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Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

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Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#81

Post by userbinator »

nwallin wrote: post #54
cptskippy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either, they're a step above Realtek. Oddly Intel is well regarded though... It mostly comes down to drivers from what I understand but I'm not entirely familiar with all the objections.

I would much rather have a realtek or intel controller than a broadcom one. My thinkpad has a realtek, my last laptop (an xps13) had an intel controller, and they just worked without issue. Admittedly it's been a while since I had a broadcom controller, but I had all sorts of problems with it. Random disconnects etc.

Realteks also have documentation and thus open-source drivers, which was for a very long time (and very much still is) a problem with Broadcom's notorious closedness.

In my experience, Intel has higher performance and more features (which might be a downside from the point of complexity and configuration) at a higher cost, while Realtek is slower, but cheap, simple and reliable.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#82

Post by kuresov »

cptskippy wrote: post #41
Ericson2314 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Linux laptop user, I'm bemused when the competition gets worse. Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on Intel macs ever was.

Still no where near as bad a Linux on the laptop the last time I tried it. I haven't used Linux on a laptop in a decade because it was so bad I swore it off.

10 years is a long time. I run Linux on a Carbon X1 and it's been great. I think it's about 4 years old now.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#83

Post by userbinator »

dannyw wrote: post #75
SilverRed wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't broadcom the worst part of the rpi? It's impossible to boot the pi without loading a binary blob backdoor first

How about the fact that Broadcom essentially enabled the Pi to be created in the first place?

Broadcom is neither the first nor only company making SoCs. The RPi people just happened to have someone working there.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#84

Post by alsetmusic »

totetsu wrote: post #26
my123 wrote: post #3

Interesting that Apple still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi + BT chips in most of their product range despite lots of issues with them. Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

Marconi is named after inventor of the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi?wprov=sfla1

Marconi was the name of my kitty. A person at the veterinary clinic called him Macaroni by mistake (she’d read it but not heard it). The vet was rather adamant about making sure she got it right when I was just gonna let it go.

He turned to me to check that my guy was indeed named for the inventor of radio. Yep, that’s how he got his name. I wanted him to have a name with dignity.

Another Apple internal project was dubbed Sagan or Carl Sagan. It was later changed to BHA.[0] The story behind it is amusing. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_7100 [1] https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-app...

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#85

Post by valuearb »

hderms wrote: post #64
imwillofficial wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux on desktop users shouldn’t be bemused until Linux desktop experience isn’t a pile of UX trash. Linux on the desktop is still so frustrating, ugly, and only marginally more useful over a Mac for extremely specific use cases, that I would rather use Windows + WSL2.

I've become a wsl convert now as I can trust windows to deal with sleep/wakeup and wifi much better than linux. If macosx experiences a developer exodus I think it's likely many will follow suit. Especially with things like WSLg coming out

With the M2 MacBook Pros due in a couple months, it’s more likely Apple experiences an inflow of developers.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#86

Post by dang »

Nextgrid wrote: post #5

Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the notifications. I’m worried for the future of the Mac.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26987508.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#87

Post by pudmaidai »

QuercusMax wrote: post #28
totetsu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marconi is named after inventor of the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi?wprov=sfla1

I know it's not pronounced like that in Italian, but I always read his name as "Googly-Elmo" Marconi.

To be fair the pronunciation of GLI in Italian is rather unique, so I’ll take Googly-Elmo!

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#88

Post by foobiekr »

imwillofficial wrote: post #56
Nextgrid wrote: post #5

Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the notifications. I’m worried for the future of the Mac.

I disagree. As a 20 year Mac user, Catalina has waaay worse. Big Sur has been painless. So much so that we’ve rolled it out enterprise wide at [Giant Internet Company]

Mail and calendar notifications are both a huge mess in Big Sur and a major downgrade.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#89

Post by wyager »

imwillofficial wrote: post #62
userbinator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a matter of tradition/long-term contracts - Apple has used Broadcom for a long time.

Broadcom makes some good stuff now and then (Rpi’s)

The Broadcom SoCs used in the RPi's are not "good stuff" at all - they are one of the worst pieces of junk I have ever had the displeasure of using.

They are extremely unstable, and if you want any kind of moderately reliable deployment of an RPi, you need to use a watchdog timer to reset the device if it freezes. Except - guess what - the watchdog timer itself is broken on the RPi! (As of the last time I tried this, iirc with an RPi 4) Either it's busted in hardware or the driver is broken. Most semi-high-reliability devices built using RPis have elected to use external watchdogs, which is super annoying and would not be necessary on a correctly designed SoC.

Their clocking and boot schemes are also totally insane garbage, with random peripherals breaking if you change the GPU clock, and with the GPU silicon running the bootloader or something ridiculous like that.

I would prefer almost any other ARM SoC to the BCM used in the RPi.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#90

Post by jrockway »

cptskippy wrote: post #40
anitil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the issue with Broadcom chips?

Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either, they're a step above Realtek. Oddly Intel is well regarded though... It mostly comes down to drivers from what I understand but I'm not entirely familiar with all the objections.

You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware, and driver. If you hack that into something good, your product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy some chips off the back of a truck in Shenzhen, solder them onto some circuit board you built in your garage, and use the three-years-out-of-date reference drivers written in a day by some random intern, the results will not be as good. Apple, I assume, uses the first approach when working with hardware vendors. The WiFi card you got for $3 on Amazon probably doesn't.

Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.

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