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Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#31

Post by dev_tty01 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #15

I don't own an ARM computer (except the ones running Android, that is) but in my experience Linux tooling should work just fine on ARM if you pick the right distributions. That said, I have run Linux distros on Android a few times so I am somewhat familiar with what's out there. Running x64 and ARM together on one machine will work through tricks like Rosetta but I don't believe that stuff will ever work well in virt…

See my comment on original question. Apple's latest beta system, Ventura, enables using Rosetta within Linux VMs. Looks like they have done a lot of work on the virtualization frameworks since last year.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#32

Post by forty »

turtlebits wrote: post #26
forty wrote: post #22

I don't have Mac, I'm a Linux user but many if my colleagues have Macs, some of them are M1. And the arm thing is really a pain, much more than the difference between OSes. Just a random example: we have some app which uses MySQL 5.7, and we use MySQL in docker for integration tests. Unfortunately MySQL 5.7 won't run on arm (current workaround: they use a mariadb image, which is apparently good enough, and the CI wou…

You can run x64 containers on M1, it's just slower. Just add the `--platform linux/amd64` flag

Yes it does work but then those tests take an unacceptable long time to run.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#33

Post by porcoda »

I'm in a similar boat - love the performance/battery of my M1 MacBook Air, but the ecosystem is just too messy at the moment for me. I have a few tools I need to use that haven't yet been making official Apple Silicon releases due to GitHub actions not supporting Apple Silicon fully yet. The workaround involves maintaining two versions of homebrew, one for ARM and one for x86-64, and then being super careful to make sure you don't forget if you're working in an environment that's ARM and one that's X86. It's too much of a pain to keep straight for me (I admit it - I lack patience and am forgetful, so this is a bit of a "me" problem versus a tech problem).

My solution was to give up using my M1 mac for development work. It sits on a desk as my email and music machine, and I moved all my dev work to an x86 Linux laptop. I'll probably drift back to my mac if the tools I need start to properly support Apple Silicon without hacky workarounds, but until GitHub actions supports it and people start doing official releases through that mechanism, I'm kinda stuck.

It is interesting how much impact GitHub has had by not having Apple Silicon support. Just look at the ticket for this issue to see the surprisingly long list of projects that are affected. (See: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187)

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#34

Post by azinman2 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #27

At least some aspects of this issue are getting better as we speak. The latest Mac OS (in beta) supports virtualizing ARM Linux but also enables the ARM Linux system to use Apple's speedy Rosetta 2 x86 binary compiler and JIT compiler to run x86 programs within the ARM Linux VM. Based on descriptions, it seems that the rest of the hypervisor VM framework has also matured substantially this release. https://developer.…

My understanding is the AOT won’t be available to Linux; it’s JIT only.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#35

Post by navjack27 »

andrewk17 wrote: post #21
_gllen wrote: post #18

I tried going from a 2018 MBP to M1 MBA in 2021 and had too many issues to make it my primary machine. Docker and Android development were particularly brutal to get going reliably IIRC. The M1 performed well for the things it could do, but I still needed the MBP (which constantly reached 100% CPU) for other stuff, so I ended up doing a horrible multi-machine setup with Synergy. That was a dark time in my life ;) The…

I've been doing React Native development on my M1 MBP and it's been pretty great overall. But is anyone else surprised how long it's taking to get the iOS Simulator for ARM? I feel like it would make a massive difference to my developer experience (especially in battery). And I haven't seen any indication that it's coming anytime soon.

Isn't it... Just in xcode? I've used it. It's like, there, right?

I open up my 13.3 beta 2 and go to the xcode tab go down to open developer tool click on simulator and then click on file and then open simulator my mouse over to iOS 15.4 go down to the iPhone 13 for example click on it and then I have a simulated iPhone 13...

And if I check the activity monitor nothing in my activity monitor is showing up as Intel code except for parsec right now...

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#36

Post by pineconewarrior »

rvz wrote: post #3

It would have made sense to simply ignore the M1 hype altogether since the tools you require do not work / run on ARM, or run worse than on Intel, you're better off staying on Intel to wait until the situation for VMs in Apple Silicon improves first: [0]. For developers using VMs, Docker, multi-pass, etc I think it is more trouble than it is worth to jump on to the new shiny thing and invest time in workarounds that…

I use Docker and Colima constantly on M1 and have had very few issues. Granted, my use case for those things is probably quite simple compared to someone in Ops.

For web development, I believe that Apple Silicon is really the place to be right now (especially if you also work on design projects!)

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#38

Post by skohan »

mtoddsmith wrote: post #25

At some point we're going to have the opposite issue. Stuff will work for ARM but not x86. Thanks Apple.

But apparently "thanks" unironically right? I am not a CPU expert, but from what I have read about ARM during this transition (plus with more ARM options becoming available in the cloud) it seems to me like x86 is bogged down with a fair amount of baggage and ARM/RISK is actually a better technology which has been held back by the inertia of x86.

Happy to be corrected if I am wrong.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#39

Post by ThemalSpan »

On the whole it's been good.

I work on scientific software, so the biggest technical issue I face day-to-day is that OpenMP based threading seems almost fundamentally incompatible with M1.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/674456

The summary of the issue is that OpenMP threaded code typically assumes that a) processors are symmetric and b) there isn't a penalty for threads yielding.

On M1 / macOS, what happens is that during the first OpenMP for loop, the performance cores finish much faster, their threads yield, and then they are forever scheduled on the efficiency cores which is doubly bad since they're not as fast and now have too many threads trying to run on them. As far as I can tell (from the linked thread and similar) there is not an API for pinning threads to a certain core type.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#40

Post by tonyhb »

1. Run arm-based debian using Parallels, headless using `prlctl`. SSH in and use tmux.

2. Everything you install will be arm based. Docker will pull arm-based images locally. Most every project (that we use) now has arm support via docker manifests.

3. Use binfmt to cross-compile x86 images within prlctl, or have CI auto-build images on x86 machines.

That pretty much does it.

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