Linux on the M1, with GPU Acceleration • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux on the M1, with GPU Acceleration

#11

Post by philwelch » Mon, Nov 08, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

ehutch79 wrote: post #10

philwelch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it just isn't for you. The full line is: "Those chips are really impressive. However, MacBooks ship with macOS, an operating system several of us consider much less impressive." That perfectly explains my personal feelings about the issue, which is why I was curious enough to click on this in the first place. If you don't feel the same way, that's a perfectly normal difference of opinion. I do feel this way and…

Yes, that is the whole line. But like i said, it changes what the article is about for that to be in the thesis of the article. It takes it from a exploration to a recommendation. Considering the other threads going around in other posts today, it's clear that a lot of people on here consider desktop linux to be superior and more user friendly that macOS. There's a lot of people who seem to think this kind of thing i…

Nobody is trying to tell you that you have to run an ARM fork of Arch Linux on an M1 MacBook. You're taking this weirdly personally.

How would you feel if people made disparaging comments about your hobbies being the sort of thing that "normal people" aren't "willing to do with their time"?

Re: Linux on the M1, with GPU Acceleration

#12

Post by FeepingCreature » Tue, Nov 09, 2021, 8:41 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #11

ehutch79 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is the whole line. But like i said, it changes what the article is about for that to be in the thesis of the article. It takes it from a exploration to a recommendation. Considering the other threads going around in other posts today, it's clear that a lot of people on here consider desktop linux to be superior and more user friendly that macOS. There's a lot of people who seem to think this kind of thing i…

Nobody is trying to tell you that you have to run an ARM fork of Arch Linux on an M1 MacBook. You're taking this weirdly personally. How would you feel if people made disparaging comments about your hobbies being the sort of thing that "normal people" aren't "willing to do with their time"?

> How would you feel if people made disparaging comments about your hobbies being the sort of thing that "normal people" aren't "willing to do with their time"?

I mean, also, that seems to apply to almost every hobby, depending on how restrictively you define normal.

Re: Linux on the M1, with GPU Acceleration

#13

Post by webmobdev » Tue, Nov 09, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

The headline is a bit misleading - it gives the impression that it is talking about running Linux on bare machine, rather than virtualised on macOS using QEMU / UTM. The GPU acceleration mentioned is also quite limited. UTM themselves point out that - "UTM does not currently support GPU emulation/virtualization and therefore lacks support for 3D acceleration (e.g. OpenGL and DirectX). You may be able to run older games with software rendering options, but nothing with hardware acceleration." (1)

It sucks that even running Linux virtualised on macOS doesn't give it full access to the hardware on an M1. Even a paid app like Parallel's Desktop ($80+) virtualising software comes with the warning - If you have some graphics performance issues, or applications complaining about insufficient resources, changing video memory value can help but it can also make the situation even worse. - because of the Unified Memory Architecture of the M1 machines that utilise the same pool of memory for both RAM and graphics. And also because such virtualising software don't have direct access to the graphics processing unit (GPU) or the memory on M1 systems, and allow GPU access only indirectly through Metal / OpenGL / macOS API. (2)

(1) https://mac.getutm.app/ (2) https://kb.parallels.com/en/125351