Some of us really like Mac hardware, but don’t like macOS A fully working setup of Linux on a Mac is the dream for me
What about sponsoring BSD OEMs to achieve the same level of hardware quality?
OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
91–100 of 204 posts
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#92So much for the many remarks made on HN claiming that Apple would use the M1 to further exert control over users’ ability to boot an alternative OS. Between this and Asahi Linux, I’d say things are off to a good start. Btw, Asahi has a Patreon page for anyone who wants to contribute. I’m tossing twelve bucks a month and recommend any Mac users with interest in booting alternative OSes support such projects. Now I’m g…
Wait till you get to wifi, power management, suspend resume, etc. The fact that linux (I know this post is about OpenBSD) boots on some random piece of hardware is commendable, but not that surprising in 2021.
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#93Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly, especially on the M1 where almost every component is Apple proprietary and it's not a matter of loading, say, some common Intel graphics driver. On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm6…
Nah, I want to choose the kernel. This statement is a bit presumptuous: "It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly." Maybe I do not want all those things every time I boot. Apple used an "alternative OS" for their Airport routers: NetBSD. Kernel was around 6.x if I recall correctly. Seemed like Wi-Fi worked preety good, maybe even "flawl…
>This statement is a bit presumptuous
It's not. Anyone who has followed the last 10 years of Apple devices knows what works and what doesn't.
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand what Apple contributed here. It's not supported, helped, or encouraged by Apple. And Apple does not document their H/W in ways that allow reuse. Hence these are all reverse engineering projects. Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc. Personally I happen to not like it, but it's a choice folks have to make by themselves. I buy my H/W fro…
They explicitly built a mechanism for loading alternate OS's. I'm not going to sing Apple's praises over that or anything, but it means that Macs are still an order of magnitude less locked down than, say, an iPhone. You have the ability to do whatever you want with a Mac... provided you figure out how.
Infinitely, really, since on iOS it’s zero and on macOS it is nonzero ;) Of course, on macOS it’s still not a lot, but you can see why everyone is excited about what Apple is offering right now.
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand what Apple contributed here. It's not supported, helped, or encouraged by Apple. And Apple does not document their H/W in ways that allow reuse. Hence these are all reverse engineering projects. Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc. Personally I happen to not like it, but it's a choice folks have to make by themselves. I buy my H/W fro…
> Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc. This is just false. iOS is a walled garden. The Mac is not by anyone’s definition.
It is in some aspects, so I am not surprised that there are people willing to claim that the walls are too high for them. Personally, they could be a bit lower but I can still see over them I’m not up in arms quite yet.
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes very little sense. What does Apple get out of letting people run Linux and OpenBSD, then preventing it?
...to play devil's advocate a bit (because I really do agree with you), I could have asked the same question about Linux on the PS3, and we all know how that ended.
I run a “Hacker News advocate” against the comments I post, and this was one of the things I thought of. You will note that in that case Sony actually suffered quite a bit in their response, and they only really did it out of fears of piracy. In this case the I believe backlash will be fairly large, not the least from their own platform security people for having years of their work invalidated. Also, in this case the only thing I can see that could drive them to do this would be if FairPlay keys were somehow made available in the fully unsigned OS environment: I haven’t really looked into this (don’t have my M1 Mac yet) but I would be very surprised if so.
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple committed to this during WWDC, when they mentioned that they would have an option to dial the boot security back.
WWDC included discussion of "Reduced security" mode, which allows downgrading to old signed versions of MacOS, but I don't remember any disclosure of plans to permit arbitrary operating systems at that point - do you have a pointer? Edit: The transcript at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/ discusses reduced security, but doesn't say anything about booting arbitrary code.
You found the right talk, but it’s actually only waved at and not explicitly discussed so it’s not in the transcript. At about 19 minutes the engineer mentions that a csrutil will be able to do more things and on the slide disabling secure boot is one of them. (This actually got moved into bputil, but the intent was there at least.)
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point is that Apple was very clear that they are only supporting macOS on their hardware. And that is exactly what they mean. They’re not going to help you with your port or field your questions when you ask for how things work. They are just going to leave the door open for you.
I took what Craig said more as “we aren’t doing Bootcamp, run Windows in a VM”. Apple never really supported the efforts to run Linux/BSD on their hardware in Intel, why would they start with the M1?
They support it about well as they did in Intel, which is to say that they left the door open to it. At the volume that Macs ship at, and the interest they garner, this is mostly enough to get people willing to put in the effort to make it work.
Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#99Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
#100So much for the many remarks made on HN claiming that Apple would use the M1 to further exert control over users’ ability to boot an alternative OS. Between this and Asahi Linux, I’d say things are off to a good start. Btw, Asahi has a Patreon page for anyone who wants to contribute. I’m tossing twelve bucks a month and recommend any Mac users with interest in booting alternative OSes support such projects. Now I’m g…
> Now I’m gonna see if there’s an option to throw money at this. Even if I were God I wouldn't stop anyone doing it, but does it not leave a bad taste in your mouth that Apple charge the best part of 2 thousand dollars for a laptop with a basically brand-new (so not rotted) stack but utterly refuse to document anything beyond the absolute basics - this is the world's largest tech company, from which I conclude that t…
>like even nvidia do now.
Nvidia does so kicking and screaming, because 1) they have no choice but to abide by the GPL for things that use kernel internals, and 2) Since they make money from linux, at least in the HPC/ML space, they want users to at least be able to see the screen light up so that they can install the proprietary stack.
The lawnmover analogy is apt for most companies.