Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by ngcc_hk » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:29 AM UTC

rileymat2 wrote: post #208

eyelidlessness wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol they highlighted running Linux in the first announcement of the ISA switch , they see no threat in Linux at all. Their business model would need to change dramatically for that to happen. They’re a hardware company that makes the hardware more attractive with software, service and device integration. Their software restrictions are part of the value proposition, but anyone fully ejecting from that would be on the…

They were a hardware company, but are moving into services for continued growth, which puts them at odds with an open platform. The business model is changing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment... You can see services revenue is up to 14 billion compared to iPhone's 26 billion.

And that is revenue. Guess margins is the main question.

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

#252

Post by msie » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:30 AM UTC

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #244

freehunter wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they w…

The company that forced me to buy a mac to develop for them?

How about Windows? Did someone force you to buy a computer to develop for it?

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

#253

Post by thayne » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:31 AM UTC

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.

I think this a contributing factor, but not the whole story. Another part is in order to switch to arm64, your entire software stack needs to support that architecture. If you are using linux and open source software, you'll be fine for most, maybe all of that stack, especially if you are willing to compile things yourself. But it just takes one component to block the transition.

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

#254

Post by woahAcademia » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:33 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #235

woahAcademia wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah heat and battery life are non issues.

The iPhone is a good example because supposedly it's the fastest, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's the animations, maybe it's the annoying Apple popups to sign in and update. Whatever the case, it doesn't make for a great device. (My experience is from 2018)

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

#255

Post by Wowfunhappy » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:37 AM UTC

woahAcademia wrote: post #254

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah heat and battery life are non issues. The iPhone is a good example because supposedly it's the fastest, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's the animations, maybe it's the annoying Apple popups to sign in and update. Whatever the case, it doesn't make for a great device. (My experience is from 2018)

> The iPhone is a good example because supposedly it's the fastest, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's the animations, maybe it's the annoying Apple popups to sign in and update. Whatever the case, it doesn't make for a great device.

So, I take it you can see why the ability to use Apple's fast processors with a non-Apple OS might be appealing!

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

#256

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #155

doctor_eval wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF. While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License

Webkit was likely "saved" by the original KHTML license being GPL. At the time, Apple were wise enough (or desperate enough) to figure that they could work with such a license, although they were eventually careful to chisel out anything they could into BSD-licensed modules. And still they had to be dragged into the light more or less kicking and screaming (e.g. they had no public VSC until KDE people kicked up a sti…

KHTML is LGPL, isn’t it?

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

#257

Post by ineedasername » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #181

nrp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is a desirable feature. You're not getting a 60W CPU in a 13" form factor, but you can get a 28W CPU that will run at 28W indefinitely while also being able to temporarily boost to 60W when needed and thermally able to.

It's fine if I could get an ultra book that could sustain non boost performance. But even that is too much to ask for intel. I have't tested recently released AMD cpus to claim AMD also falls short.

AMD laptop chips are pretty decent: you can find laptops/ultrabooks for about $700 running on a Ryzen 7 4700U. Based on a vs comparison on CPU Monkey it looks like it gets about 80% of the performance of the M1, though only about 25-50% graphics. However, you have much better ram & storage options, all at a lower price, and the graphics are still 2x to 4x better than Intel's on board graphics.

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

#258

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

ric2b wrote: post #132

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure that’s exactly accurate. The special JavaScript instructions, and the optimizations to retain/release counts within memory blocks, seem much more interesting. https://mobile.twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903... I haven’t the foggiest idea if any of this could make it to competing ARM chips, but given how many years Snapdragons have been lagging relative to the iPhone “A” chips, I don’t feel t…

> The special JavaScript instructions That's an ARMv8 feature, not specific to Apple.

ARMv8.3 to be specific.

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

#259

Post by toyg » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

spacedcowboy wrote: post #245

toyg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines Of course they do. Like they wanted people to hack on OSX 20 years ago; and once they reached critical mass, they pulled up the drawbridges (dropping anything GNU, dropping Java, restricting access to the OS, pushing AppStore, etc etc). Chances they're going to do exactly the same with M1 and its follow-ups are 99.99%... if anything because their management is largely d…

They dropped anything GNU because of the GPLv3, which was specifically designed to stop what the authors saw as exploitation of others' work. I can see both sides here - the viral nature of GPLv3 is anathema to a company like Apple, so simply walking away was inevitable; and people were exploiting loopholes in the GPLv2 (I have no idea whether Apple was, but there are documented cases of others doing it).

It's just one datapoint - there are plenty more. Simply speaking, when they are the underdog and have to attract developers, they open up; and when they don't need it, they close doors. That's just what they do, it's a perfectly rational strategy (if cynical). They are hardly the only ones at this game, Microsoft does it too. I am just pointing out that promises of openness with Apple typically come with an expiry date.

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

#260

Post by mjcohen » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 3:43 AM UTC

spacedcowboy wrote: post #241

nightski wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply it was Apple's fault Windows did not run on M1 (in fact it has been shown that Windows ARM64 does run natively on M1 albeit through a patched QEMU due to lack of driver support), but by designing a custom SoC they have abandoned the approach which would afford them the most compatibility (staying with x86). This may have been the right direction for them, but it's not the same approach as befor…

Nah, gatekeeper has been doing the remote check thing for years (just, 2 of them, I think). It only became noticeable because there was an oversight in the "fail-fast" algorithm. If Apple was available, it was assumed it would be fast, and it wasn't when there was an iCloud outage.

I followed the instructions on how to use Little Snitch to skip Apple's app start stuff.