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OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

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Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#111

Post by BillinghamJ »

linuxhansl wrote: post #45
alsetmusic wrote: post #4

So 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…

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…

I guess we could fairly call it a undocumented or obscure garden? But there's no real designed wall there.

Apple aren't preventing anything, they're just not helping us out either. Agree it would be nice for them to help out a little, but it's really not the same thing.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#112

Post by anthk »

rgovostes wrote: post #66
amatecha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literally just installed OpenBSD on my iMac G4 last week, haha (oh yeah, everything works flawlessly btw, including graphics acceleration)

The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization, so booting an alternative OS is more attractive. And the Nvidia GPU is probably easier to find cross-platform drivers for. New drivers or some sort of IOKit compatibility layer need to be developed for the M1 GPU (which is orders of magnitude more complex). (I can run OpenBSD on any modern piece of hardware, though; the novelty and nostalgia are in running Mac OS 9 on that.)

It did. Check Mac On Linux.

The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization,

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#113

Post by p_l »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #111
linuxhansl wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

I guess we could fairly call it a undocumented or obscure garden? But there's no real designed wall there. Apple aren't preventing anything, they're just not helping us out either. Agree it would be nice for them to help out a little, but it's really not the same thing.

IIRC, it turned out that ability to run non Apple OSes depends on one person who implemented it and is responsible for it. It wasn't part of any road map for M1

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#114

Post by mjg59 »

mhh__ wrote: post #13
alsetmusic wrote: post #4

So 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…

Intel refuse to document significant portions of their technology, and Linux works less well on their platforms as a result. They definitely do a better job of documenting things than Apple, but I'd really frame this as a difference in degree rather than in kind.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#115

Post by aborsy »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #110
tiew9Vii wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 mini would be a great home server in its form-factor (small size), power usage and performance. As the current mini is pretty much an empty shell, the minis' size should get smaller in the next generations. Intel nucs are popular for these reasons, but it seems the M1 will give better performance/power/size. I've used Linux for the past 20 years. I recently tried OpenBSD because I never used a BSD, so I though…

CPU performance is a funny argument for a router as the hardware reqs on a home router are already so low. My current router is gigabit, has best in class WiFi, is smaller than a mac mini and is fanless. I got to say though: PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating do not sound like something a home user should be setting up. The only reason one would play with these things in a home environment…

Security.

EdgeOS is proprietary and closed source, and not updated as frequently as OpenBSD.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#116

Post by Kwpolska »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #85
rgovostes wrote: post #51

Running 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…

> 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 "flawlessly".

That’s a nice strawman you got here. AirPort routers shipped with NetBSD, and it was officially supported. But good luck getting macOS to run on that — macOS would count as the “alternative OS” for the AirPort.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#117

Post by bubblethink »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #57
rgovostes wrote: post #51

Running 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…

> On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. Yes, you make some tradeoffs -- you sacrifice a core, a few GB of RAM, some disk space for an OS you don't _really_ want to be running. But I'm skeptical that these are not better tradeoffs than constantly using a hacked-togeth…

There are a couple of projects that improve this (for linux host + linux guest). virgl exposes accelerated graphics to the guest, which chromeOS uses in its offering. Intel also has its GVT-g offering which virtualises intel integrated GPUs. Of course, none of this applies to apple.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#118

Post by lloeki »

mhh__ wrote: post #13
alsetmusic wrote: post #4

So 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…

> utterly refuse to document anything beyond the absolute basics

I don’t see how that’s any different from PC or ARM world, save for a couple of larger scale exceptions (Dell, Lenovo, Intel, AMD) and a bunch of insignificant players (Raspberry, System76 & al), and even then it’s a fairly recent development in PC history that these players document/support/contribute anything.

The fact that Linux pretty much works+ on any PC out there is mostly due to volunteers hacking stuff around on PCs that are getting increasingly normalised.

And even with the normalisation of hardware architecture, there are still a lot of either unspecified of spec violating special cases. If one is not convinced by that, I encourage one to lurk the Linux kernel tree for quirks, device trees, and other various DSDT hacks. The weird size of payloads for the T2 SSD controller that stumped everyone for some time is only one among many, many other quirks that exist overall.

After 10+ years, dust is only settling on the BIOS to EFI transition, and I’m not the least surprised that it takes a bit of time to adapt to the overall ARM Mac architecture.

+ by “works” I mean boots reasonably well to init 5+VESA, and most of the time something else than VESA. But taking random hardware and having a bulletproof system out of the box down to every nook and cranny is still a tall order. There are systems that fully work optimally out of the box, but they’re a very small minority.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#119

Post by tiew9Vii »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #110
tiew9Vii wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 mini would be a great home server in its form-factor (small size), power usage and performance. As the current mini is pretty much an empty shell, the minis' size should get smaller in the next generations. Intel nucs are popular for these reasons, but it seems the M1 will give better performance/power/size. I've used Linux for the past 20 years. I recently tried OpenBSD because I never used a BSD, so I though…

CPU performance is a funny argument for a router as the hardware reqs on a home router are already so low. My current router is gigabit, has best in class WiFi, is smaller than a mac mini and is fanless. I got to say though: PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating do not sound like something a home user should be setting up. The only reason one would play with these things in a home environment…

Yeah for a router you wouldn’t use the M1, it has one Ethernet port and overkill. I use one of the Pc Engines APU2 board’s.

The reference to the router was in regards I used OpenBSD and found OpenBSD a great server OS.

I have multiple vlan’s as have a guest wifi for visitors, all iot devices like tv, soundbars on a private vlan with restricted network access, dns ad blocking, dns over tls, wireguard for remote access etc. I use ubiquiti access points/switches but run my own router for learning purposes plus the flexibility. To be honest, since I’ve set it up I haven’t done any fiddling, it’s been rock solid. I’ve had more issues doing updates on the ubiquiti devices dropping the wireless uplink I have then having to power cycle them to come back up.

Re: OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware

#120

Post by fsflover »

zepto wrote: post #71
linuxhansl wrote: post #45

Earlier 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.

Mac is a walled garden. What if I want to convert my OS to a VM and/or run it on a different hardware? AFAIK it’s prohibited by the license.
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