Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 161 posts

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#41

Post by bigyabai »

dhosek wrote: post #36
officeplant wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of us would prefer MS/Apple to never be within touching range of our hardware.

On the other hand, your “us” is not very big compared to your “not us.” I like Linux as a server OS (and would pick it over Windows or MacOS for that any day of the week that ends in y), but as a desktop OS it’s just more work than I care to exert (in fact, Windows also exceeds my tolerance for fiddliness in a desktop OS). My general preference is for “you don’t have to” over “you can” as much as possible which is th…

macOS and Windows are both such a chore for development, though. WSL was the closest I got to an "it just works" dev environment, but it exposes just how bad native toolchains like Cygwin and git bash are. macOS is hardly any better, and once you manage to install all of the GNU utilities it just feels like a poorly-supported Linux distro. It's a bunch of wasted effort to imitate a fraction of Linux's power.

So what are we supposed to use? ReactOS? SerenityOS? The entire mainstream is a "you have to..." OS, I fear the day when I have to abandon GNOME for a desktop that treats developers like chopped liver. Your general preference is fine, but I'm surprised that it aligns with the OEMs that want to put advertisements all over your desktop.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#42

Post by benoau »

hollow-moe wrote: post #35
GeekyBear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple designed a bootloader for Apple Silicon Macs that allows you to run an unsigned OS without degrading security when you boot into MacOS. This wasn't an accident. Macs have always allowed you to run another OS. iDevices have always had a locked bootloader. People shouldn't confuse the two.

M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply sa…

I think they are wary about macOS becoming a designated DMA gatekeeper, it would certainly be very close to the user and income thresholds.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#43

Post by GeekyBear »

hollow-moe wrote: post #35
GeekyBear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple designed a bootloader for Apple Silicon Macs that allows you to run an unsigned OS without degrading security when you boot into MacOS. This wasn't an accident. Macs have always allowed you to run another OS. iDevices have always had a locked bootloader. People shouldn't confuse the two.

M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply sa…

> M series macs are weird

More weird than the opaque Management Engines on Intel or AMD chips that can take full control of your system at any time that you have no control over?

> Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes

Apple has explicitly stated that allowing third party OSes is exactly the purpose of the new bootloader.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#44

Post by zitterbewegung »

I’m sorry but some of the comments are out of touch. Apple devices do not have any intent of supporting separate OSes . Asahi supports M1 to M2. I can see this as a PSA to not install a beta but I am confused who would install both Akashi and macOS 27 beta at the same time when you could run the beta in a VM for development ? Others have said that this has been a fix that will happen soon.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#45

Post by phire »

hollow-moe wrote: post #35
GeekyBear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple designed a bootloader for Apple Silicon Macs that allows you to run an unsigned OS without degrading security when you boot into MacOS. This wasn't an accident. Macs have always allowed you to run another OS. iDevices have always had a locked bootloader. People shouldn't confuse the two.

M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply sa…

The design of the exposed mechanism is explicitly about booting unsigned versions of MacOS. There is zero support for booting anything else, but no enforcement that it must be MacOS.

However, apple's justification for exposing this mechanism to users appears to explicitly include "booting linux" even if the mechanism has zero explicit support for booting linux.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#46

Post by happyopossum »

officeplant wrote: post #32
jjtheblunt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i run linux on both in arch and fedora versions with zero problems, by using the hypervisor framework of macos and wsl2 (wrapper for hyperv). do you need a more direct than hypervisor access to some hardware?

A lot of us would prefer MS/Apple to never be within touching range of our hardware.

Then maybe a "lot of" you should not be buying Apple hardware?

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#47

Post by happyopossum »

Teever wrote: post #6

I wish the EU would regulate this kind of stuff. A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server. A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices. The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkab…

>I wish the EU would regulate this kind of stuff.

Regulate what exactly? Bugs? That's what this was...

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#48

Post by duped »

ux266478 wrote: post #34
duped wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's unreasonable for a device manufacturer to tightly couple it to the software they design to run on it.

That might be reasonable for a general purpose computer if we were talking about something like a Parallel Inference Machine running KL1 software on a KL0 kernel. But I think conflating Apple's products with that level of foundational engineering is highly disingenuous. They're not exactly trundling into the dark woods of exotic hardware and reinventing the bridge between human and computer. It's an ARM computer runn…

Hardware and software have to interface at some point. When the people designing the hardware work at the company designing the software it's not unreasonable for them to come to some shared understanding of that interface which may not be standard, portable, or even publicly documented, and certainly not one that is stable.

This isn't incompatible with allowing users to install their own software. There just isn't an obligation on the original designers to make sure that software works. That onus is on the designers of that software.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#49

Post by amiga386 »

GeekyBear wrote: post #43
hollow-moe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply sa…

> M series macs are weird More weird than the opaque Management Engines on Intel or AMD chips that can take full control of your system at any time that you have no control over? > Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes Apple has explicitly stated that allowing third party OSes is exactly the purpose of the new bootloader.

Yes, more weird than that. x86 PCs have fairly standardised boot and autoconfiguration (UEFI and ACPI). ARM based systems, including the Apple M series, don't. You just have to know what's there (device trees), and Apple isn't going to tell you. Hence why it's difficult to make another OS run on it, because you first need to find out what hardware's even there, and how to talk to it. It's initialised by Apple before iBoot runs, sure, but you don't even know what it is, so good luck writing a driver for it.

The Intel ME / AMD PSP are creepy, and probably a security risk to the device owner, but they're not weird, you can run an OS without even knowing they're there, and they like it that way.

Re: macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

#50

Post by Rohansi »

GeekyBear wrote: post #43
hollow-moe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply sa…

> M series macs are weird More weird than the opaque Management Engines on Intel or AMD chips that can take full control of your system at any time that you have no control over? > Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes Apple has explicitly stated that allowing third party OSes is exactly the purpose of the new bootloader.

I don't know about Intel ME but AMD PSP is basically the equivalent of Apple's Secure Enclave, so there's that.
Post reply on HN