Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021 • Hacker News Board

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#181

Post by wtallis » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #162

monocasa wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more of a 'if you have everything else in the data center, then you can have this too for consistency's sake' than something to move traditional data center workloads to.

The better example of ARM entrance to the datacenter is AWS Graviton. Apple could learn from Graviton to make its ARM cores significantly more datacenter friendly. That said, I don't see Apple doing this unless they see it as a significant opportunity.

For M1 Macs, isn't it everything but the ARM cores that is not datacenter-friendly - the memory capacity, the IO options, the system form factors?

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#182

Post by marcan_42 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #158

marcan_42 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't really started yet, other than some discussions on IRC, but the TL;DR is on every other ARM64 system those features are handled by either a hypervisor or a supervisor, via special PSCI calls. These machines don't have the option for a supervisor (and no nested virtualization, so an under-OS hypervisor would preclude VMs). Rather than introducing a special snowflake driver for these machines, the current thi…

Does apple use psci too, hence that smc redirects to el2 extension they have?

I'm guessing that's so they can implement VMs that support PSCI but believe they're using the SMC mechanism instead of HVC.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#183

Post by brokenmachine » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #42

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

While I've recently stopped using Macs as my primary computers, I can definitely see the appeal of Apple computers for a large segment of the population. E.g I still have my old MacBook around for running Ableton, because support for pro audio on both Windows and Linux is not great. Linux is almost there with PipeWire support landing in most major distros, but Windows still requires a lot of fiddling with drivers and…

God I wish Ableton would support Linux, but I don't think it'll happen.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#184

Post by TeddyDD » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

RMPR wrote: post #9

This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another level.

Same here. Might be good travel laptop with Linux on board.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#185

Post by Jcowell » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #74

Jcowell wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter if your spending three mo the of your total income when you can (and should)?pay it off monthly ?

Err... because paying it off monthly doesn't make it any cheaper. And it still ends up being a sizeable chunk of your total purchasing power.

No but it gives you you better means to purchase an item you otherwise wouldn’t have if you had to do it upfront. There’s greater purchasing power in buying something over time rather than all at once.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#186

Post by astrange » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:24 PM UTC

ohgodplsno wrote: post #71

GeekyBear wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast. >The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 M…

This article is one of the few anandtech articles which is just straight up wrong and/or incomplete on many points, notably only comparing to (relatively) old desktop chips. A 5900HX (released in January) scores 50% higher on multithreading on cinebench, and equal on single threaded tests like Geekbench. A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you. So, reall…

> Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.

It isn't.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#187

Post by favorited » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

wronglebowski wrote: post #6

hbbio wrote: post #3

The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple support is minimal... Maybe the core tech users is negligible to Apple, but it shouldn't be: Winning over the power users generally precedes larger adoption and I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead.

I do wonder what Apple will do if this gets any sort of traction. I fear they only allow disabling of secure boot/other OS installs due to fear of regulation. Apple wants you running their OS and in their walled garden.

Apple explicitly enabled support for this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551...

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#188

Post by minimaul » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

boris wrote: post #98

minimaul wrote: post #64

It's still not really ready for prime-time, but I've got a M1 mac mini running debian as an arm64 build bot (and a few other small things) now, and I can say that the bits that work, work really well. Storage is fast, CPU performance is solid, PCIe for ethernet works just fine. Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD... ;) edit: the setup process is still far from polished but that's not unexpected…

If you have the time to share the details, I would definitely appreciate them (looking to do something like this myself). In particular, on which hardware did you build the kernel? Or did you cross-compile it? Also which bootloader did you use? Thanks in advance!

Hey!

I built the initial kernel on an AMD 5800X running Debian - there are cross-compiling instructions on the Asahi Linux wiki.

For bootloader, I'm currently just appending the kernel & device tree to m1n1 (which is the first stage Asahi loader).

I suggest getting started with your rootfs and kernel under m1n1's hypervisor, as the virtualised serial ports make it much easier to debug initial issues.

edit: other than the install script which is linked elsewhere in this comment thread, everything you need is on the wiki in various places :)

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#189

Post by minimaul » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

phyalow wrote: post #179

smoldesu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD... ;) Careful what you wish for. With the way Apple marks up memory and storage upgrades, you might be looking at a $5,000 machine there...

I literally just dropped £4,099 on a fully loaded MacBook Pro 16" with those specs. I could not be happier. Its going to be a great daily driver for many years to come. Also the construction is A+ and solid, makes my 2015 MacBook Pro feel cheap in comparison.

I spent about £3k on a 14" with 1TB and 32G and I'm very very happy with it - the experience is just ridiculously better than the older 15" MBP I had - or any of the x86 laptops I've used recently too - it has a good screen, a reasonable keyboard, a good touchpad, it's much faster, quieter, has better battery life, and is more portable without losing a lot of screen space.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#190

Post by monopoledance » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

sharikous wrote: post #24

automatic6131 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will only be ahead of the competition for as long as they can buy out the whole TSMC's latest and greatest node. After that day, it won't be.

It's not only that. They have the knowhow, and a top-notch engineering team. The iPhone processor were developed over the course of 15 years and grew organically to become the M1. Even if you consider other mobile processors on par with Apple's (they are not) - it will take years before they can be adapted to PCs. And as latest Intel efforts show us processors that were not designed with efficiency as a key target fr…

I think there is good chance, they remain at the top, for a while, but a low chance there will be a huge gap to the competitors, when they have access to the same tech stack.

The M1's speed and efficiency are mostly not the result of something ground-breakingly smart, but 5nm TSMC and a non-modular design, integrated chip platform. In other words: They played monopoly and made a huge compromise on the design front. I don't expect they could pull off another leap like that soon. The M1 isn't magic, as far as I can tell.