, to overcome bandwidth limits on Displayport streams.

For providing a signal to very-high-pixel-count displays, macOS uses MST.

For providing multiple displayport signals to multiple displays? Nope, not implemented.

Imagine my frustration after a day of googling and finding out that macOS supports the feature we wanted, but not the use that we wanted.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#202

Post by linuxhiker »

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 haven't run into that problem in years. As long as you are running a mainstream laptop (Asus,Acer,Dell,HP etc...) you will likely not have a problem. I will grant that you should still do a review of the hardware against supported drivers (especially around Wifi)... 9.8/10 it will just work.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#203

Post by kelnos »

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…

Yup. The last Mac I ran Linux on was a 2016 MBP. And even then, audio and suspend/resume didn't work (well, suspend was fine, resume... not so much), and battery life was terrible. When I first installed it, the keyboard and touchpad required an out-of-tree driver.

That driver has been upstreamed, but I hear the 2017 and onward touchbar MBPs still require and out-of-tree driver, and a similar level of things don't work.

In 2019 I finally gave up and got a Dell XPS13. It's... basically perfect? The keyboard doesn't suck like recent MacBooks, though the touchpad isn't quite as nice (though really, it's perfectly fine). The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader, but I knew that going in and didn't care. And subjectively the hardware isn't as pretty, but... oh well. On the plus side, I really do like the "soft touch" palm rest better than the harsh aluminum of the MacBook.

I'm definitely interested in the Linux-on-M1 project's progress from an intellectual curiosity standpoint, but I'm expecting long-term as a user it'll be just as -- if not more -- frustrating as running Linux on any Intel MacBook from the last 5 years, which means I won't bother.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#204

Post by kelnos »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #161
oblio wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because when I use a phone or tablet I have to worry about installing my own drivers :-) Apples, oranges.

When was the last time you installed your own drivers on a desktop Linux system, and for what?

2018, for keyboard and touchpad support on a 2016 MacBook Pro. (That driver was eventually upstreamed, but wasn't at the time.)

But I guess that's kinda in-line with this thread, that Macs are a pain to run Linux on.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#205

Post by StillBored »

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.

For the about price of a mac mini:

https://shop.solid-run.com/product-category/embedded-compute...

You get upgradable ram, a PCIe slot for your favorite GPU/etc, and actual mainline linux support sufficient to boot most random linux distros (ok the onboard 10G+ nic might not work without patches).

Its not the fastest machine around (A72s) but there are 16 of them, so it does a decent job of building ARM software, and running VMs.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#206

Post by kelnos »

vetinari wrote: post #186
Skunkleton wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that doesn't mean much because they're actually running Linux forks Many of these Arm SoCs are running linux forks because there are some terrible baked in drivers, and no spec associated with them. Still, that is a step ahead of the M1 as there are at least drivers that don't have to be decompiled and reverse engineered.

These drivers are baked, even if there are specs for them. The thing is, that these SoCs have no PCIe or other enumerable bus. You (=your kernel) must know what hardware it is running on and which drivers to load without being able to ask the hardware, what is really present. One wrong POKE and the entire system can hang. And that is on top of the problem, how to boot in the first place. There is not such thing as UE…

Things have gotten a lot better in ARM-land recently. It's possible to build a generic ARM kernel that will boot on a lot of hardware, as long as the bootloader passes the right device tree blob.

Most device vendors don't really have a need or incentive to use this, though. A generic kernel is much larger and wastes flash space, and most vendors don't care about running anything but their OS image on it, so they of course just build a kernel specific to their hardware.

But in theory it should be possible at some point to use a generic ARM Debian installer to install your own OS on a random ARM device, assuming the relevant drivers and device tree have been upstreamed.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#207

Post by kelnos »

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.

I'm not at all as optimistic as you are. You still need out-of-tree drivers to run Linux on a 2017 MacBook Pro, and various things don't work at all on Intel Macs from 2016 (possibly earlier) to the present.

Sure the M1 is the new shiny, and people will be attracted to it in the short term, which might boost reverse-engineering efforts. But I expect that to die down as people get frustrated, and we'll have the same (or worse) situation as we do running Linux on Intel Macs.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#208

Post by kelnos »

oblio wrote: post #131
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the advice is to buy a second hand one 5 years from now?

Maybe. But consider that a non-touchbar 2016 MacBook Pro, which is turning 5 years old this year, still doesn't flawlessly run Linux. And that doesn't even have the custom Apple T1/T2 chip. The ARM hardware will be much harder to deal with.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#210

Post by duskwuff »

StillBored wrote: post #205
simonh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the about price of a mac mini: https://shop.solid-run.com/product-category/embedded-compute... You get upgradable ram, a PCIe slot for your favorite GPU/etc, and actual mainline linux support sufficient to boot most random linux distros (ok the onboard 10G+ nic might not work without patches). Its not the fastest machine around (A72s) but there are 16 of them, so it does a decent job of building ARM software, and…

Well... for the price of a Mac Mini, and some, you get a bare motherboard with a small amount of onboard storage (64G eMMC). No RAM, no video, no power supply or case. And it's not like you can just throw an off-the-shelf GPU in, either; neither nVidia nor AMD graphics cards work on ARM devices -- so if you're expecting something you can use as a desktop, you're in for a hard time.
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