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ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

bmalehorn.com

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Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#111

Post by core-questions »

user5994461 wrote: post #49
rbanffy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will. Trust me. And you can buy a cluster of RPis to build your images for $2000

It's ludicrous to assume that anybody has $2000 to spend on fantasy hardware. It's month of disposable income outside of the SV bubble. Better question might be, how many of the most common open source projects are managed by volunteers in their spare time? These will not build for ARM, unless there is a free tool doing it automatically for them. Currently GitHub + travis/circle can do for x64 on every push to master…

You don't need a cluster of them, one $50 machine is enough for home use. Travis et. al. will be buying those 96-core Marvell ARM machines and plowing through builds.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#114

Post by sirn »

bmalehorn wrote: post #94
bazizbaziz wrote: post #84

This seems like a weird benchmark, reading from /dev/urandom and gzipping random data does not seem like something most folks will want to do. It even appears like /dev/urandom speeds differ greatly on various architectures [0] and there are issues with /dev/random being fundamentally slow due to the entropy pool [1] (but I guess this is why the author uses /dev/urandom). It would be better to measure something more…

Author here. I'm glad somebody said something! Yes the gzip perf test is pretty silly, but illustrates a significant difference. /dev/urandom throughput on this setup was about 100 MB / s so it wasn't a bottleneck for this test - the bottlneck was gzip. Feel free to come up with a performance test yourself! I personally want to know what an HTTP test would look like. You can run an ARM image by running: docker run -i…

Was your emulation done with qemu user space emulator[1] (the syscall translation layer) or qemu system emulator[2] (the VM)? If it was qemu-system you might have better numbers with qemu-user-static, which does binary translation similar to Rosetta 2 rather than a being a full system emulator with all its overhead.

You can probably use qemu-user-static to translate x86-64-only binaries in a Linux container on an ARM machine, too, but I have never tried.

[1]: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/user/main.html

[2]: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/index.html

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#116

Post by rootusrootus »

ryandvm wrote: post #82
octorian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time Microsoft or Apple majorly screws something up, people say this. It still hasn't happened yet. However, I think Apple has been a far greater threat to Linux adoption than Microsoft. Why? Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux. There is real value in proprietary commercial end-user application software. Most companies wh…

> Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux. The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks. The hardware used to be pretty nice, but honestly I'm still having trouble forgiving them for getting…

I was with you until they released the newest MBP. Now my beloved ESC is back. I already do all my development in a Vagrant instance so I've never been bothered by the tooling. In all other regards I prefer MacOS as a desktop environment to the currently available Linux choices.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#117

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

starsinspace wrote: post #52
m000 wrote: post #3

Apple will singlehandedly make 2021 "the year of Linux on the desktop".

To give a different perspective: I find Apple's move to ARM the most exciting thing to happen in desktop computers in many years. I'm typing this from a PC running Win10. Current plan is: as soon as ARM desktop Macs become available (and assuming they don't screw it up in some weird way), I'd like to switch.

So, and I say this as someone who's stoked to see any non-x86 system going mainstream... why do you want to switch? What benefit do you see to switching to an ARM laptop? Or is it just "this is a good thing (in general) so I want to get on board with it"?

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#118

Post by adrianpike »

I'm actually not worried, for a few reasons;

- I already do cross-arch development day-in and day out between x86 and ARM, and have only run into hard blockers on a library or tool a handful of times. The solve was generally pretty straightforward to either use an ARM-compatible alternative, or to cross-compile it myself.

- We've done this many many times before and it's not that bad. I know I'm not the only one old enough here to remember the days of having heterogeneous fleets across PPC, SPARC, and x86. Or even more recent - different extensions for x86 with different chipset manufacturers.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#119

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

jbverschoor wrote: post #104
user5994461 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem wasn't in our code, it was in the database code that was either from open source or from a vendor. If you want a sample. Try to install the cassandra client library in python. It will pull in and compile all sort of shit. That's supposed to be python and easily cross platform.

Yes, so time for them to clean up their mess ;)

Reading the comments here flow something like this: 1. complain that switching to ARM is a mess 2. no it's not a mess, it's easy 3. no, see it's a mess 4. fine, clean up the mess.

Yes, we should clean up the mess! It doesn't mean it's not a mess. And I think the mess is actually still understated.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#120

Post by tjoff »

bitwize wrote: post #115

Once again -- Apple will do what the entire industry without Apple couldn't do. In this case, force a migration to ARM-based servers, so that prod is running on the same architecture as the developer's machine. Apple is finally killing x86.

Hooray, we have successfully fixed the mistake with an open platform and will now be relegated to incompatible hardware without any competition.

At last, the future will surely be bright!

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