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Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

asahilinux.org

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Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#131

Post by drbawb »

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?

The Apple Platform Security[1] white paper describes the secure boot process for Apple silicon. The Mac boot process is significantly more configurable than the iOS boot process, and it allows operating in reduced security modes. (Including running locally signed operating systems.)

Apple knows how to build an iPhone: if they wanted to lock down a Mac they would have simply done that. There's something like nine pages detailing the differences. What word describes that other than "intentional" design? The fact that you can sign and boot a third party OS isn't an "accident" if it's documented, and there's no "exploit" because this is functionality the platform supports; anyone can do it with tools already present on the (Apple-signed) recovery OS.

They certainly don't provide great support for people wanting to develop [drivers for] these operating systems, but the platform was very clearly engineered to support booting them.

[1]: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#132

Post by simonh »

throw0101d wrote: post #121
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…

> 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.…

I suppose it's possible, after all if the thing can phone home and update itself, that could be spoofed so it updates itself with your code.

However if that phone home feature is read only, it could always just re-root itself.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#133

Post by boarush »

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?

marcan mentioned in a few of his livestreams that the design seems very much intentional, plus a few of the tweets by Xeno Kovah who worked on the bootloader: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914716454526979.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#135

Post by tuna74 »

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.

You will probably always need a "fork" because Asahi needs a custom installer and bootloader. It is also probably a good idea to recompile everything for the Apple ARM architecture.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#136

Post by tuna74 »

speed_spread wrote: post #57
jeroenhd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store. They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the br…

If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.

flathub.org ?

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#137

Post by thewebguyd »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #32
rvz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. Why should they when they have macOS already? > Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate. How many…

No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux. But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.

I don't think they would. What market would that exactly be targeting? Devs, who are overwhelmingly just provided macbooks via their employer? They'll still run macOS because IT requires them to.

Linux Gamers? The arm story for proton still needs work (hopefully the steam frame will help). Nvidia+Microsoft are working on it with that new surface ultra, but verdicts out on whether that will boot Linux or not as its specifically a Microsoft partnership.

General non-dev, non-gaming, non-creative users? I don't think they'd buy a mac specifically for Linux either. That market is much better served by Framework, System76, Tuxedo, Lenovo (thinkpads), etc.

And Apple certainly isn't going to win over any FOSS purists either.

I think the intersection of "I want macbook pro hardware" and "I must run Linux natively on it for my workflow" is a lot smaller than you think.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#138

Post by bigyabai »

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…

> How could they do that?

iBoot? Asahi needs iBoot to boot third-party volumes for Linux to run properly. Apple controls iBoot; if they burn an eFuse and disable third-party volumes in a "Security" update, Asahi cannot fight back.

You cannot boot macOS with an unsigned iBoot firmware, so writing your own bootloader isn't an option. If a fuse is burned, you also cannot downgrade to older firmwares. The entire system is designed to give Apple the ability to disable other OSes in a macOS update if they ever decided to.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#139

Post by troyvit »

macintux wrote: post #118
markus_zhang wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda think Asahi is not going to fair too much better in this fight. It’s an interesting exercise but most people won’t buy a Mac to use Linux. The only reason I’d buy an overpriced piece of hardware is because it can run Linux very well. But apparently people like me is negligible.

I think it'll have more of an impact with used hardware buyers. I wouldn't buy an M5 for Linux, but repurposing a cheap M1 in a few years? Absolutely.

Yeah I think I agree.

The big difference I see is in the chip. The PowerPC arguably had its benefits (vectorization) which made it super attractive for bioinformatics, etc., and a lot of that software was Linux-based. People could either buy a super-computer or a G4 (or a cluster of G4s) and get the work they needed done for a fraction of the cost. MacOS (and OSX) were behind on a lot of this stuff compared to Linux then.

Today from what I see the M3-M5 chips are a big leap forward compared to their competitors, and it just happened to hit at the same time LLMs became popular. I imagine there are some similar, specialized needs with the M[1-5] chips that might benefit from Linux but with OSX's stronger BSD underpinnings it's a different world.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#140

Post by cromka »

jeroenhd wrote: post #17
sneak wrote: post #8

It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10…

Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store. They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the br…

> Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware.

That's just your made up opinion, completely not supported by their financials.

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