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ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

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

#161

Post by [deleted] »

octorian wrote: post #40
m000 wrote: post #3

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

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…

[deleted]

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

#162

Post by timsally »

mister_hn wrote: post #141
timsally wrote: post #41

It is very likely that ARM-based Macs will lack a performant hypervisor upon release. We will have to see how VMWare responds. I'd bet it will inspire new products and innovation and the desktop space will move towards a less x86-x64 centric world. In the end it is a short term problem. Someone will respond and provide a performant hypervisor that can run on an ARM host and virtualize x86-x64 and ARM guests. It's tru…

With just less than 10% of market share, do you really think it will change the whole thing? Unless Microsoft pushes for ARM too, I don't see any changes soon

We'll have to see. As another person already pointed out, VMWare has experimented with ESXi on ARM and they claim their customers could realize significant cost savings by migrating to ARM [1]. So if they've already done a good amount of engineering work on it, we may well see VMWare Fusion on ARM that can efficiently run ARM guests. They plan on releasing a tech preview in July [2].

Whether you can stick an emulated x86-64 CPU in there is another matter. It's a much bigger engineering lift and unless Apple puts some resources into it it's not clear to me a virtualization company by themselves would want to incur the cost. I hope there is enough demand for it and that someone will provide it. For me personally the only reason I run VMWare Fusion is to access x86-only Windows applications for which there is no replacement.

[1] https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/10/esxi-on-arm-at-the-....

[2] https://twitter.com/VMwareFusion/status/1275466832002945024

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

#163

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

adrianpike wrote: post #118

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…

But back in those very heterogeneous days (don’t forget go throw in Alpha and MIPS!) - computers running more exotic processors like SPARC were workstation-class and their manufacturers were responsive to requests from the SE community - so while I share your lack of concern about heterogeneity - I am concerned that Apple won’t be making their ARM platform the best for developer workloads (at least, non-iOS, non-macOS workloads) - remember that besides freeing them from Intel’s slower release schedule, Apple’s other main incentive for adopting ARM is to ensure their computers have a great performance-per-watt ratio but with a low power budget. I know their latest A-series chips are very, very competitive (sorry, I mean: mopping the floor) with Intel’s current mainstream chips, Apple’s expertise is still with low-power mobile devices - I’m not convinced Apple will be switching away from Xeon Chips in the MacPro or i7 (i9?) chips in the high-end MBPs - but most SEs I know using MBPs have their 13-inch models which are moving to ARM right away.

In short: I feel Apple’s consumer-oriented direction is starting to be at-odds with what they need to do in order to remain a compelling general development platform.

Remember that macOS became a favourite for web-application development only around 12-13 years ago (prior to that it was seen as an OS for creative-types) - because they were selling nice hardware with an equally nice Unix-family OS with a compelling desktop experience - take a look at typical Linux desktop distros from around the same time: visual eyesores and incompatible with most laptops thanks to OEM driver issues. Apple wasn’t specifically targeting software developers at all - they were even showing ominous signs of disinterest by discontinuing their X Windos server and going-back on their promise of establishing Java as a pillar of the OS.

With the move to ARM on laptops I think Apple will just lock-down the bootloader and won’t look back.

What’s funny now is Windows 10’s WSL and Windows Terminal, Docker support, etc are suddenly making Microsoft look good as an OS for writing code for non-Microsoft platforms. And at least with a Windows laptop - even ARM Windows laptops - you can tinker with the bootloader and fire-up Slackware if you really wanted to.

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

#164

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

saagarjha wrote: post #153
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of x86 code accesses misaligned addresses.

Well, that's only because it's efficient to do so on x86. Code recompiled for ARM isn't going to do that.

It’s not that simple if that code is using explicit struct layouts or x86/x64 intrinsics.

Forgive my ignorance though - but what ISA extensions are in Apple’s ARM chips for SIMD? Intel poured a lot of effort into SSE+AXE - Does Apple have a compete there?

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

#165

Post by bazizbaziz »

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…

One benchmark would be to track down a python/JS/etc based "hello world" demo container. Base one version on Intel and the other on ARM, and measure each versions container build-time and request latency after it is set-up.

If changing the base image is all that's needed and both Dockerfiles otherwise assume ubuntu, this should not take too long.

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

#166

Post by tjoff »

duskwuff wrote: post #157
tjoff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

How was x86 any more "open" of a platform? If anything, x86 is a far more "closed" platform, as there are only two remaining manufacturers of x86 parts, and there is no licensing process to join them. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of ARM licensees, and the process for becoming a licensee is all documented online [1]. [1]: https://www.arm.com/why-arm/how-licensing-works

How? It is absolutely inconceivable how much more open it is.

Also, the CPU is but a minor part of the puzzle. But still that is still twice as many as apple (good luck exchanging that apple-arm with any other brand).

Please let me know how open you think the next apple ARM platform is when you try to boot any OS not written by apple.

Please compare that with a computer built from AMD/Intel with a motherboard out of dozens of manufacturers etc. Any ATX power supply etc. Pretty much any PCI-E graphics card etc.

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

#167

Post by mey »

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.

If it's ARM that excites you, Surface Pro X (Windows) and Pinebook (Linux) exist today. If it's macOS, you could switch now. What about the combo of macOS + ARM do you find compelling?

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

#168

Post by saagarjha »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #164
saagarjha wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's only because it's efficient to do so on x86. Code recompiled for ARM isn't going to do that.

It’s not that simple if that code is using explicit struct layouts or x86/x64 intrinsics. Forgive my ignorance though - but what ISA extensions are in Apple’s ARM chips for SIMD? Intel poured a lot of effort into SSE+AXE - Does Apple have a compete there?

> It’s not that simple if that code is using explicit struct layouts or x86/x64 intrinsics.

Performance sensitive code that relies on alignment guarantees and other platform details will not work and need to be updated, yes. IIRC Apple's chips do NEON for SIMD, not sure if they support SVE yet. (But I figure they will have to once it becomes a required part of the ARM standard…)

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

#169

Post by klelatti »

duskwuff wrote: post #157
tjoff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

How was x86 any more "open" of a platform? If anything, x86 is a far more "closed" platform, as there are only two remaining manufacturers of x86 parts, and there is no licensing process to join them. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of ARM licensees, and the process for becoming a licensee is all documented online [1]. [1]: https://www.arm.com/why-arm/how-licensing-works

Precisely. And the fact that you can run ARMv8 on both a Raspberry PI and the Fujitsu Fugaku which is now No. 1 on the Top 500 says something about what is possible as a result.

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

#170

Post by Vomzor »

lukevp wrote: post #77
marricks wrote: post #8

It will be extremely interesting to see what the dev's say with the test boxes. Curious if there's any magical fixes like switching over to ARM Linux, since the software of an image would likely be compiled for x86 I really doubt it... Perhaps this will spur some people over to running ARM servers in the cloud...

Has anyone received an invite into the program yet? I applied on day one, but don’t have a Mac Store app currently published, so I’m not sure if I will get accepted.

I don’t have a published Mac app either and I got accepted.
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