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Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

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Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#81

Post by grecy »

smoldesu wrote: post #15

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

> "it's faster than the last computer Apple made"

While true, I don't think that alone tells the whole story. It's worth adding that it gets about double the battery life of the last computer Apple made. It's about $1000 less than the last computer Apple made and it's so much quieter it can't really be compared.

When judged on the metrics that really matter to end users, it's a significant improvement from "the last computer Apple made".

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#82

Post by dolni »

nerdjon wrote: post #65
dolni wrote: post #13

As an outsider looking in, it's hard to take this post seriously. There are biases evident, the most glaring of which is the proclamation that "all of my software 'just works'" followed by a laundry list of software for which beta versions had to be installed in order to be functional at all (including Docker). It's frankly surprising to me how many hoops people are willing to jump through to use an Apple machine whe…

Since when has Docker on Intel Mac been crappy? The couples times I have tried to run Docker on Windows I have always stopped before I actually managed to get anywhere out of frustration. The experience compared to linux is nearly identical (maybe slightly better thanks too a couple shortcuts in the docker for Mac app that are nice for development). As far as the "laundry list" is concerned... 12 apps were listed. 5…

> Since when has Docker on Intel Mac been crappy?

Since forever if you actually try to use it for real development? https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77

> As far as the "laundry list" is concerned... 12 apps were listed. 5 were emulated, 4 were native and only one having a minor issue that was easily fixed. Only one of the apps needed a preview version and that was docker. VSCode worked fine emulated but there was a native version being tested.

I will quote the relevant parts of the article here since you can't be bothered to read the whole thing.

> One issue I encountered on both my M1 laptop and also a MacStadium MacMini instance that we use for Mac testing is that Brew randomly started to complain about git missing.

> The Docker team advise that QEMU is a best-effort approach and that it is best to run images natively as much as possible. I have encountered myself issues with some binaries when I tried to emulate them via QEMU.

> One thing to note is that Docker-in-Docker is not supported by QEMU (abandoned PR here). So you cannot run an arm64 Docker in an amd64 Docker or vice-versa. However, if you run your natively-supported Docker-in-Docker, the inner Docker can still run multi-platform images fine.

> Another issue that I noticed with the Docker preview on the M1 is that there are currently performance issues with multi-processor use - so much so that performance using a single core is sometimes slightly better than the performance of using 8 cores. Or at least that's what @jasmas claims. I've also seen some benchmarks testing the import of a database like MySQL, and it seems that there are some clear performance issues (~25X) with the Apple virtualization API. I've not seen such a drastic difference in common use, but hopefully these are addressed soon.

> An issue I ran into with the amd64 version was that I did not realize that the terminal was also an amd64 process (Again, Rosetta 2 is just that good). In some situations, this led to some strange issues when running Docker, where QEMU was acting up with segmentation faults. After some head-scratching the issue was resolved by switching to the ARM-based VS Code Insiders edition.

> I ran into issues when using the JVM. After investigating online, it seems that OpenJDK is not yet available for the M1. The way this was manifesting for me was that the JVM process would just hang randomly. By using --platform=linux/amd64 in Docker or in Earthly builds, I was able to get OpenJDK to work most of the time, but I'm still seeing random hangs.

All of these bugs after the author _initially_ wrote:

> All the software I need to use "just works". I found that if an ARM-native version is not available for an application, the emulated one works just fine and there's no performance drawback that I can notice.

> I am very confused where you are coming up with there being a ton of hoops or beta software needed for this.

Reading the article rather than skimming it helps a lot.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#83

Post by willcipriano »

danaris wrote: post #79
willcipriano wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ignore mobile games and games published prior to 2015 or so, that list is pretty pathetic. If your goal is to play those games from 2015 or older you can just buy a $300 pc off Ebay.

I have no idea where you got the idea that my games are mostly 6+ years old. It's not even slightly true.

The more I read into that list, the worse it gets. Cyberpunk 2021 is on the list because you can play it via Stadia. Clicking on the first item it says "The game can load up, but all the game text is invisible." but is marked as playable. Age of Empires II says "it runs but has hiccups every second, launcher can't display text. if you launch the game there is a 3 second freeze" but is marked playable. Six items on the list are listed as playable because of GeForce Now, Fourteen because it runs on Windows 10 ARM in a VM, and that is many of the newer games. Taking a look a Crysis(2007) it runs at about 45 frames a second, has audio issues and doesn't work for everyone as someone else said it won't even run, marked playable.

If you buy a M1 Mac for gaming I think you will be quite disappointed indeed.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#84

Post by lostmsu »

smoldesu wrote: post #15

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

Exactly same for me.

I am looking with wolf's eyes at the M1 and A14X performance. Desperately want it... in my Android phone, where I can install Firefox with uBlock Origin, and in my Windows laptop, that has a touchscreen and has no problems connecting external displays.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#85

Post by wiredfool »

nerdjon wrote: post #65
dolni wrote: post #13

As an outsider looking in, it's hard to take this post seriously. There are biases evident, the most glaring of which is the proclamation that "all of my software 'just works'" followed by a laundry list of software for which beta versions had to be installed in order to be functional at all (including Docker). It's frankly surprising to me how many hoops people are willing to jump through to use an Apple machine whe…

Since when has Docker on Intel Mac been crappy? The couples times I have tried to run Docker on Windows I have always stopped before I actually managed to get anywhere out of frustration. The experience compared to linux is nearly identical (maybe slightly better thanks too a couple shortcuts in the docker for Mac app that are nice for development). As far as the "laundry list" is concerned... 12 apps were listed. 5…

Anything with lots of host volume mount traffic sucks badly, inotify/watch, sequential reads, random reads, writes. It's all horribly slow.

Sometimes it takes seconds (10) for docker commands to start to run, which is super slow compared to a linux host.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#86

Post by smoldesu »

grecy wrote: post #81
smoldesu wrote: post #15

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

> "it's faster than the last computer Apple made" While true, I don't think that alone tells the whole story. It's worth adding that it gets about double the battery life of the last computer Apple made. It's about $1000 less than the last computer Apple made and it's so much quieter it can't really be compared. When judged on the metrics that really matter to end users, it's a significant improvement from "the last…

Well, I think that's the whole point of the remark. If we're going to continue to use Apple as a benchmark for Apple, then yes, they will improve year-over-year. The rhetoric behind the sentiment is that we should give up trying to compare Apple to x because their users will never hold them to those standards. If Apple releases a perfect laptop next year with replaceable components, an SD card slot and a magic smartcard reader, the community will parade and say "I told you so" rather than wondering why they let Apple get away with it for so long in the first place.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#87

Post by jmisavage »

smoldesu wrote: post #15

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

There are some known issues involving ultra widescreen monitors and color issues that are suppose to be fixed in the next release.

This may help you get multiple monitors running https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/24/m1-macs-able-to-run-six...

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#88

Post by smoldesu »

danaris wrote: post #68
Shivetya wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a M1 Mini, I do no development on PC or Mac. I use tools like editors and such but the work is all done on other boxes. So for me it is a matter of which type of machine covers the bulk of my needs. When it comes to Apple it always has been an issue if you wanted to play games. On intel macs you could VM or Bootcamp to windows. That isn't an option on a M1 mac. Worse, while some iOS games are coming to M series…

Another perspective: Macs can play more games now, natively , than they ever could before. I've been exclusively a Mac user my entire life (except for brief periods where I also had to use Windows for work), and I regularly play over a dozen different games, and own hundreds more, which run just fine on my 2019 MBP. Granted, I don't try to play the latest greatest AAA 6k 240FPS competitive shooters, largely because I…

This is just a list of games that boot in a VM. Compared to Windows, this list is a joke. Compared to Linux, this list is a slightly less funny joke. Unless MacOS gets support for DXVK, it won't even be in the same league as it's competitors. Installing Windows games on Linux is set&forget for 75% of the games available, with an additional 15% playable with minor tweaking. It's kinda hilarious that people think Crossover is an acceptable MacOS gaming experience...

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#89

Post by RantyDave »

I'm doing embedded development using an M1 and encountered my first arm/x86 related problem yesterday (trying to open an arm dylib from an x86 application didn't work).

Edit: VSCode Insiders build (referenced elsewhere on this page) is mad fast. Get it!

Honestly very impressed with this thing.

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