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Asahi Linux on M3

asahilinux.org

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Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#181

Post by dwaite »

bel8 wrote: post #66
biorach wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here. The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful

Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable. They just don't care.

Apple until a few years ago had killed off all first party monitors because they thought that business line was a distraction.

The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#182

Post by ravenstine »

amelius wrote: post #171

My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?

Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#183

Post by WhyNotHugo »

amelius wrote: post #174
hurricanepootis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asahi linux has been going on for a few years now

I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.

https://hister.org/ sounds like something you'd appreciate.

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#184

Post by dwaite »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #51
meerita wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.

The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs > https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...

Hmm, odd listing. Looks like an embedded linux job working on a BSP, but they don't have any hardware I know of which ships with Linux. Even their constrained environments use things like their own L4 variant or RTKit.

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#185

Post by apatheticonion »

whatever1 wrote: post #5

Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.

I'd imagine it's for IP protection.

There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.

If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.

Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.

I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#186

Post by apatheticonion »

Aurornis wrote: post #52
whatever1 wrote: post #5

Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.

> when they can just share a pdf. I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You hav…

> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.

I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).

> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.

Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).

> They chose to leave it open.

I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#187

Post by laidoffamazon »

brycewray wrote: post #92
sansah wrote: post #7

Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.

It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.

Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#188

Post by megous »

Aurornis wrote: post #52
whatever1 wrote: post #5

Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.

> when they can just share a pdf. I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You hav…

This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.

No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#189

Post by contingencies »

fwn wrote: post #112
xrd wrote: post #97

I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi. Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet. Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?

I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station. It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple…

Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!

Re: Asahi Linux on M3

#190

Post by Gigachad »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #187
brycewray wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.

Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!

It's hard to debug sleep in a VM or some self contained system. You need to physically interact with the laptop, reboot it after it gets stuck, etc.
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