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Linux Running on Apple M1

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Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#231
post #7

There's a bit of competition now going between asahi and corellium. While most of the spicy tweets have been removed, there's a summary https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1350547056679477250 Essentially, while this project may be quicker to get visible results, they may not be able to release all the code kosher for merging upstream. It will be interesting to see the next steps.

Reading the comment thread that arose from your comment reminded me, and maybe you'll appreciate this...

I like to view competition as a form of collaboration, for example:

When companies compete, they compete in a collaboration we call the market.

When sports teams compete, whether as groups or individuals, they compete in a collaboration we call the game, or even a tournament.

When the other side is beating you, you might look at their strengths and weaknesses, their knowledge and ability, and work out if there's anything you can learn, how to adapt your behaviour to strengthen your position.

Employees, or players, can move from one company to another, through hiring or acquisitions, bringing skills and experience with them. Here we have companies competing for employees, and then those employees collaborating anew.

Or a company might license certain IP from another, this is a form of collaboration too.

In this sense, collaboration and competition aren't necessarily opposing paradigms, they can be tools to apply to the situation.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Correlium is a bit of a minefield for obvious reasons, I don't understand why Apple hasn't blessed Marcan's work. I wouldn't expect them to commit any development resources of their own, but I'd think it would be in their interest to (A) provide Marcan with some documentation and (B) make an engineer available to answer occasional questions. Apple makes money selling hardware, and Linux support will sell more h…

I can't see why they would? Marcan is capable to be sure, but he's also a random guy with a Patreon. Why would Apple ever officially bless his work? I'd sooner seem them collaborating with Corellium, because that at least gives them a corporate entity to interact with. Plus, like, releasing documentation without giving away the stuff they want to keep to themselves, and without promising too much and having it break…

It always comes down to "it doesn't benefit them" eh…

There are some interesting situations though. Like in the big GPU world it's very common to document the ISA. Even nvidia does. I suppose that's because it benefits the vendor when games and GPGPU compute programs optimize for their GPUs, down to the assembly level. It's sad that Apple's approach is "just use Metal" rather than fully enabling developers to get to the actual… well, "metal"

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#233
post #13

(Waiting for page to load) "Nice, so they finally got a kernel to boot. I wonder what fancy way they'll be showing the dmesg infor--" "Oh." I think I need to recalibrate my idea of a 10x developer... (The standard would seem to have ratcheted up somewhat as the years have gone by!)

When the kernel boots, and you have a framebuffer working, all of userspace and gnome will probably just work with no modifications. You might have to play shenanigans like copying a complete filesystem into a ramdisk from the bootloader if your kernel doesn't have support for any IO/networking/storage devices. But you'll still be able to get this screenshot! Having said that, they have USB working, which is quite an…

Yes, USB is the same Synopsys DesignWare piece of..hardware that you can find on all the Allwinners/Rockchips/Amlogics/whatever. They wrote a driver for the "binding" crap around this to make the controller work, yeah. And some Type-C stuff (Apple handles it in software)

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#234
post #130
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, I know. But the chip kicks butt :) Software will catch up with the M1, I hope!

> Software will catch up with the M1, I hope!

Can't wait for [Your least favourite Electron App] to use even more CPU cycles!

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#235
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. Based on...? Apple is pretty straightforward: they support hardware until they don't. And they're quite explicit about ending support and it's almost always a major release. You might be able to hack support after that, but I've literally never had it be a "toss-up" about when Apple was or wasn't supporting their own hardware. As for Windows... I've got a 10 year old 26…

I'm a huge apple fanboy, but there are still issues that crop up on macOS, like it or not. My favourite example is one that the OP mentioned - not supporting multiple stream transport on Displayport. For those who aren't familiar, Displayport MST is a feature that allows multiple streams over one Displayport cable. Some monitors support this directly, meaning you can have Macbook -> Display1 -> Display2 rather than M…

[deleted]

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#236
post #44

I'm excited for Linux support on the M1. I don't even have a Mac Book, but more incentive for Linux apps to support ARM is a good thing.

Most distros have had ARMv8 (AArch64) support for a while now, Apple didn't invent RISC/ARM this year.

The most common AArch64 distro usage is on RaspberryPies

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#237
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…

Not all M1 chips are in laptops. I’m kind of intrigued by the potential of a cool and quiet linux server.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

You're mostly wrong; MST does not increase bandwidth, it splits the bandwidth of a single DisplayPort link. To increase raw bandwidth for 5k/6k they combine multiple HBR2/HBR3 links (over Thunderbolt or with multiple cables), which is the opposite of MST.

MST is supported specifically for early 4k displays that had scalers that couldn't handle 4k60, but could handle half the resolution, so they sent two streams. But that wasn't a bandwidth limitation; old MST 4k displays and modern SST 4k displays both used a single HBR2 link.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both amdgpu and nouveau work absolutely fine on ARM devices, why wouldn't they?! In fact I made the FreeBSD port of amdgpu work on my Macchiatobin :) Absolutely smooth experience btw, video output works even in UEFI (it actually runs the GOP driver from the card in QEMU), amdgpu works perfectly (played vkquake, supertuxkart, openmw, etc.)

The results reported at [1] had led me to believe that the AMD/NV ARM drivers were still unready. Am I mistaken? Are those issues specific to BCM283x?

[1]: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/external-gpus-and-ras...

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#240
post #183
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.

I last installed drivers on Linux... in 2007? 2008? I last installed drivers on Windows late last year.

I've had to on Linux for a very common wireless networking chip. Also for a scanner from a very common printer brand (that ironically has excellent support for printers on Linux). And this is Debian on a ThinkPad--a very common combination. Almost as good as Windows but given I had to load my wireless drivers via USB I still consider Windows the gold standard when it comes to built in drivers. It at least does well with networking drivers which is the most important and essential drivers to have. Everything else windows can easily download and install automatically over the network. I last did a manual install for drivers on Windows years ago cos it just does it by itself now.
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