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Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

asahilinux.org

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Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#121

Post by throw0101d »

simonh wrote: post #88
amelius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585 For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's no…

> For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.

The Oxide Computer folks wrote their own AMD boot loader and have an entire chain of trust and apparently (?) basically got rid of the supervisor code (Ring -2 and -3). They also have custom motherboards with third-party BMCs.

Could something similar be done on Intel?

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#122

Post by thewebguyd »

simonh wrote: post #107
amelius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.

>What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical. >Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you d…

> Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door

And, at least in the case of their private cloud compute, they encourage third party audit of their claims and even provide a virtual research environment running an instance of their PCC on your mac.

The UK explicitly requesting a backdoor to iCloud's advanced data protection forcing Apple to pull the service instead also tells me their claims are legit.

It's certainly possible a backdoor exists in hardware instead, or elsewhere in the stack but given Apple's surprising relative openness for how they implement their privacy products & the research papers they put out I'm inclined to believe them for now. (I say relative because its not open source, which is the only way to be 100% certain, but their research papers are surprisingly in depth).

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#123

Post by Grombobulous »

spockz wrote: post #117
Grombobulous wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think the 13 Pro is the one that’s truly competitive, the 16” is a very different story and not something I recommend specifically. Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity. SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work. Wh…

I’m mainly looking at the 16” mbp because of the beautiful screen and the refined hardware. For the work I use the laptop on my lap for (or in the evening at the kitchen table) to compare products, research holidays etc, I notice that 13” is too small to comfortably hold two browsers next to each other plus room for notes. Then sometimes when I’m on the go I like to play a game or two, but nothing seriously requiring…

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Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#124

Post by shvarr »

torben-friis wrote: post #99
shvarr wrote: post #96

Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow. There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is…

If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative. M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.

M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch.

Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#125

Post by jagged-chisel »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #108
amelius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.

What good would it do Apple to shut down the project? There’s no IP misuse and the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. The built in lag time of the current situation ensures that macOS will never have its position as the dominant OS for Mac hardware challenged. Further, doing this would stoke the flames of the already red-hot internet Apple haters and unnecessarily b…

> … the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs.

What? Where do you get that?

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#126

Post by thewebguyd »

jasoneckert wrote: post #83
simonmales wrote: post #10

Will this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro? I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.

This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances. As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle diff…

And at least Fedora is rock solid these days, which is more than I can say about Ubuntu. Its really a great distro.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#128

Post by wpm »

amelius wrote: post #98
simonh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585 For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's no…

What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.

Why would Apple do that?

If they did, I still have macOS, an OS I can easily disable all runtime protections and security on, rig up into a kernel debugger, arbitrarily dump memory of other processes and so on. If Apple takes away our ability to easily boot alternative kernels, the tools are readily available to find...alternative ways around iBoot security, which is not ideal for Apple since iOS iBoot is mostly the same as it is on macOS.

I find it hard to believe that Apple would purposefully shoot themselves in their own feet, unless you also believe that they would lock down the Mac as much as an iPad, ever.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#129

Post by fl0id »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #125
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good would it do Apple to shut down the project? There’s no IP misuse and the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. The built in lag time of the current situation ensures that macOS will never have its position as the dominant OS for Mac hardware challenged. Further, doing this would stoke the flames of the already red-hot internet Apple haters and unnecessarily b…

> … the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. What? Where do you get that?

Because it explicitly has tooling for custom boot objects etc, and stated by asahi developers, maybe also apple people they know.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#130

Post by cromka »

shvarr wrote: post #124
torben-friis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative. M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.

M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch. Hopefully, they will manage to get it done so…

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