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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

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Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#31

Post by peoplefromibiza »

saagarjha wrote: post #26
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

premium = an arm and a leg. My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds. It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.

I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.

The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is.

I could understand 20% more, but not two times.

Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs.

That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market.

They simply will never be mainstream.

My answer was to

I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead

I would!

CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#32

Post by terafo »

While it's obvious that within two years every GPU manufacturer is going to release MCM offering to the consumer market I'm surprised by a fact that Apple, of all companies, actually might deliver first consumer(actually more prosumer with their pricing) MCM GPU to the market. I think two M1 Max dies, if overclocked, actually can beat 3090 in most tasks and take performance crown if they release it this spring. Nvidia won't have a new GPU generation for nearly a year, same for AMD and Intel will probably shoot for performance crown only with Battlemage, which will probably be released in mid-2023.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#33

Post by ohgodplsno »

saagarjha wrote: post #26
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

premium = an arm and a leg. My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds. It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.

I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.

Such as a high end Ryzen, which eats the M1 for breakfast ? Sure.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#34

Post by marcan_42 »

Aissen wrote: post #8

Anyone has a pointer to what "Blocked on PSCI discussion" means ? I'd be interested to read those (mailing list?) discussions.

It hasn't really started yet, other than some discussions on IRC, but the TL;DR is on every other ARM64 system those features are handled by either a hypervisor or a supervisor, via special PSCI calls. These machines don't have the option for a supervisor (and no nested virtualization, so an under-OS hypervisor would preclude VMs). Rather than introducing a special snowflake driver for these machines, the current thinking is we can introduce some kind of third PSCI mechanism to make these calls into code set up by the bootloader (a la EFI runtime services), without switching to a higher privilege level. That means we need to define how all that would work first.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#35

Post by LeonM »

sharikous wrote: post #27
LeonM wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get your expectations up too high. My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux, and has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt, the external dock, HDMI port, audio and WiFi. For example: when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources. USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by. BMC support seems problemati…

Judging from the enthusiasm radiating from Asahi Linux I am optimistic in this regard. It seems to be interesting enough to attract a lot of talents, which is the key to succeeding for OSS projects. The ThinkPad seems a boring challenge in comparison. It won't surprise me if the Linux support will be better for Macs than it is for Lenovo "officially supported" PCs.

Don't forget that Thinkpads have a huge Linux fan base as well.

Don't get me wrong though, I am hoping that this project succeeds, I'd love to have a Mac with Linux as my daily work machine.

I guess time will tell how well this unfolds.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#36

Post by frant-hartm »

terafo wrote: post #32

While it's obvious that within two years every GPU manufacturer is going to release MCM offering to the consumer market I'm surprised by a fact that Apple, of all companies, actually might deliver first consumer(actually more prosumer with their pricing) MCM GPU to the market. I think two M1 Max dies, if overclocked, actually can beat 3090 in most tasks and take performance crown if they release it this spring. Nvidi…

MCM = multi chip module

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#37

Post by dijit »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #21
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they would…

well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 1.429 on the Italian Apple web site. My sister bought a Lenovo thinkbook with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32) for € 729 My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 1.780 and he's using it to render complex scenes. Does the increase in performance justify the ridiculous price? It doesn't, in my opinion. A…

The price seems to be comparable to premium lines of PC's.

Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks often meet or exceed the price of comparable MacBooks.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#38

Post by dagw »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #21
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they would…

well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 1.429 on the Italian Apple web site. My sister bought a Lenovo thinkbook with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32) for € 729 My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 1.780 and he's using it to render complex scenes. Does the increase in performance justify the ridiculous price? It doesn't, in my opinion. A…

My company has Lenovo Thinkpads as their standard laptops, and they cost basically the same as MacBooks. So it's not like Apple are charging uniquely high prices for their laptops

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#39

Post by bartvk »

yosito wrote: post #4

As a Linux user coming from Mac, I'm super excited about this, since Apple's hardware is some of the best. As a web application developer and Linux newbie, I don't feel like I have the expertise to be able to contribute to this, but I wish I did.

Me neither, so I donate to Marcan on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/marcan/posts

(I'm not saying you should, I just thought your point is good and I wanted to point out the possibility of sponsoring to everyone here).

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#40

Post by marcan_42 »

LeonM wrote: post #22
RMPR wrote: post #9

This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another level.

Don't get your expectations up too high. My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux, and has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt, the external dock, HDMI port, audio and WiFi. For example: when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources. USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by. BMC support seems problemati…

> My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux

I ran the M1 Pro for a whole day during early testing without charging (because we hadn't initialized the USB-C port yet) and didn't even run out of battery. And I didn't even have the power management driver running yet.

> has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt

We'll see how that goes, but I get the feeling Apple's Thunderbolt controllers are going to be a lot less insane than Intel's...

> HDMI port

That's just a DP-HDMI converter and whatever needs managing is managed by DCP firmware; it'll work once DP works.

> audio

WIP, already working on some machines; we just need to write a couple codec drivers to get it working across the board.

> WiFi

That's my TODO for this week, and I have it all planned out already :-)

> when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources.

Good thing these machines don't have ACPI then! :-)

> USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by.

We actually already have a workaround in Linux for USB lockups that affect macOS on these machines, so we're already doing better on that front.

> BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.

That goes via SMC on these machines, which has a very simple interface. That's my TODO right after WiFi :-)

> And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux.

Turns out "official" support sometimes is horrible... we can do better than that.

> I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.

Some people are already using them as their daily driver; I don't see it taking more than another year to be in a very good place.

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