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Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

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Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#241

Post by oneplane »

lrvick wrote: post #133
Bluerise wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all the feature wasn't available in the initial Big Sur release and it only got available during the Betas for the first minor patch. Second of all, some Apple developer stated on Twitter that (during M1 unveil) he's finally able to show all the boot policy work they worked on the past year(s) to allow users to boot foreign OSes and without opening up holes for attackers. Basically it boils down to: they cou…

Kind of like all the work Sony did to allow Linux on the PS4 only to kill it later? You don't own a mac. You can only do on it what it is profitable for Apple to let you do, today. As much as I respect the incredible RE skills required for this task, I feel like this is shaky foundation unless an unpatchable bootrom exploit is discovered. Even then new models would be patched leaving existing users with an insecure p…

You don't really own any high-tech stuff anyway (with that interpretation). You can't boot your Intel of AMD CPU without their signed and sometimes encrypted code. You can't even initialise a single core, let alone the DRAM controllers.

Everyone likes to point at Apple, because that's easy, but it's neither new nor big nor special. There are practically three things at play:

- root-of-trust, if you have a better solution than CA-based signing, by all means, let the world know

- NDA/IP/Lawyerisms

- Apple and many others aren't selling hardware, they are trying to sell experiences or ecosystems, and that is the only reason they exist at all and also the reason a lot of the beige box hardware companies are either less visible, less profitable or both

Is it fun? No. But it's not some sort of automatic malice or 'haha you don't own things but you thought you did' all the time either.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#242

Post by kube-system »

klelatti wrote: post #178
samatman wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resale value is the closest thing to an objective measure we're going to get. The butterfly keyboard era Macs took a nosedive in this metric, because they were bad computers. I have what turns out to be the last Intel 16" MacBook Pro which Apple will ever build. I suspect the Intel part of it will make its resale value kind of grim, but the keyboard, speakers, monitor, build quality: all great. MacBooks traditionally…

I bought a new Intel 13" MBP just before the M1 announcement specifically because I needed an x86 machine. No intention to sell but I suspect resale value will stay OK as there is likely to be ongoing demand from those who want a Mac for x86 cloud development (and non-technical users probably don't care if its x86 or M1).

My shop is also all x86 in the cloud... but I took the plunge anyway. I'm glad I did; Rosetta 2 works really well.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#243

Post by macintux »

mauz wrote: post #231
macintux wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching Apple vs the rest of the industry when it comes to long-term strategy reminds me of Marvel vs DC in the film industry.

Interesting could you elaborate?

Well, from all appearances Warner Brothers saw the wild success of Avengers and decided they needed a big superhero mashup, thus the disastrous rush to create a Justice League movie without the gradual build-up of story lines and characters that the Marvel films produced.

Apple takes the Marvel approach to their technologies: releases features (of varying initial quality, admittedly) that gradually improve and are incorporated into bigger and better products.

Siri has never been best-in-class for anything, but has been a big part of making Apple Watch and AirPods so successful.

Apple invested in their own CPU designs for more than a decade before finally unveiling the M1 lineup.

Apple chose to shrink the Mac operating system to fit the iPhone, instead of porting the iPod OS, which gave them a unified set of APIs, and has made it practical to have Catalyst as a (still somewhat raw as I understand it) toolkit for writing software across iPhone, iPad, and macOS, plus of course iPhone and iPad apps can run natively on M1.

Most of Apple's competitors lack the freedom or the desire to bet the company on a specific direction; Microsoft of course has released Windows for ARM but has not, and cannot, tell their partners they have two years to switch or get left behind, for example.

Apple can set long-term strategic goals and follow through on them.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#244

Post by gorkish »

bluepizza wrote: post #217
gorkish wrote: post #204

Apple needs to give a little here. I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside of Apple's labs. > In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for i…

> This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. Why? There have been several success cases of reverse engineering in the past, for all sorts of popular and fringe hardware.

I am all about the hacker cred here, but you need only take a look at the most directly comparable project, Nouveau to get an idea of how ridiculous the thought is that greenfield reverse engineering of apple's custom GPU will result in something that is desktop-class usable and reliable. Please remember that Nouveau can't even do better than a framebuffer on anything newer than a geforce 10 series card. GPU development is just too eratic and fast paced to even try to keep up the effort. Anyone willing to devote that kind of time and expense into the project would be better off engineering a GPU from scratch.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#246

Post by gorkish »

wmf wrote: post #221
gorkish wrote: post #204

Apple needs to give a little here. I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside of Apple's labs. > In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for i…

Several mobile GPUs have been reverse-engineered so it's not as hard as you think. As for the ecosystem, if users care enough to pay for it then it doesn't matter how little Apple cares.

Small variants/extensions of mobile GPUs have been shoehorned to work with existing drivers or provide very basic framebuffer capability. This isn't exactly vulkan running on Apple-silicon level of functionality. Maybe Apple's implementation isn't so alien after all and these great folks will pull it off. I hope they do, but I'm still tempering my expectations.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#247

Post by oneplane »

DCKing wrote: post #45
chpmrc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple adds limitations to protect the system: "too strict!" Apple gives the chance to disable these limitations to power users: "they should be disabled by default!" Apple disables limitations: "temporary convenient oversight?" ...

It's a bad faith argument. The presupposition is that Apple is inherently motivated to actively lock things down, because that's what they do with the iPhone. This glosses over that Apple has no reason to actually do so, only has reasons not to do it on the Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't treat the Mac as the iPhone. It's based on the notion that Apple would be against free booting a priori for some rea…

Apple is trying to make a trusted computing platform (for various reasons) with the side-effect that activities that they do not feel like supporting (for various reasons, money and experience being the first that come to mind) are not available. It's not a hand-wringing evil person in a throne trying to think of ways to make people sad.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#248

Post by oneplane »

sneak wrote: post #203
machello13 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've plenty communicated their intention to not turn the Mac into the iPhone/iPad. And besides which, it would be a disastrous product strategy to do that, from a company that's absolutely top-of-the-ball when it comes to product strategy.

There are entitlements on macOS that are not provided outside of the App Store, such as NetworkExtension API VPNs. There is also no way to turn off the persistent, hardware-serial-number-based APNS connection to Apple, tracking the system from IP to IP whenever it's on, even when no apps are running. You also can't wipe and restore a mac with filevault without an online reactivation from Apple, even if you have local…

There is also no way to disable your persistent radio connection on your cell modem (except for turning it off), and your network provider will know your location and radio tower etc as well. Same applies to your mac: you turn the appliance off and then the connection is off as well. You turn it on and it's connected again.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#249

Post by deaddodo »

gorkish wrote: post #244
bluepizza wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. Why? There have been several success cases of reverse engineering in the past, for all sorts of popular and fringe hardware.

I am all about the hacker cred here, but you need only take a look at the most directly comparable project, Nouveau to get an idea of how ridiculous the thought is that greenfield reverse engineering of apple's custom GPU will result in something that is desktop-class usable and reliable. Please remember that Nouveau can't even do better than a framebuffer on anything newer than a geforce 10 series card. GPU developm…

The problem with nouveau is more that it's trying to replicate the Nvidia blob driver (and then some), in that it supports multiple disparate architectures and at different levels (three generations might be a similar uarch, for instance). Replicating a single GPU driver would be significantly easier, albeit still a Herculean task. Especially if your main goal out of the gate is simply framebuffer support and maybe some 2D acceleration.

At least, this is from my experience dealing with the Tegra X1 on a Jetson board for hobby osdev.

Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

#250

Post by wmf »

comex wrote: post #205
marmaduke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be materially different than Linux running in a VM on m1? Because you can have that now

GPU support would make a big difference.

I would expect a VM to have better GPU support since AFAIK Parallels and Fusion have already implemented it.
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