Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by sircastor » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

I am the only Mac user on a small team of web-based tool devs for my company. Everyone else is on Linux.

I occasionally have to do exploratory processes where I have to figure out how to setup the same environment locally that my teammates are using. It can be time consuming, but overall I’m able to replicate it just fine. We’re far enough into the transition that most stuff is supported out of the box.

I admit I don’t know much about what’s going on under the hood. I used podman for containers so far.

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

#172

Post by hhh » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

I use m1 max in work and personal projects and have done so since November. I primarily work in *ops, choose your flavor (dev/sec/ml/net).

The only issues I have ever really ran into were:

RKE had issues on arm early-on. Random containers didn't have arm image support. This went away quickly as an issue for me.

No nested virt. This one was painful for a few reasons, particularly when I was attempting to use the Canonical tooling to create preinstalled Ubuntu images, which I was doing in a vm via Multipass. Maybe M2/M3?

That's about it, really. I had to buy two Safari extensions when moving from Windows, but they were cheap and worth it (dark reader and some other one I can't remember rn)

I currently run Rancher Desktop every day as a replacement for Docker Desktop. Works spectacularly for me, and I can just not care about the environment. Just works.

I use Multipass when I need linux environments, and it's been spectacular.

Universal control has been the greatest enhancement in my workflow (and general daily use)

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

#173

Post by alwaysanon » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

I think it has been mentioned a few times already but ARM64 on servers is also quite compelling (Graviton on AWS and Ampere Altra in Azure). I've actually seen a few customers that couple the move to new M1 MacBooks for their devs with a move to ARM in production as well to retain that same "the same container image runs on both" that they were used to even if they go multi-arch just incase.

In one case the devs were given the condition of getting their containers working on ARM to get the new MacBooks they wanted - and the cost savings of moving to ARM in cloud even subsidised the cost of them a bit too...

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

#174

Post by sircastor » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:49 AM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #48

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.…

> highly performant Last thing I read, 70% of the native performance was shown by running GeekBench through Rosetta (with a few odd results noted). If somebody has better info... Edit: I see that Nov 2020 checks returned an 80% performance, and there was discussion on HN at (at least) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105597

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I really think people should ignore bench scores and run the processes they need themselves. See what it feels like, and how comfortable you are with that.

Benchmarks are good for bragging rights and maybe convincing over-zealous accounting to approve a purchase (but even then that’s probably not all there is to it.)

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

#175

Post by dhosek » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:49 AM UTC

We had an engineer in India get an M1 MBP last month and most things worked, but the docker container for MS SQL had big issues and he had to get an Intel MBP to be able to work. I suspect that those issues will dissipate with time. Right now, I find it annoying that the only OTP auth apps that are available for the Mac require Apple Silicon as they're essentially iPhone apps with new skins. I really want to be able to get something like Google Auth in my menu bar so I don't have to pull out my phone every time I need a code for Okta.

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

#176

Post by dexterdog » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 3:59 AM UTC

dhosek wrote: post #175

We had an engineer in India get an M1 MBP last month and most things worked, but the docker container for MS SQL had big issues and he had to get an Intel MBP to be able to work. I suspect that those issues will dissipate with time. Right now, I find it annoying that the only OTP auth apps that are available for the Mac require Apple Silicon as they're essentially iPhone apps with new skins. I really want to be able…

When your 2fa is on your computer it is no longer 2fa

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

#177

Post by xrd » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 4:06 AM UTC

We had a customer testing our video player application recently and asked whether M1 support was there. It was embarrassing to realize we hadn't formally tested on the M1.

Our application is Gstreamer based, which means it uses highly optimized codecs that eventually render to OpenGL. I was very worried it wouldn't work on the M1.

It works flawlessly. Rosetta is amazing. I'm not an Apple fanboy at all but Apple has done an amazing job with M1 and this is true even though many applications are just running x86 code via Rosetta.

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

#178

Post by teilo » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #148

mdp2021 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> highly performant Last thing I read, 70% of the native performance was shown by running GeekBench through Rosetta (with a few odd results noted). If somebody has better info... Edit: I see that Nov 2020 checks returned an 80% performance, and there was discussion on HN at (at least) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105597

Those are terrific numbers for emulation. Anyway I can say that my colleagues M1 using rosetta is faster or equal to my MBP i9 2020.

That's because it's not emulation. It's binary translation, which is vastly more performant.

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

#179

Post by mrtksn » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

d3nj4l wrote: post #152

jeppester wrote: post #103

There are many comments here that goes: "we had to do all sorts of configuration for this to work, but it's been great and we like it". As a primarily Linux user these feel like very familiar stories. It's kinda refreshing to hear those stories from mac users. Maybe we are not so different after all.

Mac-using devs are mostly Linux-using devs who prefer a non-free distro ;)

That’s not that far from the reality. It’s essentially like using a Linux with really good graphical UI, ecosystem/3rd party integrations that just works and fully supported stellar hardware.

After all, macOS is certified Unix and Linux is Unix-like.

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

#180

Post by sl0wik » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

We had the same issue and ended up using remote docker.

Pros: - Setup is very simple. - It can run dozens of containers without overloading local machine. - Its stable. - SSL is working.

Cons: - I got issues with web sockets support. - Some times I get file conflicts.

I actually got ready solution for running remote docker with Mac but It need a bit of work. If someone would like to support project some front-end work, and a bit of docker/nginx work, please get in touch.