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Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

asahilinux.org

161–170 of 243 posts

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#161
post #21

I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to…

Yeah, I'm optimistic we're getting really close to "forever laptops" once competing hardware catches up on efficiency. What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?

As someone who does a lot of work with local LLM's, today's systems feel woefully under-powered. I'm looking forward to a future where my laptop has 10x the memory, 100x the memory bandwidth, and optimized cores to make inference workflows that currently take minutes or hours go down to seconds or milliseconds.

While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#162
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAWK, M6 CPU is a die shrink of M5, so unless something M7 present that will significantly improve CPU performance. The ARM C1 CPU core that is available to everyone has pretty much matched up to Apple. And that is all things included from performance, power, die size etc.

Can you just use normal acronyms instead of something like AFAWK? Why not AFAIK? Do I need to know every acronym there is on the internet?

Or just not use acronyms for standard sentence structure and non-specialised terms?

For example: "AFAIK the TLA is NFG for well written prose FWIW, NGL."

It is awkward to parse them and is infuriating when the author can clearly write well otherwise, because they don't use three- or four-letter-acronyms to replace standard sentence structures for the rest of their prose.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not new Anthropic/OpenAI/whatever trained on copyrighted code and leaks (anna's archive). Companies just don't give a shit because you can't prove it. In Asahi Linux specifically, there was not long ago a PR for M3 or similar for removing a big roadblock that existed (and I think still exists). Turns out this whole PR was implemented by an LLM (using copyrighted materials, probably most of it is Apple's) and it…

If you can't prove it, you can't prove it both ways. Either everybody gets to use it or nobody does. Especially that the code getting trained on is for the vast majority copyrighted open source software so if anybody has something to say, it's the opensource community rather than Apple

It sounds like Asahi are holding themselves to a higher standard;hey won't violate copyright even if no one can prove it.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. When you make a big chunk of your revenue selling Enterprise Servers, you can no longer rely on drivers written by volunteer labor, as they did in the past.

You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company.

> You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company.

You can't think of an Enterprise use case for GPUs that has become popular of late?

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#165
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I’ve been a big Lenovo fan, settled on the X1 carbon. I’ve had three of them, G5, G6 and G9. The USB-C port broke on both G6 and G9 models. Apparently it’s a common problem. Unfortunately the ports are soldered directly on the motherboard making it difficult to fix(should be a small separate board for easy replacement). I was going to desolder and replace the ports, but haven’t gotten around to it. I’m now u…

Ummm if repairability is a concern, I’ve got some news to share about your new Macbook.

I replaced some parts on my M1 MacBook Air.

For 90% of the parts it’s honestly pretty easy to work with. You just need a few screwdrivers. And I sourced all my parts from eBay.

The documentation is excellent:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/100586

The only thing that’s egregious is the batteries. They tape the batteries to the case, and to remove them you have to do this complex twirling motion with tweezers to pull the tape out from under the battery. If the tape snaps during this then the documentation basically says get a new case.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not new Anthropic/OpenAI/whatever trained on copyrighted code and leaks (anna's archive). Companies just don't give a shit because you can't prove it. In Asahi Linux specifically, there was not long ago a PR for M3 or similar for removing a big roadblock that existed (and I think still exists). Turns out this whole PR was implemented by an LLM (using copyrighted materials, probably most of it is Apple's) and it…

If you can't prove it, you can't prove it both ways. Either everybody gets to use it or nobody does. Especially that the code getting trained on is for the vast majority copyrighted open source software so if anybody has something to say, it's the opensource community rather than Apple

It makes sense, though they don't seem to take any chances. If Apple ever files a lawsuit, Asahi Linux is done.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company.

> You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company. You can't think of an Enterprise use case for GPUs that has become popular of late?

If you're hinting to neural networks, it's not about providing drivers for 3D graphics. For Nvidia that's CUDA and it's basically different set of libraries. Also Intel is not in this business anyway.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life. Then why bother installing a different OS?

Or why bother buying an expensive machine in the first place...

I actually didn’t buy it! It was a gift from a friend who really likes splurging at Micro Center. If it were my money, I probably would’ve gotten an Air.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#169
post #141

We seriously need an open hardware law or something. Like it doesn't have to be regulation necessarily (as by law) but we really need to start very strongly pressuring/forcing companies to open up their hardware and provide all documentation to get any operating system to run on it, and to hell with what the manufacturer wants (to prevent things like attestation requirements). This entire "just let random volunteers…

I think you’ll also find that the best way to strongly pressure companies to do something is by law. The work that Right to Repair advocates have been doing across the industry is fantastic.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#170
post #5

> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices. When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installi…

> other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life. Then why bother installing a different OS?

Preference?

You can dual boot Asahi when the time comes.

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