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Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#231

Post by cozzyd »

nordsieck wrote: post #167
CountSessine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with ma…

> Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service. I have heard a theory that ARM Servers have a difficult time because there aren't really many developer machines that run ARM. With Apple changing that, there is a chance that the next round of ARM server chips will have better success.

That seems silly. Developer machines rarely have AVX-512 or multiple TB of ram too...

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#232

Post by Wowfunhappy »

waheoo wrote: post #226
scoopertrooper wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac M1 platform is about as open as any other laptop platform. Your points are quite valid for the i-class devices, but there is nothing preventing anyone from installing linux on an M1 Mac once driver support arrives.

Do you seriously trust that not to change? When is driver support coming? When will audio on Mac's work on Linux? When will the touchbar drivers be made available? Apple doesn't give a shit about Linux, but they also don't make it easy to use their hardware. And to answer the question posed, no, I would never give this company money.

> Do you seriously trust that not to change?

No, I don't. On the Mac platform, Apple has consistently elected to give users ultimate control. They could have a change of heart some day, but so could Intel, Microsoft, or any other vendor.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#233

Post by sys_64738 »

Usually the SoC vendor provides the drivers to the Linux kernel tree as they have access to the hardware register specs of the various constituents of said SoC.

With these M1 chips, you're gonna take a long time to get to that level of understanding. I think Apple would likely need to provide Linux driver support to get this to a complete model.

I'm sure the chip can be reverse engineered as they got Linux running on the T2 chip when it was jail broken.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#234

Post by jjoonathan »

someperson wrote: post #191
CharlesW wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux becoming attractive on their hardware would almost certainly be unsupported, but I seriously doubt it would be undermined. This. Apple doesn't even care about Hackintoshes, which are (theoretically) orders of magnitude more threatening to Apple's business model since they (theoretically) cannibalize Mac sales.

Reminds me of that Bill Gates quote from 1998: > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. I am sur…

Did they ever start getting license revenue from China? I've had a few recent interactions with Chinese businesses that suggest piracy is still rampant and shameless.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#235

Post by Wowfunhappy »

woahAcademia wrote: post #227
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #214

I wonder—how certain are we that Apple would be unwilling to assist with a project like this? They've said that Windows support is "up to Microsoft"[1], and they explicitly demonstrated Linux VM support at WWDC. Apple's primary mission is to sell hardware, and they know that Linux is important for certain consumers. I wouldn't expect Apple to write or finance any code, but I could certainly see them providing documen…

Something I'm just not understanding here. Why the obsession of single thread time in 2020? Give it 2 years and a competitor will beat it, Apple will be behind yet again and the price will be higher than ever. And again, this is only for single thread. My computer is already blazing fast and intense programs will use multi threads.

I don't know what computer you have, but it probably produces more heat and has a shorter battery life than the new M1 Macs. That's Apple's real accomplishment—they made an ARM chip that is (very) competitive with modern x86 processors, but which has the power efficiency typical of ARM.

Will a competitor beat them in two years? It's possible, but I expect Apple to keep their lead for a while. CPU-wise, the iPhone has been well ahead of competitors for several years (even as other specs like memory lag behind), and no one else appears to be making serious inroads in this space.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#236

Post by gshixman »

m00x wrote: post #64
devwastaken wrote: post #54

Apple won't support it, therefore support and maintenance will be working around apples proprietary hardware and special drivers. Linux is not meant to live in that environment, I'd argue bettering support for other OEM's is a more fruitfull goal.

If anyone has been following nvidia/linux story, this nails it on the head. Apple has never played well with FOSS and aren't going to start now. Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs, and the linux port will always be a shitty experience that takes up several weeks to get working properly, and then it'll be slower than expected. Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today…

I disagree with this on a few points aside from the hyperbole:

>Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs...

No, it's not and really hasn't ever been. Every platform has a shortcoming and claiming it's ahead of the game is a biased stance. The M1 specs may be impressive now, but the same can be said of every "new" SoC chip.

>... linux port will always be a shitty experience...

People who really love Linux and FOSS actually prefer to tune their environment to their expectations. The weeks of tinkering is part of the hacker mindset that is slowly eroding, and I'll take the weeks long config experience over a locked environment.

To sum it all, Linux and consumer open systems have a different target audience from Apple. Apple users are like car lessees, they just want to hop in and drive their car until the lease is up. Linux users are like the mechanic working out of their garage who drives a hodgepodge vehicle they pieced together. To say that the Apple experience is better is just hype, and calling the personalization/optimization process "shitty" is closed-source/closed-minded view.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#237

Post by dev_tty01 »

frankchn wrote: post #206
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #162

Most of the solutions in this thread are simply not viable. Stuff like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi are several magnitudes away from Apple's M1 SoC. No amount of hackerish imitation will bridge that gap, the laws of physics are not kind to consumer product hardware hackers. It is very obvious that most of the people commenting here has never held a soldering iron, nor taken a single computer architecture class. The…

> Apple has already laid the architectural groundwork, a chip with similar performance numbers can probably be commissioned with ~50 million. I think you might be two orders of magnitude off here. A class leading general purpose compute chip on a cutting edge process? I don’t think $5 billion to produce working chips is unreasonable. If it were only $50M to produce A14/M1 level chips, Qualcomm would already have done…

Agreed. Apple has acquired multiple companies and been building custom CPUs for 10 years with a significant sized design team. They paid about 280M for P.A. Semi in 2008. They reportedly also hired a number of DEC StrongARM refugees as well as several other small design teams. Apple was also an original ARM investor and have been using ARM cores for various uses for decades.

A competitor also needs 10 years experience designing higher and higher performance ARM cpus in tremendously heat/power constrained systems (phones). There are a lot of long term threads that have come together in the M1 chip.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#238

Post by mch82 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #219
mch82 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the source of the app is released by the author, what about GPL prohibits this? Edit: I ask because I’m curious to learn and because many systems run apps that are GPL without the whole system being GPL. For example, I love using GIMP on Windows.

Section 6 of the GPLv2 states: > You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. This conflicts with the App Store's Terms of Service, particularly it's "Usage Rules". https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store... This is of course different from merely running GPL software on a proprietary OS. In fact, iOS ships with GPL software on board.

That’s a helpful reference on GPL. I’ll save a link to it.

Not sure this Stack Overflow is current/correct, but it appears other FOSS licenses might be compatible with iOS App Store terms. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/459833/which-open-source...

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#239

Post by psanford »

oblio wrote: post #45
chippiewill wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a legitimate concern, but it seems less likely to me, specifically in the case of Apple hardware, for two reasons: 1. There will be far more interest in being able to run Linux on that hardware, and in being able to keep it up to date (since it'll be a daily driver). 2. Apple are probably less likely to regularly make drastic changes between hardware revisions because they will need to support multipl…

I'm skeptical. Linux is reasonably popular for "Windows" hardware, most statistics put it at about 0.5% market share. I've never seen anyone running Linux on Intel Macs. Why would ARM Macs, which seem quite a bit more locked down, ever become a better supported and more popular Linux hardware platform? I wish they would become one, but I don't see how we can make this leap.

I ran linux on a MBP as my primary machine from 2009 - 2015 (on 3 different hardware revs). The late 2015 MBPs moved a bunch of peripherals off of the USB bus making them harder to use with linux at the time. In the years since, support has been added for all those peripherals.

I still use my late 2013 MBP running nixos. That machine was a great piece of hardware at the time and still works fantastically well even today. (Its really sad how terrible most most non-Apple speakers are in laptops).

I would buy an M1 Macbook Air if it could run linux and had good power management. (I'll say the same about an M1 MBP in the generation where they give up on the touchbar and go back to hardware buttons.)

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#240

Post by dev_tty01 »

newbie2020 wrote: post #228
dev_tty01 wrote: post #224

No, because it is already a unix OS. I imagine this is unpopular in HN, but what matters to me is just running on a good solid unix. I don't really care if it is a unix or Linux. What I want is shell scripting, pipes, forks, make, python, awk, grep, find, du, df, etc... Most anything that doesn't come pre-installed can be built from source. This wasn't true in the early days of OS X, but now the only things I find th…

Same. Only reason I even look at OSX is because of the terminal/BASH and how easy that makes programming-related work. For everything else, I think windows is way better.

I actually like the Mac GUI for GUI specific tools, but to each their own. No big deal. I used to use Macs in the early days and always had a separate unix workstation. When OSX gave me both, I was all set.
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