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ARM64 Linux Workstation

jasoneckert.github.io

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Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#191

Post by LoganDark »

loeg wrote: post #150
TacticalCoder wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had multiple of these and some of them have tons of EM noise, which is very obnoxious. Ah darn yup! If there's one thing I'd expect from these is to not be noisy! FWIW I'm using a CambridgeAudio DAC and, well, CambridgeAudio is supposed to be a good brand when it comes to audio stuff (amp is CambridgeAudio too).

> CambridgeAudio DAC It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well. I'm more wary of this pricepoint: > Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC I've gotten a lot less EM noise with builtin soundcards than cheap USB DACs, but YMMV.

EM noise is something that someone would notice, so I'm sure Apple would have nuked it from orbit until it's completely imperceptible.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#192

Post by rektide »

mardifoufs wrote: post #173
apatheticonion wrote: post #152

I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP. That is going to be such a killer environment to develop on. Crazy fast hardware, great high refresh screen, insane battery life, fantastic touchpad, gestures and keyboard. There is the potential that Windows games could run on it with some combination of x86 translation and Proton. Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Wa…

I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS's power management probably has a big influence too. In the same way that Linux laptops usually have a bad battery life compared to the same hardware on Windows. How good is Asahi when running similar workloads? And is it possible that it could reach parity w…

Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit.

I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable.

It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux.

Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#193

Post by richrichardsson »

pram wrote: post #185
derefr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no builtin speakers in the author's mac studio though, so I'll give them a pass for this one. Don't all Macs come with a built-in speaker? I.e. the one that plays the start-up chime, and plays "system sounds" like emptying the trash. On Mac notebooks and AIOs, this is one-and-the-same as the obvious external speaker array used as the default output device; but on desktop Macs (like the Mac Mini — don't know…

Yes the Mini and Studio have the exact same mono speaker.

Wow, i would have thought given the Studio price you'd be getting the same speaker as in the current MacPro, which is pretty decent compared to the tinny PoS in the M1 Mini (og version is my experience)

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#194

Post by TacticalCoder »

loeg wrote: post #150
TacticalCoder wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had multiple of these and some of them have tons of EM noise, which is very obnoxious. Ah darn yup! If there's one thing I'd expect from these is to not be noisy! FWIW I'm using a CambridgeAudio DAC and, well, CambridgeAudio is supposed to be a good brand when it comes to audio stuff (amp is CambridgeAudio too).

> CambridgeAudio DAC It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well. I'm more wary of this pricepoint: > Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC I've gotten a lot less EM noise with builtin soundcards than cheap USB DACs, but YMMV.

> It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well.

Price inflated, like the price of nearly everything. I paid mine 150 EUR back in the days (still not cheap but not either the 4 digits high-end audiophile stuff).

The thing is: you want thing to work fine from Linux's side and in my experience USB Audio on Linux just works.

I'm sure there are other brands/models at reasonable price points.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#195

Post by moondev »

rkunde wrote: post #142

> In some cases, it is too fast. When I installed K3s, all of the containers in the kube-system namespace kept entering the dreaded CrashLoopBackOff state [..] After some investigation, I found out that the Mac Studio was just too fast for the Kubernetes resource timing I’d like to understand what the issue here is. Sounds counterintuitive to me.

Same here, OP can you share the limits you added? Or is it on namespace level

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#196

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

pxc wrote: post #102
nicce wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran all my stuff inside non-root non-volume container so prebuilt binary it is not really a problem. I used QEMU through Podman machine in the end, but the performance is terrible. Even on MacOS side QEMU does not support Rosetta 2. Docker for Desktop supports and gives significant boost, but I don’t want to use it.

> Even on MacOS side QEMU does not support Rosetta 2. Is Rosetta 2 that much faster than QEMU's own translation? Why?

>Is Rosetta 2 that much faster than QEMU's own translation

Oh yes. Based on the benchmarks I've seen it's a good 30-40% faster on compute workloads. I assume that the pre-transpilation of the binaries is advantageous relative to having to virtualize the CPU.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#197

Post by rektide »

sliken wrote: post #50
bogwog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame Apple is Apple and you can't pay a reasonable price for RAM, otherwise these would make awesome servers.

That's the cost for 10x the memory bandwidth of the Ryzen 7950x.

Once again reminding folk to still be angry at AMD for giving up on HDET. Sucks so bad that one has to go server to get >128bit ram. So sad, such a bad limitation.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#198

Post by jlokier »

apatheticonion wrote: post #152

I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP. That is going to be such a killer environment to develop on. Crazy fast hardware, great high refresh screen, insane battery life, fantastic touchpad, gestures and keyboard. There is the potential that Windows games could run on it with some combination of x86 translation and Proton. Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Wa…

On my x86 MBP, I run GNU/Linux in VMWare Fusion, full screen. That gives me a combination of both worlds, which I can easily switch between with 4-finger swipe.

I did battery life tests running the same Linux distro natively vs in a VM on MacOS. What I found surprised me: battery life was better with the VM than native, so I stayed with the VM.

When a VM is used, driver issues are effectively absent as Apple drivers handle most devices. (USB devices can be passed through to the VM.) The touch pads are properly calibrated and gestures work. Things like external displays just work. GPU access is not the same as from native Linux but the basic OpenGL support in VMWare Fusion was good enough for what I wanted to do. (That's not true any more though.)

Historically I've been more of a Linux user (and developer) on other laptops but it became interesting to get to know the MacOS world as well while still using Linux for dev work.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#199

Post by loeg »

LoganDark wrote: post #191
loeg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CambridgeAudio DAC It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well. I'm more wary of this pricepoint: > Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC I've gotten a lot less EM noise with builtin soundcards than cheap USB DACs, but YMMV.

EM noise is something that someone would notice, so I'm sure Apple would have nuked it from orbit until it's completely imperceptible.

Yeah, to be clear I expect the Apple ones do fine. The ones I had issue with were not Apple.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#200

Post by sliken »

rektide wrote: post #197
sliken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the cost for 10x the memory bandwidth of the Ryzen 7950x.

Once again reminding folk to still be angry at AMD for giving up on HDET. Sucks so bad that one has to go server to get >128bit ram. So sad, such a bad limitation.

Heh, well, seems silly to have a 2 channel standard, 4 channel standard, and TWO 8 channel standards. The volumes don't justify it, and it's just a big waste of money. It contributes to expensive motherboards among other things.

Seems like Intel and AMD are heading towards an 8 channel standard and the cheaper chips will enable only 4 of those channels.

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