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ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

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Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#301

Post by starsinspace »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #117
starsinspace wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a different perspective: I find Apple's move to ARM the most exciting thing to happen in desktop computers in many years. I'm typing this from a PC running Win10. Current plan is: as soon as ARM desktop Macs become available (and assuming they don't screw it up in some weird way), I'd like to switch.

So, and I say this as someone who's stoked to see any non-x86 system going mainstream... why do you want to switch? What benefit do you see to switching to an ARM laptop? Or is it just "this is a good thing (in general) so I want to get on board with it"?

I'm also excited about a non-x86 architecture on the desktop again. Monoculture is bad, and I find x86 to be especially ugly...

As for switching... I'm increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's complete disregard of user privacy. Apple isn't perfect with that either, but IMO much better at least. For my use cases, Win and Mac are the only credible options due to software availability. So to get away from Windows.. there's not much choice these days.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#302

Post by cwhiz »

mister_hn wrote: post #282
cwhiz wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been dabbling with ARM for a long time now. It will all come down to whether this move gives Apple a significant performance and/or battery life advantage. If Apple pulls it off it will force Microsoft and other vendors to respond.

They announced there will be no Bootcamp, I hope there will be a possibility to install other OSes as well on their new machines. This is critical especially when they make their older devices "EOL" and there are no more OS updates.

VMWare and Paralells have both said they will have support. I don’t know what that means, yet.

I would not personally buy a Mac product for the next 2-3 years.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#303

Post by tjoff »

pjmlp wrote: post #278
tjoff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hooray, we have successfully fixed the mistake with an open platform and will now be relegated to incompatible hardware without any competition. At last, the future will surely be bright!

Actually the original mistake was IBM's to make.

Yes, that was my point, we are still "suffering" from it.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#304

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #269
anthk wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot about porting and compiling software which depended on X11 and Motif. Linux won because of that.

What for? That is what having something like Hummingbird took care of. I used to admin UNIX and develop for it from Windows NT/2000 workstations. Also the FOSS version of Motif only appeared when Motif wasn't that much relevant and most enterprise shops were migrating to CORBA and Web as integration points.

No, I mean when Motif + Slackware were an alternative to SGI machines in a brief time. Those were supported by big multimedia companies.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#305

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

dclusin wrote: post #252
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But back in those very heterogeneous days (don’t forget go throw in Alpha and MIPS!) - computers running more exotic processors like SPARC were workstation-class and their manufacturers were responsive to requests from the SE community - so while I share your lack of concern about heterogeneity - I am concerned that Apple won’t be making their ARM platform the best for developer workloads (at least, non-iOS, non-macO…

As a life long Mac user my next machine is going to be a windows box. It's not so much hatred for Apple that's driving me. It just seems that Microsoft has a huge financial incentive now to play nicely with Linux due to their cloud business being pretty success and Apple with their iOS hegemony does not. The product decisions each company is making seem to reflect that. Also $4k buys a lot more windows box than it do…

Re: Azure.

Microsoft is lucky, more than anything else (Azure is a very nice platform now, but it was very feature-anaemic in comparison until about 5 years ago)

AWS is king, so anyone with any reason to not use Amazon will automatically use the next-biggest/next-best Cloud provider - and that’s Microsoft. Which is odd: someone waking up from a 10-year coma would presume it would be Oracle or IBM, or from a major vendor of webhosting or VPS. Oracle was slow to get in, and IBM cheated by just buying Softlayer and then spectacularly cocking it up: https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/09/ibm-cloud-suffers-prolonge...

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#306

Post by ArgyleSound »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #211
ArgyleSound wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still having trouble forgiving them for getting rid of the physical ESC key and turning volume control into a two-step routine on the TouchBar To be fair it's always been a one-step routine on the touchbar (touch and drag the icon) and they brought back the escape key.

Touch and drag is easy to jump the volume up/down variable amounts but really sucks compared to a single key press for "just a little louder" or "just a little quieter." There is something satisfying in the discrete steps of volume notches. On the other hand, my speakers have a physical volume dial that provides feedback via friction on movement so I like that better than touchbar or physical up/down buttons.

So there’s actually two types of touch and drag you can do. One is holding until the slider appears and then dragging, the other is flicking the icons left and right which causes single step increments.

Discoverability certainly sucks for that second one.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#307

Post by torstenvl »

starsinspace wrote: post #301
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, and I say this as someone who's stoked to see any non-x86 system going mainstream... why do you want to switch? What benefit do you see to switching to an ARM laptop? Or is it just "this is a good thing (in general) so I want to get on board with it"?

I'm also excited about a non-x86 architecture on the desktop again. Monoculture is bad, and I find x86 to be especially ugly... As for switching... I'm increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's complete disregard of user privacy. Apple isn't perfect with that either, but IMO much better at least. For my use cases, Win and Mac are the only credible options due to software availability. So to get away from Windows.. there'…

Why do you feel like proprietary software monocultures are better than commoditized hardware monocultures? OS vendors selling 100% custom silicon is not the path to diversity and freedom of choice.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#308

Post by john_alan »

sirn wrote: post #62
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…

Apple has Hypervisor.framework which has been updated for ARM Mac[1]. Xhyve and HyperKit (used by Docker for Mac) uses Hypervisor.framework exclusively. The last time I tried Hypervisor.framework on x86-64, the CPU performance was quite fine (matches that of VMware/VirtualBox), but I/O was pretty abysmal. Emulating x86-64 on ARM is probably going to be a role of something similar to QEMU. [1]: https://developer.apple…

Cool! Does docker no longer use virtual box on macOS?

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#309

Post by sirn »

john_alan wrote: post #308
sirn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has Hypervisor.framework which has been updated for ARM Mac[1]. Xhyve and HyperKit (used by Docker for Mac) uses Hypervisor.framework exclusively. The last time I tried Hypervisor.framework on x86-64, the CPU performance was quite fine (matches that of VMware/VirtualBox), but I/O was pretty abysmal. Emulating x86-64 on ARM is probably going to be a role of something similar to QEMU. [1]: https://developer.apple…

Cool! Does docker no longer use virtual box on macOS?

Depends on whether you install Docker for Mac (uses HyperKit) or Docker Toolbox (uses VirtualBox)
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