Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

asahilinux.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 414 posts

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#22

Post by spurgu »

codetrotter wrote: post #4

I was wondering if this was the project of the guy that talked about doing this a while back, which I read about here on HN and indeed it is. Announcement post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-launch-45852093

I came here thinking this was a separate attempt and was going to share that Marcan has already started working on it and that there could be some collaboration.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#23

Post by mhh__ »

jasoneckert wrote: post #8

On the About page: "...requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform" It "is" a well-documented platform. I'm hoping that Apple makes it available to the open source community to make Linux on M1 happen sooner than later.

How is it documented if there is so software developers manual for the ISA, optimisation manual for the uarch, and no documentation at all on how the subsystems like the neural accelerator works let alone how to access it.

I assume you mean that Apple have it internally, but I wouldn't assume it's any good.

I would also love to see someone (I haven't got and can't afford one) try and fuzz it for undocumented instructions.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#25

Post by ogre_codes »

reikonomusha wrote: post #21

For projects like these, I don’t know why Apple doesn’t just step in and help. What have they got to lose?

I agree. At the very least, they should be a corporate sponsor for Marcan's Patreon. Ideally they should just hire him and provide him with internal resources to work on it. Even if Apple doesn't benefit from Linux running on bare metal, many of these efforts will benefit Linux running inside a VM as well.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#27

Post by flatiron »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #2

> In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. Well, this is exciting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would take on this challenge, but it's exciting all the same.

judging by other open source reverse engineerd GPU drivers its a massive undertaking. i also looked at a shot of the chip and see lots of neural networking functionality, i wonder what sort of special drivers stuff like that needs. i just feel like the hardware is so specialized without apples help it would take a lot for it to be a killer linux laptop.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#28

Post by wtetzner »

deadmutex wrote: post #16
Badfood wrote: post #5

I'll buy our whole company these macs in a heartbeat if this becomes good enough

Why not support a hardware vendor that actually cares about linux?

One reason I can think of is that the hardware from those vendors is less appealing.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#30

Post by mhh__ »

ogre_codes wrote: post #29
mhh__ wrote: post #24

What are the odds Apple shit on this?

Why? If they'd intended to shut this down, they would have a locked down boot loader like on iOS. Instead they deliberately built a boot loader which supported things like this.

The engineers who did that probably don't make the decision on things like this.

When have Apple been open about anything recently?

Post reply on HN