ARM64 Linux Workstation • Hacker News Board

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#491

Post by sixothree » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

sliken wrote: post #98

sixothree wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet open source community embraces the hardware with fervor.

It's an appealing platform. Entry level is $600, nice memory systems (66GB/sec to 800GB/sec), and nice iGPU. The laptops have nice keyboards, nice trackpads, nice screens, and great battery life. The desktops are built in a solid aluminum chassis and have a single fan (instead of the normal 4-8) and are small and quiet. I do wish apple did a native apple port, but the community is making good progress on that front.

> but the community is making good progress on that front

You mean in reverse engineering hardware?

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#492

Post by sliken » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #491

sliken wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an appealing platform. Entry level is $600, nice memory systems (66GB/sec to 800GB/sec), and nice iGPU. The laptops have nice keyboards, nice trackpads, nice screens, and great battery life. The desktops are built in a solid aluminum chassis and have a single fan (instead of the normal 4-8) and are small and quiet. I do wish apple did a native apple port, but the community is making good progress on that front.

> but the community is making good progress on that front You mean in reverse engineering hardware?

Yes.

Marcan, Asahi Lina, and related folks have been working on improving 3d accelerations. It's good enough for desktop use and some gaming so far, games like tuxracer, video playback, minecraft, etc. First the driver was in user space in python, then in the kernel with rust, and recent improvements have increased parallelism (from Lina) and removing Mailboxes (from Marcan).

OpenGL and Vulkan compliance has been increasing. Last I heard OpenGL was at 99-100% (almost all tests passing) and Vulkan wasn't as good, but improving. I believe Alyssa Rosen is doing much of that work.

Last published update I've seen is: https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...

There are some posts on Twitter and/or Mastodon, and regular updates on YouTube from "Asahi Lina" and Marcan, often by Live stream and Patreon.

Oh, and Neal Gompa is working on getting the GPU working with Fedora. One problem is most ARM linux distros default to 4k pages. But the GPU (which shares memory with the CPU) requires 16k pages. Seems like a performance win (less TLB thrashing), with a marginal increase in memory use.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#493

Post by june_soon » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 12:28 AM UTC

shaunsingh0207 wrote: post #332

kalleboo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link, what's missing for the OP is: Thunderbolt, DP Alt Mode, Video Decoder/Encoder, SEP, Neural Engine, internal Speaker Thunderbolt seems like the main missing feature. It's easy to see how someone could live a fulfilling life without running into the lack of any of those features. E.g. is there even anything on the Linux desktop that could take advantage of the Neural Engine or Secure Enclave?

I'm dearly missing support for the fingerprint reader on asahi, thuogh its likely never going to be supported.

They say they are aiming to support it at some point in the far future (they still have to implement support for the SEP firmware in order for this to be possible, as far as I know).

Granted, that might as well be never.