Hi!
Virgl3D developer here. Could you please open a MR with your patches so we can look into integrating them into master?
Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
131–140 of 149 posts
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.
Is it? Up until now most devs still go with 16 or even 8 GB laptops. 32GB laptops are far between (Macs or not), and much fewer people use desktops... And we used to run Vmware with Windows (on Linux) or Linux (on Windows) in 2005 just fine, on laptops with a couple GB at best... Dozens of devs I know in a company I work with have 8GB Macs (and 2-3 years old at that), and run Vagrant and Docker with no issue. And tho…
> no issue.
Could this be because they don't understand how much faster it can be -- the slowness is an accepted cost of doing work?
I've recently run virtualbox/vagrant/docker on an air from ~3 years ago, and it's painfully slow compared to my 3-yo system with 32GB RAM. It works perfectly fine, but it's slow.
> I think people with 32GB laptops
That may be true. It may also be true that people with 8GB laptops vastly underestimate the benefit of having more memory available for development workloads.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still works and at least somebody still seems to work on it going by the somewhat random GL-related fixes and regressions in macOS Betas since GL was declared deprecated. AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility. Apparently Zink on top of MoltenVk on top of Metal works, but that looks like a Jenga…
Virgil 3D renderer provides some desktop GL emulation, so it is still somewhat usable. But a serious application expecting desktop GL would see glitches. My recommendation is to use Wayland, and to play serious games on macOS (although such games are not available on Linux AArch64 anyway...)
Virgl3D should support emulating GL on GLES usecases. If you're seeing issues, please open bug reports on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/virgl/virglrenderer/-/issues and we can try and look into them :)
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#134Sigh. I wish Apple would just release these drivers as a sign of goodwill to the rest of the community. I think these machines could make decent development workstations if they had an M.2 port and native Linux support on day 1. It really feels like the least they can do considering their transgressions against the open source community over the past few years...
I'm not sure what transgressions you're referring to, but releasing some specs would be nice, or updating the open source copy of XNU to a version with M1 in there.
Already happened.
>Okay, so Apple just went and released M1 support files as binaries in their latest XNU source code dump.
There is no specific license applied to these binary files, therefore the top-level APSL license applies.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.
What the hell, enough with this! My main dev machine until a few months ago was a Dell laptop with 8 GB of RAM on Ubuntu. I ran RubyMine on it all day, some Sublime, Spotify, Slack, MariaDB, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and I had no problems whatsoever. The only reason it ever ran out of RAM was a memory leak in Firefox.
Indeed, as mentioned before, I used to "surf the web" in the 90s with 8MB of RAM. :-)
8GB is plenty for normal work, my current 16GB is plenty for development work including a 4GB Windows 10 VM running on top of Linux.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual su…
Browsers will quickly eat up all of your available RAM if you open enough tabs. The thing is, if you had less RAM, they'd be keeping fewer tabs alive in RAM. So you can't really infer from "I'm using X amount of RAM now" to "I need at least X amount of RAM". If you upgraded to 64GB you'd probably end up 'using' a lot more than 28GB for the exact same workflow.
Simply open a blank page, quit the browser and restart it. Now, only load the two or three page/sites you really need. Simple as that to bring mem use under 500MB, with Firefox at least. Repeat this once a day.
I personally close my browser at night and load it in the morning.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.
Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.
Perhaps you're correct that I don't need it in the sense that I only very occasionally find myself with a dataset or something that doesn't fit in memory, and could just run a high memory cloud instance for a bit to process it.
Even still, my experience of desktop Linux under memory pressure has been frustrating, even with fast SSDs, and overspeccing the memory is an inexpensive guarantee that my system will never start thrashing during an important screenshare demo or something, so it's an obvious choice if I'm shopping for a new computer.
When I built this computer last year the cost difference between 16 and 32GB was like $40...easy to justify a 2-3% premium on the overall cost of the machine to never have to give a second thought to conserving memory. That said, Apple charges $400 for the same upgrade (in their machines that support 32GB), so the calculus there is a bit different.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what transgressions you're referring to, but releasing some specs would be nice, or updating the open source copy of XNU to a version with M1 in there.
Already happened. >Okay, so Apple just went and released M1 support files as binaries in their latest XNU source code dump. There is no specific license applied to these binary files, therefore the top-level APSL license applies. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1355907966541565957
Ugh, binaries. I wonder what the motivation was to keep those closed.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#139I like the attitude of author of this gist. Just make it work. My own practical practice is to use both a very fine System76 Linux laptop and also a super fast, if constrained, M1 MacBook Pro. Depends on what I am doing, or sometimes just what I feel like using. To be perfectly open though, I had considered switching to just using Linux until the M1 was released. The thing that held me back was spending $3500 on a co…
Does running M1 somehow save you from having to use Common Lisp, or something?
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.
Perhaps you're correct that I don't need it in the sense that I only very occasionally find myself with a dataset or something that doesn't fit in memory, and could just run a high memory cloud instance for a bit to process it. Even still, my experience of desktop Linux under memory pressure has been frustrating, even with fast SSDs, and overspeccing the memory is an inexpensive guarantee that my system will never st…
Desktop Linux tends to be a bit of a memory hog compared to MacOS. I think a lot of Linux users would be surprised how usable even the 8GB macs are for most tasks.