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Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

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Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#182
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard solution: turn it off, and turn it back on.

Microreboot – A Technique for Cheap Recovery https://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS865/Papers/candea_microreb...

Even earlier: Erlang.

https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's technically Chromium Embedded Framework instead of Electron, but last time I used the Spotify desktop client it was possible to push its RAM usage past 512MB up to the 1GB mark just by clicking through albums and artists. For something extremely functional like a VS Code, which is a mini-IDE of sorts, that might be excusable but it's beyond silly for a streaming music player.

But it has nothing whatsoever to do with it being a web-based app. It pretty clearly has to be the result of caching lots of album art and/or metadata and/or audio data, which is just as likely to happen on a native app.

Web technologies in and of themselves aren't bad, but their usage is strongly correlated with cost-saving measures and the questionable technical decisions that result since choosing a web app itself is often a cost-saving measure.

VS Code is an example of things gone right, where Microsoft has clearly hired an AAA-class team and funded them well. Within the same company, Teams is an example of the exact opposite and much more representative of the typical web app.

In Spotify's case, if they're aggressively caching album art, metadata, and/or audio I would say that's of questionable value to the user. Art and information on songs/albums/artists/etc are in nearly all cases only going to be seen once or twice by the user per session, and so keeping them sitting in memory doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Caching audio that's not been played is very questionable (to the point that I don't think they're doing this) because many, many people are still on metered connections and Spotify would quickly be blowing past bandwidth limits if it were pre-caching albums left and right.

Disk caching makes a ton of sense for Spotify, given that it's being done in a standarized directory that the OS can clear to free up space when necessary, but on machines with 8GB or especially 4GB of RAM there's a very good chance that by aggressively caching to memory they're evacuating other things that would better serve the user to be sitting in memory.

Using a lot of memory is fine when there's clear user benefit but it should still be done intelligently.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#184
post #39

"Please temper your expectations: even with hardware documentation, an optimized Vulkan driver stack (with enough features to layer OpenGL 4.6 with Zink) requires many years of full time work. At least for now, nobody is working on this driver full time3. Reverse-engineering slows the process considerably. We won’t be playing AAA games any time soon." From https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html

Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? It's an honest question. Even if someone (or a team) could somehow be paid for this work, by the time the results are usable, the hardware will be more or less functionally obsolete. And that is on top of the fact that ARM64 on MacOS will always be a small slice of the gaming pie, and ARM64 on Linux games and GPU applications virtually nonexistent.

Getting this off the ground has a chance to get this to snowball. Imagine it gets to rough but useable and it’s in the kernel. Then more and more folks can iterate on it. It’s development rate will increase.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#185
post #39

"Please temper your expectations: even with hardware documentation, an optimized Vulkan driver stack (with enough features to layer OpenGL 4.6 with Zink) requires many years of full time work. At least for now, nobody is working on this driver full time3. Reverse-engineering slows the process considerably. We won’t be playing AAA games any time soon." From https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html

Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? It's an honest question. Even if someone (or a team) could somehow be paid for this work, by the time the results are usable, the hardware will be more or less functionally obsolete. And that is on top of the fact that ARM64 on MacOS will always be a small slice of the gaming pie, and ARM64 on Linux games and GPU applications virtually nonexistent.

The answer could be: because they like it.

People do great stuff with computers and programming and I think this is a good example. Passion is what it's all about.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#186
post #153
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because weechat uses <18 megs?

Does weechat support rich embedded media like images and videos, can you live stream games to your friends on it, talk with people, have profile avatars, use emotes, build bots that stream music to you? Even something completely simple such as snip a portion of your screen and paste it in the chatbox so others can see it immediately, without having to mess around with dodgy image upload sites. This is basic functiona…

How much of that needs to relate to the memory usage though? Embedded media doesn't need to be loaded besides what's visible in the current channel and perhaps a bit of scrollback, perhaps some text and scrollback for other frequently viewed channels. Livestreams also shouldn't be taking memory unless you're watching, same with voice. Avatars and emotes would certainly take memory, but certainly not hundreds of megabytes of it.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#187
post #149
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you all using some rare electron apps that are unknown to me because I keep hearing this meme repeated but when I look at my RAM usage[0], it never corroborates this. I just don't see how 220MB for Discord is unreasonable in any way, when Firefox with 8 tabs takes 1.2GB. Telegram written in Qt meanwhile takes 200MB, literally no difference to Discord, an electron app. [0] https://i.imgur.com/cfCRWDS.jpg

Because weechat uses <18 megs?

Kopete, less than 100MB under KDE3 in ~2007. Video calls, emojis, inline LaTeX, Youtube videos...

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#188
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don’t understand things like that avatar. maybe i’m too old. [ unpopular opinion incoming!! ] yes, you are special and unique, sure. we all are. you like anime, and stuff from Japan, awesome. lots of people do. why is one third to one quarter of the video real estate consumed by the avatar? why is the voice so high pitched and hard to understand? i mean, fine. i am not about to tell someone how to present themselve…

> why is one third to one quarter of the video real estate consumed by the avatar? From what I've seen, it's not unusual for streamers which do not use an avatar to consume a fraction of the video real estate with a camera showing their face; the avatar merely replaces that.

yeah, I know, but the ratio of avatar to screen share area is abnormally large in this case. at least to me.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it has nothing whatsoever to do with it being a web-based app. It pretty clearly has to be the result of caching lots of album art and/or metadata and/or audio data, which is just as likely to happen on a native app.

Web technologies in and of themselves aren't bad, but their usage is strongly correlated with cost-saving measures and the questionable technical decisions that result since choosing a web app itself is often a cost-saving measure. VS Code is an example of things gone right, where Microsoft has clearly hired an AAA-class team and funded them well. Within the same company, Teams is an example of the exact opposite and…

> their usage is strongly correlated with cost-saving measures and the questionable technical decisions that result since choosing a web app itself is often a cost-saving measure

Correlation is not causation

We can debate the specific design choices that Spotify or any other company has made, but my original point was to push back against the tired trope that using web technologies for an app automatically means runaway resource consumption and (apparently) the downfall of civilization

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#190
post #153
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because weechat uses <18 megs?

Does weechat support rich embedded media like images and videos, can you live stream games to your friends on it, talk with people, have profile avatars, use emotes, build bots that stream music to you? Even something completely simple such as snip a portion of your screen and paste it in the chatbox so others can see it immediately, without having to mess around with dodgy image upload sites. This is basic functiona…

I could do that in 2007 with 256 MB of RAM.
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