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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?

#41

Post by marcan_42 »

reificator wrote: post #36
sweden wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are just planning to hack something to show some basic and buggy 2D rendering, 5 years might be realistic.

This talk was posted in another comment chain: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 This was 3 years after the hardware release, presented on substantially more locked-down (but x86 and PC-like GPU to be fair) hardware with a demonstration of Portal 2 running in real time. Presented by the person you are replying to. I'm also assuming there was no funding involved given the requirement to build an ex…

To be fair, as the author of that: that was mostly a job of reverse engineering what was weird/broken/different about the PS4's GPU, which is otherwise a standard Radeon. It was effectively adding support for a new Radeon variant chip of an existing GPU generation. There was definitely a deep dive into the platform and I reverse engineered the proprietary Radeon firmware CPU architecture in the process (which nobody had done before), though, so I think I get some credit for that. But e.g. the userspace side "just worked" after a few trivial library patches; AMD's entire userspace blob GL/Vulkan driver worked completely unmodified once the kernel side was fixed up.

This would be adding support for a completely different GPU, which is a whole different ballgame and order of magnitude of complexity.

That said, as many hours as went into the PS4 Linux project, it was a hobby thing and I'm pretty sure if you add up the hours spent on the GPU side it wouldn't hit one month's worth of full-time work. I'm also offering a whole different order of magnitude of time investment here.

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

#42

Post by macintux »

izacus wrote: post #30
internet2000 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it sells the hardware, where they make the most money. I don't think they will do something like that, but I think the reason is that they just don't care enough to dedicate internal resources.

Well, even for BootCamp, a marketed feature, they only dropped a halfarsed set of drivers which worked very poorly and were pretty never updated. We need to use hacked AMD drivers to get updates for the Radeons and the Macs still overheat and burn a lot energy due to lack of even basic power saving features. Heck, even the GPU switching isn't implemented. Why would there be expectation they'd do anything more for Lin…

> Why would there be expectation they'd do anything more for Linux?

Linux is more complementary, compared to Windows which has been an existential threat to the Mac since the 90s.

I agree with an earlier comment: I don't expect Apple will provide any assistance, but neither do I see it as entirely unlikely.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

marcan_42 wrote: post #41
reificator wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This talk was posted in another comment chain: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 This was 3 years after the hardware release, presented on substantially more locked-down (but x86 and PC-like GPU to be fair) hardware with a demonstration of Portal 2 running in real time. Presented by the person you are replying to. I'm also assuming there was no funding involved given the requirement to build an ex…

To be fair, as the author of that: that was mostly a job of reverse engineering what was weird/broken/different about the PS4's GPU, which is otherwise a standard Radeon. It was effectively adding support for a new Radeon variant chip of an existing GPU generation. There was definitely a deep dive into the platform and I reverse engineered the proprietary Radeon firmware CPU architecture in the process (which nobody…

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by oblio »

chippiewill wrote: post #39
heavyset_go wrote: post #12

If I thought there was a good chance of having the work upstreamed so that a mainline Linux kernel would eventually work on these computers, maybe. In my experience, there are not many ARM SoCs that have mainline support, even some of the Raspberry Pi boards don't, and they're some of the most popular ARM SoCs used for Linux. A lot of these projects get to the stage where a forked kernel will run on the SoC, but then…

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.

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

#46

Post by oblio »

internet2000 wrote: post #25
phendrenad2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt Apple would though. Why help people run non-standard OSs on your hardware with no App Store?

Because it sells the hardware, where they make the most money. I don't think they will do something like that, but I think the reason is that they just don't care enough to dedicate internal resources.

Apple is turning into a services company, though, look at their numbers.

And one of those core services is the App Store.

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

#47

Post by oblio »

internet2000 wrote: post #37
radlad wrote: post #28

Do we expect that this port will be complete before another chipmaker is able to achieve similar performance?

If mobile is any indication, expect the performance gap to widen as time goes on.

Isn't Qualcomm kind of the same distance behind with the most recent hardware? I don't get the impression that the gap is widening, with the new high perf ARM cores it seems to be shrinking, even.

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

#48

Post by sweden »

reificator wrote: post #36
sweden wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are just planning to hack something to show some basic and buggy 2D rendering, 5 years might be realistic.

This talk was posted in another comment chain: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 This was 3 years after the hardware release, presented on substantially more locked-down (but x86 and PC-like GPU to be fair) hardware with a demonstration of Portal 2 running in real time. Presented by the person you are replying to. I'm also assuming there was no funding involved given the requirement to build an ex…

I know very well who marcan is and I also have quite some experience in this area. I know how challenging these kind of things are and I just didn't expand on my argument because it is a very ambitious project.

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

#50

Post by macintux »

shmerl wrote: post #33
internet2000 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that since the first implementation of System Integrity Protection/Gatekeeper 5 years ago. It's been long enough to the point I think your comments counts as FUD... yes they can do it, but there hasn't been any indication they would.

I wouldn't trust Apple with anything. Lock-in is their bread and butter. Just because they didn't lock something down for some time means nothing given they are very aggressive with lock-in in other areas. You don't need FUD to know their infamous reputation.

The problem is this notion is not able to be disproved. While I'm completely confident that 10 years from now the Mac will still be open enough to be considered a "real" computer, I'm also confident that 10 years from now someone will be predicting its imminent demise because the water just keeps boiling hotter and hotter.

So we'll keep having this argument (and the argument over whether apps will be installable in the future without Apple's permission), over and again, year after year.

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