ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 6:17 AM UTC

lsllc wrote: post #265

adrianpike wrote: post #118

I'm actually not worried, for a few reasons; - I already do cross-arch development day-in and day out between x86 and ARM, and have only run into hard blockers on a library or tool a handful of times. The solve was generally pretty straightforward to either use an ARM-compatible alternative, or to cross-compile it myself. - We've done this many many times before and it's not that bad. I know I'm not the only one old…

I'm actually happy about this! With the recent decline of pretty much every UNIX vendor/platform and the now-deep proliferation of Intel/Linux, it's beginning to feel like MS/IE6 in the early 2000's all over again. We need diversity and competition for both OS's and processors (just as we did with browsers back then). In fact, let's bring back Ultrix/OSF/1, DG-UX, Solaris! (... we can skip HP/UX and SCO because they'…

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

mister_hn wrote: post #141

timsally wrote: post #41

It is very likely that ARM-based Macs will lack a performant hypervisor upon release. We will have to see how VMWare responds. I'd bet it will inspire new products and innovation and the desktop space will move towards a less x86-x64 centric world. In the end it is a short term problem. Someone will respond and provide a performant hypervisor that can run on an ARM host and virtualize x86-x64 and ARM guests. It's tru…

With just less than 10% of market share, do you really think it will change the whole thing? Unless Microsoft pushes for ARM too, I don't see any changes soon

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 6:25 AM UTC

ryandvm wrote: post #82

octorian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time Microsoft or Apple majorly screws something up, people say this. It still hasn't happened yet. However, I think Apple has been a far greater threat to Linux adoption than Microsoft. Why? Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux. There is real value in proprietary commercial end-user application software. Most companies wh…

> Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux. The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks. The hardware used to be pretty nice, but honestly I'm still having trouble forgiving them for getting…

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

bmalehorn wrote: post #249

Uehreka wrote: post #146

For my most recent project[1], I wanted to see if Amazon’s Graviton instances would be a good choice for my docker deployments (I was deploying MongoDB, an Express server, and several instances of the Janus WebRTC server). I was developing in Pop OS on an x86_64 desktop (since we’re gonna have to start specifying now) and found the toolchain around building ARM64 images to be pretty simple once I got it set up. I ben…

Cool, thanks for sharing. It's these kind of experiences that I was hoping to gather from making this post. Did you notice at the end that you did NOT end up choosing ARM? You ended up going with x86_64 because that's what made more sense for your backend. That's part of my point - developers should choose their backend architecture based on the performance and pricing of their backend, not their development laptop.…

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

ndesaulniers wrote: post #193

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

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?