Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

I’m extremely impressed with anyone’s ability to do this at any age, but if I remember correctly, she’s like 17-19 years old or something? Incredible! You go Alyssa!

Re: Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

#5

Post by solarkraft » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

chownchown wrote: post #3

Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker? I kid. Now what I really wanted to ask.. Is it using Wayland?

Only framebuffers are currently available and a typical Wayland compositor runs through DRI (direct rendering infrastructure), which is a whole bunch more complex.

I haven't ruled out Mutter having a framebuffer backend, but I suspect she just ran it through X, which has one.

Edit: Looks like DRI is there after all: "Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now."(https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098).

Re: Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

#6

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

chownchown wrote: post #3

Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker? I kid. Now what I really wanted to ask.. Is it using Wayland?

> Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker?

This is of course a harder and more pervasive problem than one might realize. macOS Finder RAM usage can explode catastrophically and take down the whole system if you have image previews enabled and click on a very large (gigabyte) TIFF.

Re: Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

#7

Post by rpowers » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

I am forever in awe of the engineers that can work with the low-level bits and make things like this happen. I'm a deer in the headlights whenever I see addrs and `eax 0xDAFAC000...`

Re: Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

#8

Post by butterisgood » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 12:20 AM UTC

Excellent!

Re: Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

#9

Post by aviatordongle » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

rpowers wrote: post #7

I am forever in awe of the engineers that can work with the low-level bits and make things like this happen. I'm a deer in the headlights whenever I see addrs and `eax 0xDAFAC000...`

I was until I did some device driver development. Imagine it like trying to write a HTTP client for an undocumented SMTP-as-a-service HTTP server.

* you know how to make HTTP requests (you know how to use I2C or PCI or ...)

* you know roughly what an SMTP-as-a-service should do (you know roughly what a display driver should do)

* you don't know the URLs (you don't know the addresses)

It's a fun exercise in collaborative reverse engineering.

Also there's survivorship bias. The reverse engineering that's most likely to succeed (and thus be written about) are the most approachable ones.

Bravo to all those doing this stuff!

Re: Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

#10

Post by sys_64738 » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:19 AM UTC

Are there any videos of the movement of windows? Trying to gauge if it’s sluggish or not.