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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

#191

Post by jeroenhd »

outworlder wrote: post #188

On the flip side, I guess ARM Macs will now allow the use of hypervisors for Android simulators, instead of a full hardware virtualization. ... thus making Android development better on Macs?

Android emulators on desktop generally run amd64 images of Android using existing virtualisation hardware and software.

At best, you can say that you can run ARM-only games at native speed now, but as a developer you won't really notice much different (assuming the processors aren't slower than Intel's)

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

#192

Post by edw »

I'd like to advocate for remote development environments. Most of my day is spent typing into a tmux session on a cloud-hosted box. (I picked up a Magic Keyboard for my 11" iPad Pro, and thanks to Blink it's a great glass terminal. It's not going to work if you're debugging let's say a React app, but I've been very happy on it the last several days churning out Golang.)

Running stuff on your laptop makes it run slow, get hot, and burn battery. I've considered getting a small x86 or ARM media appliance as a (physically local) remote server for when I can't count on an Internet connection. A media PC costs how much? The big holdup has been the tyranny of choice I'm confronted with. (Suggestions are welcome!)

I think very few people would be surprised if the coming of ARM Macs will, along with AWS's ARM moves (and Microsoft's), drive acceptance and adoption of ARM-based server computing. The mechanism won't be anything formal, just the vague pressure that comes from people wanting their programs and libraries to compile locally.

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

#193

Post by ndesaulniers »

donarb wrote: post #73
fluxem wrote: post #15

But linux can be run on arm natively. Moreover, most packages are also compiled for arm. So apt-get install will work just the same. I'm sure they will be able to target Apple's specific arm chips when they come out.

Apple released a list of open source projects that they have ported to ARM, they intend to upload patches to each of these projects: - Bgfx - Blender - Boost - Skia - Zlib-Ng - Chromium - cmake - Electron - FFmpeg - Halide - Swift Shader - Homebrew - MacPorts - Mono - nginx - map - Node - OpenCV - OpenEXR - OpenJDK - SSE2Neon - Pixar USD - Qt - Python 3 - Redis - Cineform CFHD - NumPy - Go - V8

I'm curious to see the Google projects that have patches from Apple, since all of those run on Android which is for all intents and purposes ARM.

I'm guessing new ARMv8 ISA features, PAC/BTI/MTE?

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

#194

Post by saagarjha »

donarb wrote: post #73
fluxem wrote: post #15

But linux can be run on arm natively. Moreover, most packages are also compiled for arm. So apt-get install will work just the same. I'm sure they will be able to target Apple's specific arm chips when they come out.

Apple released a list of open source projects that they have ported to ARM, they intend to upload patches to each of these projects: - Bgfx - Blender - Boost - Skia - Zlib-Ng - Chromium - cmake - Electron - FFmpeg - Halide - Swift Shader - Homebrew - MacPorts - Mono - nginx - map - Node - OpenCV - OpenEXR - OpenJDK - SSE2Neon - Pixar USD - Qt - Python 3 - Redis - Cineform CFHD - NumPy - Go - V8

Has anyone seen those patches start to land? Just curious what the timelines on those are.

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

#195

Post by sjs382 » 

    I would expect about a 5x slowdown running Docker images.
    
    Docker on a Mac utilizes a hypervisor. Hypervisors rely on running the same architecture on the host as the guest, and are about about 1x - 2x as slow as running natively.
    
    Since you're running ARM Mac, these hypervisors can only run ARM Linux. They can't run x86_64 Linux.
    
    What will happen instead? These tools will fall back on emulators.
Most of the software I run in Docker already supports ARM. I'd imagine that a lot of (most of?) us that use Docker do, too.

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

#196

Post by saagarjha »

duskwuff wrote: post #145
donarb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple released a list of open source projects that they have ported to ARM, they intend to upload patches to each of these projects: - Bgfx - Blender - Boost - Skia - Zlib-Ng - Chromium - cmake - Electron - FFmpeg - Halide - Swift Shader - Homebrew - MacPorts - Mono - nginx - map - Node - OpenCV - OpenEXR - OpenJDK - SSE2Neon - Pixar USD - Qt - Python 3 - Redis - Cineform CFHD - NumPy - Go - V8

Great to see Homebrew and MacPorts on that list. That's a huge signal that Apple plans on supporting developer / tinkerer use cases.

Apple engineers have to install packages too :)

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

#197

Post by jayd16 »

outworlder wrote: post #188

On the flip side, I guess ARM Macs will now allow the use of hypervisors for Android simulators, instead of a full hardware virtualization. ... thus making Android development better on Macs?

Android already had x86 builds and that was the preferred way to run the emulator so its mostly likely a neutral change (once they get hardware virtualization for arm working). The GPU aspect of things might improve maybe?

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

#198

Post by mthoms »

donarb wrote: post #73
fluxem wrote: post #15

But linux can be run on arm natively. Moreover, most packages are also compiled for arm. So apt-get install will work just the same. I'm sure they will be able to target Apple's specific arm chips when they come out.

Apple released a list of open source projects that they have ported to ARM, they intend to upload patches to each of these projects: - Bgfx - Blender - Boost - Skia - Zlib-Ng - Chromium - cmake - Electron - FFmpeg - Halide - Swift Shader - Homebrew - MacPorts - Mono - nginx - map - Node - OpenCV - OpenEXR - OpenJDK - SSE2Neon - Pixar USD - Qt - Python 3 - Redis - Cineform CFHD - NumPy - Go - V8

I feel like the ARM transition is why MacOS hasn't progressed much (IMHO) in the past 2 or 3 years. It was a common assumption around here that they were diverting all their top resources to iOS/iPadOS development.

The reality seems to be that their top MacOS developers have been busy laying groundwork for the ARM transition. There's so much to be done.

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

#200

Post by platinumrad »

eberkund wrote: post #176

Are there any excited embedded developers in the crowd? I have done a little embedded work and cross compiling has always been a huge pain in the ass to setup. I know some people have even gone as far as purchasing expensive niche workstations with ARM CPUs specifically to avoid this problem. I feel like having a mainstream ARM platform like the MBP will make compiling software for ARM-based single board computers a…

There isn't a single embedded target that uses MacOS's libc so you will still have to set up a specialized environment.
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