181–190 of 282 posts
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Hello, marcan is CCed on that set of patches as a courtesy, and he can help with figuring out better approaches before it's merged. Because it's set in stone forever after that. - someone
You're right! I should've paid more attention to the headers. Still, this is only very basic support for the CPU. Much more work is needed.
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The thing is, many more people are using phone and tablets, than Windows and many more people are using Windows, than Macs and many more people are using Macs, than desktop Linuxes and many more people are using desktop Linuxes, than desktop BSDs. So the anecdata goes against your mountain of anecdata that goes against a world of anecdata from people using those platforms.
Yeah, because when I use a phone or tablet I have to worry about installing my own drivers :-) Apples, oranges.
And actually, Windows 10 is also approaching this state, but it is not there yet.
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The thing is, many more people are using phone and tablets, than Windows and many more people are using Windows, than Macs and many more people are using Macs, than desktop Linuxes and many more people are using desktop Linuxes, than desktop BSDs. So the anecdata goes against your mountain of anecdata that goes against a world of anecdata from people using those platforms.
Yeah, because when I use a phone or tablet I have to worry about installing my own drivers :-) Apples, oranges.
I last installed drivers on Windows late last year.
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Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads. I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn…
MacOS a coin toss and Linux being robust regarding drivers/hardware support on desktop? Are you talking about Hackintosh, or do we not live on the same planet?
No such problem with Linux.
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A middle finger from Apple would be locking the bootloader–keeping it open, plus providing minimal tooling and telling people to figure it out, is about as close to "we'd love to see what you'll do with it" as Apple could possibly give. (Dealing with the GPU is going to be the majority of the work, I'd think.)
While Correlium is a bit of a minefield for obvious reasons, I don't understand why Apple hasn't blessed Marcan's work. I wouldn't expect them to commit any development resources of their own, but I'd think it would be in their interest to (A) provide Marcan with some documentation and (B) make an engineer available to answer occasional questions. Apple makes money selling hardware, and Linux support will sell more h…
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Agreed. Check out the state of Linux support on Intel Macs that were released in and after 2016[1], it's abysmal. Once Apple started adding non-standard hardware, Linux support never caught up. It isn't like the lack of support is Linux developers' fault. Apple doesn't provide datasheets for their hardware, and they don't cooperate with developers writing drivers for their custom hardware. There are hundreds, if not…
> that doesn't mean much because they're actually running Linux forks Many of these Arm SoCs are running linux forks because there are some terrible baked in drivers, and no spec associated with them. Still, that is a step ahead of the M1 as there are at least drivers that don't have to be decompiled and reverse engineered.
The thing is, that these SoCs have no PCIe or other enumerable bus. You (=your kernel) must know what hardware it is running on and which drivers to load without being able to ask the hardware, what is really present. One wrong POKE and the entire system can hang.
And that is on top of the problem, how to boot in the first place. There is not such thing as UEFI on these SoCs. Every single one is a special snowflake with its own special way to boot.
Hence, kernels built for specific systems, even if it is just Device Tree.
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What instructions from an extended ISA are you referring to? The only ones I've seen written up have been: 1. Instructions to change the memory ordering mode, which allows Rosetta2 to skip some expensive memory fences when translating x86 binaries to ARM. 2. Some instructions for matrix math. I wouldn't expect either of these to affect typical usage or battery life much, unless your workflow involves running things t…
And the former isn't even an instruction, set a single bit in ACTLR_EL1 and off you go. The second is an extension that talks to a coprocessor that's quite application specific. And that has an unstable ISA that changes every year. Probably not the biggest priority for anyone.
Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…
Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads. I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn…
Based on...? Apple is pretty straightforward: they support hardware until they don't. And they're quite explicit about ending support and it's almost always a major release. You might be able to hack support after that, but I've literally never had it be a "toss-up" about when Apple was or wasn't supporting their own hardware.
As for Windows... I've got a 10 year old 2600k based desktop that runs the latest version of windows flawlessly. I guess if you go back 20? 30? 40? years you might find something that can't run the latest version of windows, but you're going to be down a really, REALLY obscure rabbit hole. I can't say I ever recall it being a coin toss, it was about 10 seconds on google of finding or not finding a driver.
Linux on the other hand... the support of hardware is awesome, but determining if something is or isn't supported is generally an afternoon of reading mailing lists.
Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…
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Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads. I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn…
MacOS a coin toss and Linux being robust regarding drivers/hardware support on desktop? Are you talking about Hackintosh, or do we not live on the same planet?