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ARM64 Linux Workstation

jasoneckert.github.io

321–330 of 493 posts

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#321
Just so that I understand this correctly: he bought a $6000+ Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM. But all these cores, ram, bandwidth, storage are not important, but rather the fact it is an "ARM64" workstation is what was the game changer.

Seriously? Would a $6000+ x64 workstation be noticeably slower?

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#322
post #307
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ferrari with square wheels, that is a good one. A UNIX descendent of NextSTEP tooling, versus the distribution of the month in GNU/Linux world, preaching they will get the desktop this year, for 20 plus years, and the road for gaming relies on pretending to be Windows. Treat macOS as Mac OS, not as a Linux distribution. A proper set of UI frameworks, not stuck in pre-history C and C++ workloads or even worse Electr…

I’m paid to develop apps which deploy on Linux containers. macOS is uniquely incapable of providing a good development experience for that use case. Even Windows with WSL2 is leaps and bounds ahead.

That depends a lot on what you do. People writing servers on the JVM can do all their development locally and have be tested on Linux via ci. The idea that all developers spend their days running software inside Linux VMs isn't right. Many of us don't need to do that at all.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#323
post #56
post #49

Forgive a bit of ignorance on my end; does Asahi have x86_64 emulation? It would be cool to play Linux Steam games on Arm.

Performance will be terrible as you virtualise instructions. You can try it with QEMU for example.

Performance with Rosetta on macos is good enough for most games that shipped for x86 macos. With a decent enough graphics driver implementation it should be feasible to grab the Linux version of Rosetta and use that to play games. A lot of the emulation on Rosetta is straight instruction conversion; the hardware acts like an x86 cpu in most other ways apart from the isa. It’s not that bad as far as performance goes.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#324

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…

> Want to use FUSE? Not on your work computer locked to high-sec mode as you cannot install kernel extensions (where is our user space FS Apple?). It exists already - https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-f... - it is just that Apple hasn’t made the API public, and (AFAIK) won’t give you the entitlements necessary to use it. But, both are issues Apple could fix relatively easily - if they wanted…

I think they're uninterested because they have a documented and supported userspace VFS API. The problem is, it's really designed for cloud drives and so deeply assumes a sync model. Works great for the intended use case, much better than Fuse but if you want to do something unusual, not so hot.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#325

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…

> Want to use FUSE? Fuse is infuriating on MacOS - why is it not included by default??

They have their own APIs for it but seem to have assessed that the only mainstream use case is cloud sync, which they always provide a better API for.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#326

Just so that I understand this correctly: he bought a $6000+ Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM. But all these cores, ram, bandwidth, storage are not important, but rather the fact it is an "ARM64" workstation is what was the game changer. Seriously? Would a $6000+ x64 workstation be noticeably slower?

Not sure, but anecdotally I have a machine running linux that was $6,000 and definitely feels slower than my M2 macbook air.

Mostly its a question of latency I would imagine.

My machine:

Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel).

Threadripper 3970x

256G DDR4 2666MHz

3x4TiB NVMe (PCIe Gen3) in RAID0

Radeon VII GFX card (more than enough for 2D render of terminals).

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to use FUSE? Not on your work computer locked to high-sec mode as you cannot install kernel extensions (where is our user space FS Apple?). It exists already - https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-f... - it is just that Apple hasn’t made the API public, and (AFAIK) won’t give you the entitlements necessary to use it. But, both are issues Apple could fix relatively easily - if they wanted…

Last I heard there are no plans to do this.

If true that's a pity.

20 years ago, Apple cared about macOS as a Unix, they were interested in putting in features that developers and sysadmins wanted, like this.

Sadly, today's Apple has a rather different attitude towards that sort of thing

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reviews on youtube that showed the macbook air/pro M1 playing video (streaming?) for that long. Actually, it kept going for 20h. https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645

Benchmarketing. It has hardware support for video codecs so it can play video efficiently in particular even though people traditionally think of that as something processor intensive. The question is, what's the battery life when you're doing kernel compiles or GPGPU.

According to "Garry explains" on YouTube, the M1 MBP gets 3 hours of battery life looping kernel (I think) compilations until the laptop dies.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#329
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery life is significantly worse on my m1 pro macbook pro under asahi. I'd estimate about half of MacOS.

Is it worse across the board? Is idle power consumption higher, or is it mostly when under load that it gets worse?

I find under load its the same, idle power consumption is higher. It seems linux doesn't have the same level of delegation on powerformance/effeciency cores that apple manages with macOS

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#330
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing about battery life being just as almost just as good or better on linux (and on Windows too, though that's a more realistic claim). Yet even the latest gens thinkpads are pretty awful w.r.t battery. My friend bought an i5 12xxx Thinkpad X1 and can barely do 5 or 6 hours of screen on time, when the stated capacity is 16h. Lenovo denied a refund, because it's working as intended according to them (and my…

Lenovo’s battery life numbers are consistent generation to generation, but wildly unrealistic. My 2015 thinkpad (since replaced by m1 air) was rated as 12 hours but could do at most half in practice doing very light tasks and typically ran about 4 hours. So when you buy a thinkpad you should assume actual battery life is a third to half of the rated life. Apple’s numbers are equally unrealistic. They rate my m1 air f…

My macbook pro was rated for 18 hours and I find it very easily meets or exceeds that number if I'm working on general tasks.

Of course if its a day where I'm compiling often and have several tasks running its going to be lower, but thats not the usecase they advertise

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