[HN Gopher] Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
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Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
Author : jackhalford
Score : 628 points
Date : 2021-01-05 19:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (asahilinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (asahilinux.org)
| mikece wrote:
| > Asahi means "rising sun" in Japanese, and it is also the name
| of an apple cultivar. Xu ringo (asahi ringo) is what we know as
| the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name.
|
| If for no other reason than how cool and fitting this name is I
| hope it succeeds.
| depablo wrote:
| Awesome project. Also, nice logo.
|
| Given the seemingly unbeatable performance of Apple Silicon
| (judging by reviews), this would remove one of the bigger pain
| points of having a Mac. Some projects just don't run on macOS -
| either due to a community lack, or due to political reasons (e.g.
| CUDA). I wonder why Apple does not seek to support projects like
| this.
|
| Will be interesting to see how hard it is to bring this to a
| useable state. Thanks for the effort and looking forward to
| hearing more about the project!
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Credit for the logo and website goes to soundflora* ! She's at
| https://soundflora.tokyo/ and she also makes some really
| awesome music.
|
| I was going to say I don't think you'll see CUDA any time soon
| on M1 machines but... apparently Nvidia _does_ have a beta
| AArch64 driver these days. TIL.
|
| I wouldn't hold my breath on that working well given that it's,
| well, the Nvidia blob... but it might (once we get Thunderbolt
| working, with an eGPU). I avoid Nvidia GPUs these days, so if
| an eGPU demo does happen, it'll more likely be an RX 5700XT
| running the open source amdgpu drivers, which I do happen to
| have lying around :-)
| gorkish wrote:
| Apple needs to give a little here.
|
| I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the
| assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at
| porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run
| on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside
| of Apple's labs.
|
| > In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU
| architecture and developing an open source driver for it.
|
| This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything
| other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation
| from Apple. After the street cred of getting a marginally usable
| OS up and running evaporates, why continue to take the effort of
| great engineers and waste it developing an ecosystem that doesn't
| care? It makes no sense to me.
| monocasa wrote:
| > This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being
| anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero
| cooperation from Apple.
|
| I think marcan has proven he has the chops for pieces like
| that. The ps4 linux port had him reverse engineering the ISA
| for the custom risc cores that are some of the deepest firmware
| of a pretty modern AMD GPU. Like even the open source drivers
| just treat this stuff as blobs and moves on with their life,
| but he had to port a fix over and showed off more publicly than
| anyone else had.
|
| This Apple stuff is for sure more work, but it all seems within
| his wheelhouse. Hence the patreon I think, attacking the size
| of the problem with some funding to make it more viable than a
| side project.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Also, it sounds like he just loves doing this. Everyone is
| treating him like a martyr but he's doing what he's good at
| and we're all benefiting.
| ece wrote:
| They could offer an equivalent to Nvidia's PTX ISA for compute,
| and possibly documentation like Intel and AMD offer for their
| GPUs. Offcourse, the first thing the latter would do is
| undermine Metal, so I don't think that's likely.
|
| Nvidia PTX-level openness for GPU-compute would be nice though.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| It was not different for PC for many years. Most of drivers
| were reverse-engineered, including GPU ones.
|
| That said, hardware was simpler back then. Implementing drivers
| for modern GPU is a hard task, may be an impossible one. It's
| like writing a second OS.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Apple sells hardware and now services. Software seems to be a
| cost center. So I doubt a third party OS like Linux will ever
| be a priority for them in their consumer products.
| modo_mario wrote:
| People aren't asking them to go out of their way to provide
| support or develop anything. Only to be open with their
| already existing documentation so that those open source devs
| that want can without doing unneeded work.
| IanSanders wrote:
| They may not want to encourage it. Being able to run linux
| comfortably would make users less dependent on the
| ecosystem
| vaxman wrote:
| This project is obviously a farce, but I would not say Apple
| is against Linux insofar as supporting it on the backend.
| Their own backends are designed for raytracing/render farms
| and will probably always run macOS though.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Why is it a farce? I don't get what you mean. Hector Martin
| is really good.
|
| Of course it might not actually go anywhere, it doesn't
| even have a commit yet, literally just a logo and webpage,
| but let's see.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| They don't necessarily need to _support_ it, but that doesn't
| preclude being open enough to let others do the work.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| They could simply release the specification documents that
| they obviously already have.
| ttflee wrote:
| Software is an essential supportive pillar which stands
| between its hardware and lucrative value-added services.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Otherwise you have a shiny brick
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| My shiny brick is in space gray
| zepto wrote:
| I don't think there is _any_ rush at all for Apple to do
| anything to support Linux on macs that are only a couple of
| months old.
|
| However I absolutely think they should produce a Bootcamp
| equivalent designed to support Linux on all Macs and iOS
| devices that Apple no longer supports with MacOS.
| ageofwant wrote:
| I don't think they have to do anything but publish the specs.
| That's not 'support' as far as I'm concerned. In fact its
| easy to argue that Apple will benefit from motivated top tier
| hacker feedback on their designs.
| bluepizza wrote:
| > This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being
| anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero
| cooperation from Apple.
|
| Why? There have been several success cases of reverse
| engineering in the past, for all sorts of popular and fringe
| hardware.
| gorkish wrote:
| I am all about the hacker cred here, but you need only take a
| look at the most directly comparable project, Nouveau to get
| an idea of how ridiculous the thought is that greenfield
| reverse engineering of apple's custom GPU will result in
| something that is desktop-class usable and reliable. Please
| remember that Nouveau can't even do better than a framebuffer
| on anything newer than a geforce 10 series card. GPU
| development is just too eratic and fast paced to even try to
| keep up the effort. Anyone willing to devote that kind of
| time and expense into the project would be better off
| engineering a GPU from scratch.
| SXX wrote:
| The reason why Nouveau got stuck is because Nvidia
| intentionally changed firmware loading process to break
| Nouveau and not cooperating on providing firmware. Also
| part of the problem is that main Nouveau developers are
| from Red Hat and they are limited in terms of RE of actual
| Nvidia code. Unfortunately some of Nouveau contributors
| dropped their efforts once Nvidia began to be actively
| hostile to the project.
|
| If you look at GPUs like GTX 650 they actually almost have
| feature-parity and 90% of performance. I personally used
| GT710 on my PC and while it super-low-end card it's really
| decent under Nouveau and can drive 3 of 2K displays with
| 75Hz and lag-free.
|
| As for Apple hardware it's different at least because
| Marcan isn't as limited in terms of keeping source code
| purity. After all Apple dont have any Linux drivers so
| there is no way to RE any code that can be directly applied
| to Linux graphics stack.
| ungamed wrote:
| It would be very possible and also related to RE code
| from the OSX stack though.
| deaddodo wrote:
| The problem with nouveau is more that it's trying to
| replicate the Nvidia blob driver (and then some), in that
| it supports multiple disparate architectures and at
| different levels (three generations might be a similar
| uarch, for instance). Replicating a single GPU driver would
| be significantly easier, albeit still a Herculean task.
| Especially if your main goal out of the gate is simply
| framebuffer support and maybe some 2D acceleration.
|
| At least, this is from my experience dealing with the Tegra
| X1 on a Jetson board for hobby osdev.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| Sounds like a fun project, honestly. I wonder how much
| 2D-only "legacy" functionality even exists on the thing.
| I expect not much. Going for something like Vulkan right
| off with a mind for it probably being built to accelerate
| Metal might be a viable angle.
|
| Total spitballing though. Once they come out with the 16"
| MBP I may have fun poking at it.
| deaddodo wrote:
| You can read about the architecture in their docs:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/gpu_featu
| res...
|
| It's a fairly generic TBDR architecture based on it's
| slowly-replaced PowerVR heritage and it still has fixed
| function hardware in the core of the architecture.
| hashkb wrote:
| See: the state of nvidia support on Linux today.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Well put, it's very confusing that Apple is willing to reduce
| the matter of Windows on M1 to a matter of licensing, but Linux
| on M1 is somehow seen as competition. I was gonna buy an M1 Mac
| Mini to replace my aging desktop, but Apple can forget my
| patronage if I can't control the hardware I own.
| wmf wrote:
| Several mobile GPUs have been reverse-engineered so it's not as
| hard as you think. As for the ecosystem, if users care enough
| to pay for it then it doesn't matter how little Apple cares.
| gorkish wrote:
| Small variants/extensions of mobile GPUs have been shoehorned
| to work with existing drivers or provide very basic
| framebuffer capability. This isn't exactly vulkan running on
| Apple-silicon level of functionality. Maybe Apple's
| implementation isn't so alien after all and these great folks
| will pull it off. I hope they do, but I'm still tempering my
| expectations.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Just a reminder, the Patreon is not fully funded. If people
| really want to see this happen, dropping a couple dollars a month
| to help support the project is the best way.
|
| https://www.patreon.com/marcan
| newacct583 wrote:
| No, Apple actually supporting it (in the same way that Intel,
| AMD, ARM/Linaro et. al. staff resources to support their
| hardware on Linux) is the _best_ way. But paying productive
| engineers via crowdfunding isn 't an awful workaround.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| We can't change what Apple does. Gnashing your teeth about
| that isn't going to help.
|
| What we can do is support this Patreon.
| ungamed wrote:
| Or do not buy the hardware..
| ogre_codes wrote:
| If you don't buy the hardware, why do you care if it's
| supported or not?
| alex_duf wrote:
| Is this the same project?
| kelchqvjpnfasjl wrote:
| Yes:
|
| Asahi Linux was founded by Hector Martin "marcan" after the
| launch of the first M1 devices.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/about/
| my123 wrote:
| With https://github.com/sponsors/marcan also present as an
| option.
| boogies wrote:
| Which IIUC should give him a larger fraction of your donation
| (all but payment processor fees for now, minus 10% after the
| beta ends), or you could pledge at
| https://liberapay.com/on/github/marcan/ and let him choose to
| take whatever fraction he wants (also excluding processor
| fees, forever +-).
| gitowiec wrote:
| Why there is VAT on every pledge? Using Patreon is not buying
| (that is what I believe, that is how similar services work in
| my country, they don't add extra tax).
| [deleted]
| blinkingled wrote:
| This is good of course but it's an uphill battle - just reverse
| engineering the Apple GPU and making a decent driver for it in
| itself is going to be a huge problem. Look at nouveau - we still
| don't have any way to reclock NVidia GPUs. Getting good
| experience and good battery life with reverse engineered hardware
| is impossible.
|
| Then there's going to be new gen hardware and firmware updates
| for existing ones to keep up with.
| SXX wrote:
| On top of what Marcan posted: keep in mind that back when
| Nouveau development started Linux open source graphics stack
| was young and had no mature drivers to look at. Only in last 4
| years graphics stack feature and performance parity thanks to
| Intel, AMD and Valve.
|
| Today LLVM is well-developed for GPU drivers and there is tons
| of other ready-to-use code for OpenGL and Vulkan
| implementation. E.g RADV was initially created by two
| developers only and now it is better than AMD official Vulkan
| implementation.
|
| On top of this modern GPUs are now less complex to develop
| drivers because they'e decoupled from display controllers and
| hardware no longer have fixed pipelines.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Thankfully, Apple loads most firmware for us in the bootloader,
| so we don't have the blob problem that Nouveau does. This
| includes parts related to power management.
|
| Nouveau has an uphill battle because Nvidia is actively
| hostile, and because they have to support dozens of chips. We
| are starting with one. I do not expect for us to end up in a
| Nouveau situation with poor performance/PM over time. It will
| take time, of course, but I fully expect we will make it
| happen.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Very happy to hear you're optimistic - more power to you! I
| might even sign up if I end up buying one of the m1 Macs :)
|
| Is the WiFi chip in the M1 Macs a solved problem or did that
| need to be written from scratch as well? Just curious.
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| > As long as no code is taken from macOS in order to build the
| Linux support, the end result is completely legal to distribute
| and for end users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of
| macOS. Please see our Copyright & Reverse Engineering Policy for
| more information.
|
| This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source
| components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour?
| Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific,
| driver-y bits excluded?
|
| [0] https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Worth noting that that OSS release does not include M1 support
| (and Apple does not open source most of their drivers, just the
| kernel core), although it does include (partially redacted, not
| buildable, because Apple) support for other mobile chips using
| the same CPU cores. Perhaps the next OSS dump will finally have
| the M1 bits. But we're definitely on our own for all of the fun
| stuff beyond "Linux boots with a serial tty".
|
| At least some really basic parts are useful as a hardware
| reference, e.g. things related to the interrupt controller,
| UARTs, and CPU quirks/errata workarounds. That said, their
| license is incompatible with the GPL, so we cannot take any
| code directly. I documented this explicitly in our copyright
| policy:
|
| https://asahilinux.org/copyright/
| saagarjha wrote:
| All the driver stuff is shipped as closed-source kexts, and
| interesting proprietary hardware features like GXF are missing
| too from the public sources for the most part.
| geogra4 wrote:
| Does Apple still maintain open Darwin? Can you run it on an m1?
| somehnguy wrote:
| Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours
| spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to
| accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take
| is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours?
| I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something
| complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in
| the sense of doing something pointless.
|
| In some cases all companies would have to do is _not_ actively
| hide or obfuscate things. In others it may take more effort but
| still just a drop in the huge bucket compared to developing a
| system in the first place.
|
| I love Apple's hardware, I even (mostly) love the OS. If they too
| believe that it is solid - why prevent people from running what
| they want? The majority will come back anyway - I've run Linux
| for years and still ended up on MacOS for simplicity. I'll still
| buy Macs and run MacOS because it works for me, it's not like
| letting me run Linux will cost them money or something. The vast
| majority of people don't know what Linux even is, there is no
| threat there.
|
| Please note that this comment is not directed at people who
| choose to spend their time on projects like this. You're awesome,
| I just wish you didn't have to put so much effort in.
| deepGem wrote:
| I am quite saddened by I also see it as highly challenging and
| reverse engineering is one of those excruciating tasks. Sadly,
| I am not a good C programmer and I just can't get myself to
| write C code.
|
| That said, with the rise of RISC-V architecture, I believe
| there will be viable alternatives to Apple silicon which are
| much more open. Building a new linux variant for those
| computers might be a lot less excruciating than reverse
| engineering Apple silicon. However, the timeline for RISC-V
| computers is a huge unknown.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| No, I'm saddened that people spend hours to support hardware
| from companies that go against users freedoms.
|
| We should work on what matters: free software, open hardware.
| nindalf wrote:
| > teensiest bit of cooperation
|
| Apple _did_ put in the effort to cooperate when they added
| support to boot other OSes. Apple hasn't prevented anyone from
| running Linux, they simply haven't written Linux drivers for
| their hardware or provided a manual to do so.
|
| Most of the effort in Asahi Linux is going to be writing
| drivers for hardware that hasn't had Linux drivers written for
| it. It makes sense that a Linux driver doesn't exist, because
| this hardware is new and no one has tried to run Linux on it
| before.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Apple never added support to boot other OSes on arm macs.
| emteycz wrote:
| It'd be impossible to boot other OS if Apple didn't put a
| lot of work into opening the device. It'd be like iPhone
| and need a jailbreak if they didn't.
| [deleted]
| FootballMuse wrote:
| Yet. They also didn't allow you to create or install third
| party apps on the first iPhones too
| simonh wrote:
| Er, like the vast majority of phones at the time. It only
| took them one more year to prepare and release both a dev
| kit and an App Store that revolutionised the industry.
| One year.
| emteycz wrote:
| Vast majority of phones before 2007 supported J2ME apps,
| it simply wasn't much useful without 24/7 internet
| everywhere.
| simonh wrote:
| J2ME was an utter nightmare, I know because I worked in
| telecoms back then. Mobile app development as an utter
| shitshow in 2007 with no signs of it getting any better.
|
| It just seems weird to complain that the company that
| made mobile apps mainstream "didn't allow it" earlier.
| The only reason they delayed a year is because the SDK
| wasn't publication ready yet. They hadn't even finalised
| the APIs yet and they were still very buggy at the launch
| of the first phones. We know that from interviews from
| former employees, the iPhone OS changed hugely between
| launch and the second phone a year later. A lot of the
| internal apps were extensively rewritten. Not a great
| time to push third party development.
| dusted wrote:
| Yes.
|
| "Oh, there's this hardware where the vendor tries actively to
| lock people out of other platforms and lock them into their
| own, they're real nasty guys.. Know what we should do? We
| should spend a lot of time making their product better, so more
| people will buy it, so they can continue their policies."
| Terretta wrote:
| From Asahi Linux FAQ:
|
| _Does Apple allow this? Don't you need a jailbreak?_
|
| _Apple allows booting unsigned /custom kernels on Apple
| Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn't a hack or an
| omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these
| devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not
| intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they
| probably won't help with the development)._
| mister_hn wrote:
| in this perspective, I'm saddened of all the electricity
| Bitcoin burns for futile intents. Imagine putting all these
| electricity for good purposes rather than making people rich.
| jojobas wrote:
| Apple doesn't lose anything by opening up to other OSes (or
| they could single out free ones).
|
| The hardware has already been sold, nobody's returning OSX
| for a refund.
|
| If anything, they're missing out on sales to people that live
| by "Linux or bust" motto.
| troyvit wrote:
| Back when Apple was a PowerPC platform I worked for a
| company that ported Linux to their devices (Yellow Dog
| Linux). It made sense because the PowerPC was a cheap RISC
| alternative so it was great for scientific applications
| that didn't want to pay out the nose for full-blown RISC
| hardware. At the time Apple saw this as putting an ugly,
| buggy OS on their awesome sexy hardware and it damaged
| their brand. Many people in Apple saw the benefit of
| selling more hardware but most weren't incredibly helpful
| because we were diluting their brand. We were allowed to do
| it, but Apple wasn't exactly psyched about it.
| p_l wrote:
| It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else.
|
| While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft
| actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even
| reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors.
|
| Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side,
| this means that they can escape the trap that cripples
| performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to
| deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means
| that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw
| interface.
|
| Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks,
| special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp.
| Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it
| properly, _it will be quirked_. This goes all the way to simple
| things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in
| memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on
| mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant
| machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process
| (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in
| some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces
| you 'd brick the laptop.
|
| Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable
| open platform, _especially open source boards_ , because making
| an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI
| is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot
| where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically
| built for the device is that people complained about lack of
| upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine
| defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| > It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else.
|
| It's done also to protect the brand, make it fancy, exclusive
| and costly for sure. Some fashion brands even destroys tons
| of wear just to not let them out with cheap price. "Walled
| garden" is very helpful here.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else.
|
| If I understand correctly, seeing the rest of the comment,
| your point is that it's cheaper to not have it adhere to some
| fixed standard.
|
| While I fully understand this position, and think that it's
| actually something that can help a vertically integrated
| company such as Apple, I think that the situation isn't an
| either or.
|
| Rather, things could be shades of grey. The way I see it,
| Apple could keep on doing their specific things because it's
| better for them. But once a given system (which can be as
| restrictive as a given combination of laptop size, generation
| and spec-level) is out to mass manufacturing, it becomes its
| own standard of sorts. As in each and every "late 2020 MBA
| 13" 8 GB RAM 256 GB SSD rev 1" or whatever are exactly the
| same. I suppose this has to be, since macOS has to know how
| to handle them.
|
| If I'm not mistaken this is what DSDT patching was/is about
| in the Hackintosh community: make the hardware present a
| "known" interface, such as MBP 15 13,1 so that macOS knows
| what quirks to load.
|
| So instead of Apple adhering to some "fixed" standard for all
| of their models for several years, they could just publish
| the "quirks" of each model.
|
| You want to run Linux on your MBA? This is how it works.
| You're on your own adapting Linux to this, mind, but this is
| how it works. And of course, you want next year's model?
| Better get busy adapting again.
|
| I think that would still be immensely better than the current
| situation and would help prevent the waste GP was talking
| about. I always concur with the claim that this would
| probably not lose Apple money. They don't make money any more
| through selling macOS itself and people looking to run Linux
| are probably not the biggest spenders on the mac app store
| either. But they could probably sell more macs.
| p_l wrote:
| Publishing such quirks list would require tracking them
| better, and possibly making sure they don't reveal anything
| bad about your devices.
|
| As is, they remain locked somewhere on Apple's
| institutional secrecy and they don't have to care except
| for Bootcamp as they do not officially support anything
| else, and just publishing a "quirk database" possibly means
| more support calls (not that anyone will pick them up)
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I don't think this is the reason. It is ingrained in Apple's
| ethos to prevent users from tinkering with their "perfect"
| devices, it was a core belief instilled by Jobs from the
| earliest days of the organization.
|
| Certainly, that could change given that he's no longer
| around, but change in a large organization often takes a long
| time or some external force. Since it's the most profitable
| company in the world, I don't expect them to go to the
| trouble of changing something that works for them.
|
| Edit: I obviously don't or have never worked there, so I am
| willing to stand corrected if anyone who has refutes this.
| fattire wrote:
| The original Apple Computer schematics were distributed by
| the company.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They were, and then there was NuBus, Apple's own floppy
| format, OS used a mix of Object Pascal and Assembly,
| Quickdraw, Quickdraw3D, NuBus, NetTalk,...
| Someone wrote:
| I don't think those are good examples. The. '80s were an
| era of rapid evolution, in which about everybody had its
| own low-level stuff.
|
| NuBus, being a standard predating it's use in the Mac
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus) technically was
| more open than the ISA bus on the PC (https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture: "The ISA term
| was coined as a retronym by competing PC-clone
| manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a
| reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT-bus with its
| new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture")
|
| In 1984, floppy formats were still changing all the time,
| so Apple picking something non standard for hardware that
| wasn't used much by anybody else wasn't unheard of.
|
| Writing an OS in assembly was normal, too. Shipping
| graphics libraries with it wasn't, but you can't blame
| them for writing their own. What should they have picked?
| X Windows is from June 1984.
|
| Quickdraw 3D, one could argue, should have been based on
| OpenGL, I don't think it was clear that would be a winner
| on the desktop in 1995. Also, they started with usability
| in mind, supporting easy copy-paste of models working,
| something OpenGL doesn't aim for
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%2B%2B did, but it
| started after QuickDraw 3D (and, like it, died))
|
| AppleTalk, similarly, started with usability in mind,
| leading to the use of thinner cabling (at the time,
| ethernet cables had a diameter of almost 1 cm
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5, required
| terminators, etc), easier configuration (plug in the
| cable, and you're good) and also predates the realization
| that TCP/IP is the winner, networking wise.
|
| I don't think anybody could have picked the
| pjmlp wrote:
| Had Copland been a success, and UNIX like stacks would
| never have been a consideration at Apple's HQ, specially
| after A/UX failure.
|
| Only thanks to the eminent insolvency, and reverse
| acquisition from NeXT did anything UNIX like had a say in
| Apple's business strategy.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Don't forget that Apple reversed course when Jobs
| realized that Apple was losing control with unfavorable
| OS licensing deals circa 1997 [1]. It's clear that since
| then, exclusivity and absolute control has been their
| mantra.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Jobs_en
| ds_the_...
| anoncake wrote:
| It may be cheaper for Apple. For society, it's a huge waste
| of resources.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, it sucks. Why are these companies so uncooperative? I
| have a Clevo laptop and I actually emailed them asking for
| documentation or some kind of help. They replied with an Ubuntu
| help page. I had to reverse engineer it in order to implement
| some features on Linux and I didn't manage to figure out
| everything.
|
| It's very hard work and I have immense respect for people who
| are able to reverse engineer entire systems. There would be no
| need for this activity if companies just played nice but since
| they don't I'm glad that there are people out there doing this
| work.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Did Apple ever try to prevent people from running Linux on
| Macs? It sounds like that is what you're saying, but my
| impression is quite the opposite, the made Bootcamp etc.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Almost 20 years ago when they were struggling for survival
| they even sponsored a Linux distribution.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux
|
| > Terra Soft Solutions held the unique distinction of being
| the only company licensed by Apple to resell Apple computers
| with Linux pre-installed
|
| A fact that I bet many HNer aren't even aware of.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| ...which doesn't work at all on arm macs this submission is
| about.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Yes, but the effort they put into that clearly shows that
| they are not against people installing other OSs, so there
| are other reasons, like the fact that the M1 macs have only
| been out for a month.
| tmpUserA wrote:
| Yes I agree
|
| Also in a similar idea, I think PostMarketOS, LineageOS, /e/
| foundation, etc. are nice for privacy minded people on the
| short-term, but on the long term if we want things to truly
| change, we have to take both hardware & software independence
| like PinePhone & Librem 5 are doing.
|
| If the foundations you build upon are too hostile towards you,
| on the long run you'll spend all your time & money fighting
| them instead of achieving you original goal.
|
| However sometimes it becomes near impossible to do your own
| thing. Google has infected the whole manufacturing world with
| their own Android HAL & specific drivers and now it's
| impossible to find any competitive modern SOC running standard
| Linux decently (with GPU, Linux drivers, etc.). Which is why
| PinePhone has an old crappy chip and Purism took an automobile
| chip for their phone. And even that might disappear as
| IoT/Cars/Planes/etc. are using more&more Android instead of
| Linux. Even Microsoft is moving to their own chip.
|
| The situation is very sad and extremely anti-competitive, but
| soon, the only way to run your own platform on some modern
| hardware might be reverse Eng (if that's even still legal by
| then)
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I would say that I wouldn't use Apple hardware if it didn't
| have an OS that doesn't prevent developers from working
| properly - like Linux.
|
| But really, the state of their support is so garbage I don't
| care what the performance of their systems is like. I know
| their warranties aren't worth anything and their disregard for
| consumer laws is absolute.
|
| Never will I buy their garbage.
| Grustaf wrote:
| The triple negative has me confused, are you saying macOS
| prevents developers from working properly? I know very few
| developers that don't use macs, is this what you're actually
| saying?
|
| What support of theirs is "garbage"? Their documentation for
| some aspects of iOS/macOS frameworks has been pretty bad for
| a few years, but that's probably not what you're referring
| to?
| Razengan wrote:
| One reason of not documenting is when something is expected to
| change rapidly and break in the next version anyway.
| totorovirus wrote:
| Another japanese named OS:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU
| architecture and developing an open source driver for it.
|
| Well, this is exciting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone
| would take on this challenge, but it's exciting all the same.
| flatiron wrote:
| judging by other open source reverse engineerd GPU drivers its
| a massive undertaking. i also looked at a shot of the chip and
| see lots of neural networking functionality, i wonder what sort
| of special drivers stuff like that needs. i just feel like the
| hardware is so specialized without apples help it would take a
| lot for it to be a killer linux laptop.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You can't just not use that functionality. But getting the
| GPU to work is essentially required.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Reverse engineering of the Neural Engine is already under
| way:
|
| https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/tree/master/ane
| skavi wrote:
| wow, and by George Hotz of PS3/comma.ai fame too.
| actuator wrote:
| It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity
| with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not
| succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story.
|
| Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as
| well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience
| was just not there.
|
| We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux
| distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think the situation is simple:
|
| People don't care whether their laptop is ARM, x86 or z80. They
| want to know:
|
| 1. will it run my apps?
|
| 2. does it have good overall performance (in a broad sense, not
| just compute)?
|
| 3. is it a competitive value?
|
| We've known about the _potential_ strengths of ARM for decades,
| but nobody has been able to implement it in a way that checks
| all three boxes until now.
|
| MS was putting out devices that checked 0/3 boxes
| nereid wrote:
| Yes, Microsoft locked the laptop to avoid Linux to be
| installed.
| zinekeller wrote:
| With the RT, yes it was indeed locked as the market pattern
| and target at the time (with iPad and Android tablets) have
| been to lock the system at the benefit of better curation and
| more integrated experience (well some will point out and
| argue that this was more of a lock-in, but obviously a
| Windows without malware was a goal also). The newer ARM
| attempt however were a complete reversal: Microsoft had
| dropped the focus on phone and (to an extent) tablet markets
| and even recent first-party Surface have unlockable boot
| systems, something that was impossible with Surface RT
| devices.
| r00fus wrote:
| Perhaps it's because the M1 is not just a random ARM chipset.
|
| For those wondering why Apple has a market cap of $2T this may
| be a good reason.
|
| They have the ability to stage, time and deliver something like
| the M1 Mac whereas other massive corporations like Microsoft,
| Google, Intel, etc simply can't.
| macintux wrote:
| Watching Apple vs the rest of the industry when it comes to
| long-term strategy reminds me of Marvel vs DC in the film
| industry.
| mauz wrote:
| Interesting could you elaborate?
| macintux wrote:
| Well, from all appearances Warner Brothers saw the wild
| success of Avengers and decided they needed a big
| superhero mashup, thus the disastrous rush to create a
| Justice League movie without the gradual build-up of
| story lines and characters that the Marvel films
| produced.
|
| Apple takes the Marvel approach to their technologies:
| releases features (of varying initial quality,
| admittedly) that gradually improve and are incorporated
| into bigger and better products.
|
| Siri has never been best-in-class for anything, but has
| been a big part of making Apple Watch and AirPods so
| successful.
|
| Apple invested in their own CPU designs for more than a
| decade before finally unveiling the M1 lineup.
|
| Apple chose to shrink the Mac operating system to fit the
| iPhone, instead of porting the iPod OS, which gave them a
| unified set of APIs, and has made it practical to have
| Catalyst as a (still somewhat raw as I understand it)
| toolkit for writing software across iPhone, iPad, and
| macOS, plus of course iPhone and iPad apps can run
| natively on M1.
|
| Most of Apple's competitors lack the freedom or the
| desire to bet the company on a specific direction;
| Microsoft of course has released Windows for ARM but has
| not, and cannot, tell their partners they have two years
| to switch or get left behind, for example.
|
| Apple can set long-term strategic goals and follow
| through on them.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| They failed to have good backwards compatibility.
| takeiteasyy wrote:
| My hypothesis for why it failed is because the only real value
| Windows provides is with legacy Windows applications, which
| their ARM platform did not provide (at least to a comparible
| level).
| EamonnMR wrote:
| That was certainly why I dismissed the platform and never
| purchased it or attempted to build apps for it. Wintel is the
| platform, not just Windows.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Maybe it is not Qualcomm that is to blame, but it is Apple to
| be praised. But I guess I am talking glass half full / half
| empty here, so nevermind :D
| esclerofilo wrote:
| I think they are to blame. Qualcomm is one of the biggest (if
| not THE biggest) manufacturer of ARM chips, yet they still
| simply use reference designs. Besides, for the next flagship
| (Snapdragon 888) they switched to Samsung 5nm (inferior to
| TSMC 5nm) and they're not even using the ARM-recommended 8MB
| L3 cache, but staying with 4MB.
|
| It seems benchmarks for tha SoC aren't bad, but it really
| shows that they aren't really trying to catch up to Apple.
|
| (My source is https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-
| snapdragon-888...)
| WanderPanda wrote:
| But isn't ARM to be blamed if the standard designs (which
| apparently almost everyone is using) are inferior?
| esclerofilo wrote:
| Yes and no. The problem is those standard designs have to
| please a very wide spectrum of customers, so in a lot of
| the tradeoffs in chip design (like area vs performance)
| they tend to lean more towards keeping area small. The
| Cortex X1 is supposed to change that, though, but it's
| very new.
| actuator wrote:
| Yeah, Apple definitely deserves a lot of praise on these
| chips. They are not even incremental improvements but drastic
| ones which will probably change the landscape completely.
|
| Like AWS was working on their own ARM chips, they now have a
| benchmark to go against if they even can. In DCs a lot of
| spend is on just power consumption. If these chips can really
| drive compute in servers at a much lower power consumption,
| it is just not monetarily good for the company but good for
| the planet too.
| newusertoday wrote:
| Qualcomm will supply whatever customers will demand, Die area
| of apple chips is significantly bigger than qc chips, if qc
| were to make similar chips will microsoft or for that matter
| any other vendor pay for it? it all comes down to that.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Microsoft also saw the opportunity of tablet computing, media
| players, smartphones, and basically every other category where
| Apple has kicked them the pants despite coming out way later.
|
| In this particular case, Microsoft wanted an iPad, right down
| to the complete and total lockout of all third-party app
| distribution. They wrote a completely new UI toolkit for
| fullscreen tablet apps that only Store apps could make use of,
| then shipped an ARM port that refused to load anything but
| those signed fullscreen tablet apps. The comparatively less-
| locked-down Intel models succeeded far better than the
| WinRT/ARM ones, so the lesson was mislearned as "people want
| Intel".
|
| Apple knows that interfering with how people get their software
| to try and collect revenue is not a great idea; that's why the
| M1 Macs have the same security policy as Intel/T2 ones. If they
| had locked it down iOS style, creative professionals would be
| fleeing the Mac in droves and Adobe would seriously start
| considering native Photoshop on Linux.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM
| opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow
| managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story.
|
| It's definitely not a stellar ARM laptop story, but the ARM
| laptops have been at market for years prior to the ARM Macbook
| release. Not porting Chrome for the initial release was a huge
| blunder IMO. No one wants to use Edge. Having a chip with
| performance parity targeted at Intel's i5 might have been a
| mistake, too.
|
| But (while admittedly not as stellar as M1 Macbook) we have
| options: the Envy X2, Yoga/Flex 5G, Surface Pro X, Galaxy Book
| S.
|
| The M1 validates Microsoft's strategy to embrace ARM. Hopefully
| the third-party software devs are able to port their software
| in order to make this transition easier.
|
| Qualcomm stopped their own CPU design a while back and if
| they'd have kept that going then perhaps there would be a
| better competitor to the M1. Or maybe they just need to drop in
| a better reference design from ARM?
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Looks like his donation/sponsorship page is down :-(
|
| I'm super excited someone is taking this on. Hopefully Apple
| contributes drivers as well -- they only stand to gain from the
| success of this project.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| There's also a GH Sponsors page:
| https://github.com/sponsors/marcan
| Hamuko wrote:
| Wouldn't the sponsorship page be this:
| https://www.patreon.com/marcan
| my123 wrote:
| https://github.com/sponsors/marcan is a better option.
|
| (much lower fees present there)
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I think the Patreon is the best place to donate
|
| https://www.patreon.com/marcan
| codetrotter wrote:
| I was wondering if this was the project of the guy that talked
| about doing this a while back, which I read about here on HN and
| indeed it is.
|
| Announcement post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-
| launch-45852093
| spurgu wrote:
| I came here thinking this was a separate attempt and was going
| to share that Marcan has already started working on it and that
| there could be some collaboration.
| djhworld wrote:
| Really hope they pull this off.
|
| The initial target of the M1 Mini is probably the smart choice,
| I'd imagine all the power management stuff in the laptops might
| be a big task to reverse engineer
| marcan_42 wrote:
| It's also the simplest hardware (no keyboard/trackpad/internal
| screen/camera to worry about), and no-PM Linux will be useful
| already on the Mini (no so much on laptops).
| rickdg wrote:
| Given the level of technological proficiency of people interested
| in this project, why Patreon tough? A platform that carries all
| the fees back to the person you're trying to support and puts
| their own cut on top for basically hosting a few iframes? Is this
| really the best way to provide some monthly income? I
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I also have GitHub Sponsors!
|
| https://github.com/sponsors/marcan
|
| I want people to pick whatever platform they are comfortable
| with, and Patreon is very popular, so I offer both. But yes, in
| principle GitHub sponsors should have lower overhead (I'll have
| to wait until I get income from both to see exactly how it
| works out after the intermediaries involved).
| ilaksh wrote:
| Wondering about GPU and ML hardware acceleration with this? Like
| TensorFlow or PyTorch, or OpenGL/Vulkan using the ML/graphics
| chips?
| [deleted]
| mgalgs wrote:
| Everyone keeps saying this is "a lot" of wasted resources...
| AFAICT it's just one guy right now, and even if it were a small
| team that still sounds like a bargain. I would expect it to take
| at least a small team within Apple to get Linux running on their
| new hardware.
|
| I worked on SoC chip bring-up at Qualcomm for a few years and
| it's literally hundreds of engineers working for weeks to get
| Linux running, and that's with not only technical documentation
| but direct access to the hardware engineers who designed the
| stuff. That was 5 years ago but I assume not much has changed.
|
| If this one guy (or a small group) ports Linux to the new
| MacBooks on a "Patreon salary" I'd say we got a smoking good
| deal. I'm rooting for them and happily donating.
| fareesh wrote:
| Do the cons of open sourcing device drivers really outweigh the
| pros? Good / popular hardware will end up benefitting from all
| kinds of contributions from interested folks. Plus the
| recruitment pool and onboarding of new talent expands by a
| reasonable amount, in theory.
|
| Is it really the case that somewhere in the drivers there is some
| secret sauce that is so ingenious that if the competition got
| wind of it, it would give them free access to a lot of hard work
| and research, and enable them to catch up?
|
| I guess I've never really dealt with super secret proprietary
| magic beans before so I can't relate.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| For projects like these, I don't know why Apple doesn't just step
| in and help. What have they got to lose?
| sneak wrote:
| I agree with you in theory; in practice Apple seems to have
| enough issues just getting their own in-house OS to work right
| on these things.
|
| A lot of macOS internals are really a reflection of Apple's
| deadlines-over-everything, ship-at-all-costs attitude. Certain
| parts are great, because those teams seem to be great and are
| blockers, such as the kernel or the silicon. Other parts closer
| to the surface that aren't in quite as critical a path, all the
| way up to documentation... not quite as much.
|
| Overall they do a decent job, and are certainly moving in a
| good direction security-wise (although not privacy-wise). It's
| just clear that many of their teams are stretched extremely
| thin.
| deergomoo wrote:
| My biggest wish for the Mac is to take macOS back off yearly
| releases. Or at least make every other yearly release minor,
| just to add compatibility with whatever got added to iOS.
|
| What's the point in having a big release every year if takes
| six months to sand down all the rough edges?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I agree. At the very least, they should be a corporate sponsor
| for Marcan's Patreon. Ideally they should just hire him and
| provide him with internal resources to work on it. Even if
| Apple doesn't benefit from Linux running on bare metal, many of
| these efforts will benefit Linux running inside a VM as well.
| ksec wrote:
| Or they could donate anonymously, supporting its development
| without their official logo.
| monocasa wrote:
| I don't think hardly anything here will help Linux running in
| a VM FWIW. The unknowns are mainly the Apple specific IP
| blocks which aren't exposed to VMs.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Depends if you care about having graphics or audio in your
| Linux VM. Currently I think Linux VMs are just console
| only. Also, there is a lot of accelerated hardware which
| the CPU has which would be nice to get access to inside a
| VM.
| INTPenis wrote:
| It's also bonus points towards sustainability to ensure their
| devices have a life after obsolescence.
|
| Honestly Apple could use some of those points considering how
| many little plastic parts they force people to buy.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > It's also bonus points towards sustainability to ensure
| their devices have a life after obsolescence.
|
| This is my primary interest in this project. Given Apple's
| support life for Macs, I don't think I will ever use it,
| but I'd like to have the option the same way I was able to
| extend the life of my G4 iMac.
| kamalhm wrote:
| It's not what they got to lose, but what they got to gain for
| doing this? Which is almost nothing. Except they fully support
| linux on their laptops too
| x87678r wrote:
| What have they got to lose?
|
| 30% cut of app store, icloud, apple+ TV, Safari users, Maps
| users, Incremental Market Share.
|
| Realistically lots of people could end up preferring Linux over
| MacOS, why risk it?
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| What they got to win? It is probably quite small userbase.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a platform
| whos creator is unwilling to provide support.
|
| I think it's part of the Linux ethos to run on everything, but I
| also think this kind of effort is ... not wasted, but I feel like
| it could be spent more efficiently.
|
| Still looking forward to hear about the first successful boots
| and the epic reverse engineering feats.
|
| Just wish this kind of stuff wouldn't be needed anymore and
| companies would just release their specs already.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a
| platform whos creator is unwilling to provide support.
|
| If Linux only ran on hardware which the creator was willing to
| provide support, Linux would not exist. Linux was created in
| spite of Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc etc. Support from the makers
| only came later.
|
| Linux was originally an OS created by people who wanted to do
| things the OEMs and commercial vendors didn't support. While
| it's cool that a lot of manufacturers support Linux now, that's
| not where we came from.
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe you're over-interpreting "support". The x86 PC platform
| at least provided documentation for OS developers while Apple
| Silicon doesn't.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Not sure what you are getting at here. Getting Linux to run
| on the M1 already works... it's ARM Linux. It already runs
| on a VM on the M1 unmodified. I suspect we'll see Linux
| booting on M1 hardware within 6 months, likely less.
|
| What is going to be a much bigger struggle is getting the
| drivers for all the various other bits of the architecture
| working properly. The GPU is the biggie, but networking
| drivers, power management, audio drivers... the DSP, etc
| etc.
|
| All of the the things which are going to be difficult to
| get right on the M1 were an uphill battle on x86 as well.
| And no, Nvidia never provided documentation for their GPUs,
| it was a long time before we had good graphics support on
| Linux. Even audio drivers were a mess. Wifi modems were
| problematic well into the 2010s.
|
| Most hardware makers still don't document hardware
| features, the good ones provide binary drivers, and plenty
| of others rely on known interfaces so they work with older
| drivers.
| toyg wrote:
| _> it was a long time before we had good graphics support
| on Linux_
|
| <implying that we actually have good graphics support>
|
| In practice we have _tolerable_ drivers (depending on any
| given year), typically with terrible power management...
| and it took 20 years - on a platform that was much more
| transparent than what Apple will ever provide, given half
| the chance.
|
| Doing it all again on an even-more-wilfully-opaque
| platform, built by a company that is GPL-hostile and does
| not care for interoperability, seems fairly masochistic
| and self-defeating in the long run. I'd rather see great
| hackers, as the dude here, spending their time doing
| amazing things for companies who aim to provide the "good
| ARM laptop" experience for Linux. _That_ I would pay for.
| We didn't really have the chance to do this for x86 since
| Linux started with zero marketshare; that's not the case
| anymore, we have a decent critical mass both in terms of
| hackers and consumers, we should leverage that imho.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > on a platform that was much more transparent than what
| Apple will ever provide, given half the chance.
|
| I spent 15 years screwing around with X86Config files
| trying to get Nvidia support working. The idea that
| anyone could be _less opaque_ than that seems unlikely.
| Well into the early 00s I had a laptop with a worthless
| internal wifi card and an expensive aftermarket card
| because the internal card had zero support.
|
| I have no idea how transparent Apple is going to be
| regarding their technology, but it can't be any worse
| than what we dealt with with Nvidia prior to getting
| their binary blob solution out.
|
| Apple is one brand, one stack. Even if Apple offers no
| support at all, that is going to be a hell of a lot
| easier than fighting hundreds of OEMs building one-off
| cards and onboard sound/ wifi/ video drivers with no
| interest in Linux.
|
| I'm not talking up Apple here. But it really seems like
| people have forgotten what a shit-show driver support was
| on Linux for decades. And however uncooperative Apple is,
| just the fact that it's a single monolithic stack is
| going to make it massively easier.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Let's ignore the money pumped by IBM and others.
|
| Linux exists because POSIX subsytem on Windows never had much
| love, had it been OS X like and Linux would have stayed an
| hobby OS.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Seems unlikely.
|
| The success of Linux had a lot more to do with performance,
| resource requirements, and security than POSIX compliance.
| You could get a lot of the essential pieces running on
| Windows, it just required spending twice as much on
| hardware to do it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Quite unlikely.
|
| Linux in 1994 didn't had any of that, just a toy OS
| trying to be UNIX.
|
| Had Windows NT kept its POSIX compatibility story in a
| proper way, hardly anyone would bother to contribute.
|
| Just like GCC only got serious contributions after Sun
| started the trend to sell UNIX SDKs and no longer have
| the development tools as part of a base UNIX
| installation.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Fully agree.
|
| Sometimes the uphill battle gets tiresome tough.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Sometimes the uphill battle gets tiresome tough.
|
| Yep.
|
| Apple hiring just one engineer and giving them access to
| internal resources would be massive. Or just giving them an
| engineering contact for support.
| pkulak wrote:
| Mac hardware is just so damn good though. And everywhere. I
| absolutely agree with what you're saying... but man, Linux
| working well on an M1 Mac would be my ideal machine.
| rightisleft wrote:
| is it? my 2016 macbook was the worst apple product i've ever
| owned...
| ksec wrote:
| Well All 2016 - 2019 MacBook are pretty much junk. As shown
| by their resale value. So it was probably one of the worst
| Apple product ever.
|
| But the Pre-2015 MacBook Pro and M1? They are great. (
| Although M1 still have shitty keyboard )
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| > Although M1 still have shitty keyboard
|
| Curious have you used the new M1 keyboard? It's a totally
| different mechanism, and feels completely different than
| the ~2019 MBP I have for work. I would go so far as to
| say that the 2019 keyboard was hands-down the worst
| keyboard I have ever used, but the new one is really
| excellent. I really enjoy mine. It seems to me to be one
| of the better laptop keyboards I have ever used. Maybe
| not quite as nice as some of the better lenovo models,
| although I'm not quite sure.
|
| If you have used the new keyboards, what do you dislike
| about them?
| ksec wrote:
| >If you have used the new keyboards, what do you dislike
| about them?
|
| Key Travel. And Spacing between Keys although I could
| cope with that a little easier. I find Most people who
| like the new M1 / Magic Keyboard are either
|
| a) Those that actually like / have no problem with the
| butterfly keyboard ( Macbook 2016-2019 )but much prefer
| to have the reliability of old scissor ( Macbook Pre 2015
| )
|
| b) Those that didn't like butterfly Keyboard but was
| forced to use it for work, and got a new scissors / Magic
| Keyboard ( 2020 / M1 ) would find it to be so much better
| than butterfly.
|
| But then if you have an old scissors to compare to the
| key travel is just so much better.
|
| Butterfly Keyboard - 0.7mm New Magic Keyboard - 1.0mm Old
| Scissors Key - 1.3mm
|
| ( Key Travel means the distance pressed downwards before
| the keystroke is recognised )
|
| It is not like I didn't spend time trying the Butterfly
| and the New Magic Keyboard at work. And it just didn't
| work out. My MacBook Pro at home is Pre 2015. And the old
| scissors just give me so much more responsive feedback
| for only a _cost_ of 0.3mm thickness.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| I'm still using my 2013 MBP on a daily basis. Fucking
| beast. Though I need to do a battery swap.
|
| Far superior to my 2019 MBP my employer got me.
| oneplane wrote:
| While I understand what everyone is complaining about, I
| have no problems or failures with any of them, except a
| battery swap on the 2015 13" when it started swelling up
| after 2000 cycles. The keyboards and trackpads are
| different but I can do my work on them just fine all the
| same. The 2017 has the benefit (to me) of working a bit
| like the Magic Keyboard 2, the 2019 is not that much
| different from that, and as far as the other user-facing
| I/O is concerned, the screen, sound, ports and palmrests
| are all pretty good. The 2015 is starting to feel a bit
| odd (small keys, small trackpad) and without Thunderbolt
| 2 the I/O would not have the bandwidth I wanted.
|
| The only thing I have had break was a 2009 MagSafe
| charger, the insulation somewhere in the middle started
| getting brittle, probably some sort of chemical reaction
| causing it to lose its flexibility. But since I only have
| 1 MagSafe first revision device left it doesn't matter
| that much. (and I don't use it that much either)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Although M1 still have shitty keyboard
|
| On the contrary, much like the 16" 2020 MacBook Pro, this
| is probably among the best MacBook keyboards ever
| created. Apple definitely stepped it up when they finally
| responded to the criticism of the 2016-2019 MacBook
| keyboards.
| midrus wrote:
| Worst apple product is still far ahead of most non-apple
| alternatives. At least laptops wise.
| reader_mode wrote:
| My previous ThinkPad X1 is a superior device to my 15
| inch i9 MBP (2018) in every way - thermals, keyboard,
| touchscreen, issues with 5k display for over a year,
| Bluetooth issues.
|
| I needed a Mac for iOS development so I went all out
| since I do all sort of development - and this is by far
| the worst premium device I owned.
|
| With that said M1 Macs look really good and I'll probably
| upgrade if they refresh the 16 inch.
| midrus wrote:
| I did use a thinkpad X1 for a long time some years ago, I
| actually want to go back to an X1, it is the best
| alternative. But honestly, if I go back to it would be
| making a good bunch of trade-offs as well and mostly to
| satisfy my inner wish of using Linux and Open Source
| software instead of Macos.
|
| But still:
|
| 1) After a few months, the screen of the thinkpad started
| to get permanent scratches from the keyboards. This is a
| common problem, see [1]
|
| 2) The keyboard is better, totally agree. But the
| trackpad is much, much worse. I managed to adapt to the
| bad keyboard on the mac, I didn't manage to adapt to the
| trackpad on the X1.
|
| 3) The quality of the screen has no point of comparisson.
| Color gamut, calibration, resolution, etc. I like the
| WQHD screen, but it is not available for the X1 on many
| countrie outside the US. In my country (Spain) you only
| have the UHD which is a fantastic battery draining mirror
| or the FHD which reminds me of the nintendo 64 when
| looking at it. Let's not talk about scaling hi dpi
| resolutions, and deciding if using Wayland or Xorg so
| that I can plug an external screen with different
| resolution, etc.
|
| 4)Battery usage is not as optimized
|
| 5) I think nowadays this is better, but at the time
| (around 3 or 4 years afgo) I had lots of problems on
| Linux with bluetooth, resuming after suspending, and the
| fingerprint reader. Hopefully this has improved since
| then.
|
| 6) Price wise, they are as expensive as an equivalent
| macbook
|
| A being "good" or "bad" has a lot of aspects to it. It is
| not just "It has the same CPU freq and the same amount of
| memory then they are equivalent" (not what you're saying
| but something many say when doing this comparison). Build
| quality matters, integration/support with the operating
| system matters, support matters, upgradeability matters,
| resale value matters.
|
| And also, just compare the f __*ng mess the Lenovo
| website is. Every time I think about going back to
| thinkpad, browsing such a terrible, slow, clunky,
| outdated, terrible thought out website makes me regret it
| and just close the tab.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=thinkpad+screen+keybo
| ard+scr...
| reader_mode wrote:
| I have to admit I never use trackpad - I always carry a
| Bluetooth mouse (keyboard as well with my MBP because of
| how terrible it is) and for couch surfing touch screen is
| king for me. I also had a yoga and would go for that X1
| next - the versatility is amazing (bed/couch/travel media
| use in the reverse V position is 10x better than tablet
| and laptop)
|
| Battery life is about equal on this MBP - it's just a
| terrible CPU for a mobile device. But more importantly I
| use battery about 1-2% of the time - ergonomics are just
| not good enough for it IMO.
|
| X1 Yoga with an AMD CPU would be my ideal laptop but
| unfortunately it seems like AMD gets pushed to gamers and
| budget laptops still
| Wohlf wrote:
| I really don't find them any better than the competing
| products in the same price range these days, but you do
| you.
| midrus wrote:
| Show me your examples of competing products.
| samatman wrote:
| Resale value is the closest thing to an objective measure
| we're going to get.
|
| The butterfly keyboard era Macs took a nosedive in this
| metric, because they were bad computers.
|
| I have what turns out to be the last Intel 16" MacBook
| Pro which Apple will ever build. I suspect the Intel part
| of it will make its resale value kind of grim, but the
| keyboard, speakers, monitor, build quality: all great.
|
| MacBooks traditionally resell at a significant premium,
| because they're good computers with a long useful life. I
| expect this will be true for the M-series as well,
| although it's too soon to know.
| klelatti wrote:
| I bought a new Intel 13" MBP just before the M1
| announcement specifically because I needed an x86
| machine.
|
| No intention to sell but I suspect resale value will stay
| OK as there is likely to be ongoing demand from those who
| want a Mac for x86 cloud development (and non-technical
| users probably don't care if its x86 or M1).
| kube-system wrote:
| My shop is also all x86 in the cloud... but I took the
| plunge anyway. I'm glad I did; Rosetta 2 works really
| well.
| klelatti wrote:
| That's good to hear. The critical issue for me would be
| running an x86 (incldung AVX) Docker image on M1.
| Reasonably sure that's not going to happen in the near
| future.
| kube-system wrote:
| FWIW I think they've got QEMU baked in to docker desktop
| to emulate x86. But I've just been using a remote docker
| daemon.
| klelatti wrote:
| Thanks - that'a really helpful to know. I'm not sure that
| QEMU has AVX but will investigate further.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I got Linux running on a MacBook 14,3. It was ... less than
| ideal.
|
| https://battlepenguin.com/tech/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/
|
| ..but I also don't want to see Linux get left in the dust.
| I'm more likely Intel or AMD crush the M1 in their next few
| generations.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I think that's pretty unlikely. The M1 is a totally new
| world from even the best x86 processors, especially in a
| laptop. Not only that, but Apple has indicated that the
| next generation is yet another quantum leap from this
| one. Eventually other companies _will_ catch up, but I
| doubt it will be anyone without a stake in ARM already.
| NVIDIA looks like the one to do it.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| I have run Linux on a Macbook pro (several times; several
| different models; up until around 2013). Was always a
| good experience . . . EXCEPT: trying to get power
| management dialed-in. (a package from Apple would be very
| helpful here).
|
| Of course, now with TouchBar, I have no idea if that is
| even supported on Linux at all. I assume it's not, and if
| it is, it's a complete pain in the ass. (but honestly -
| could possibly be GREAT, if it weren't for the loss of
| the 'esc' key).
|
| I seem to recall getting Debian running on my dual PPC
| Mac Pro was also difficult; with power management - but
| on the other hand, I was using it as a server and ran it
| full-blast 24x7 anyway. Damn that thing was loud.
|
| I only see the M1 making power management that much more
| complicated, (due to custom chipset and lack of support
| from tools that are standard on x86-based linux distros).
| The main thing you'd stand to gain from the M1 platform
| is power and heat management. So I am cautiously
| optimistic that anyone wanting to port linux there will
| possibly pay close attention to putting together a
| package of tools that will work.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think you're comparing it to the wrong thing.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Yeah of course it is! Don't you know how the Cult of Apple
| works? We proclaim it is, so it is.
|
| Edit: Whoops, I broke the first rule of the Cult... Here
| come the downvotes.
| marmaduke wrote:
| Would it be materially different than Linux running in a VM
| on m1? Because you can have that now
| Megranium wrote:
| It doesn't feel "right", there's resolution issues, and I
| never got real-time, low-latency sound running in any VM
| ... so, I'd say yes, by all means.
| comex wrote:
| GPU support would make a big difference.
| wmf wrote:
| I would expect a VM to have better GPU support since
| AFAIK Parallels and Fusion have already implemented it.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| What VM matches the performance of a mac mini?
| viraptor wrote:
| Trying to display at native full screen resolution from a
| VM is not a great experience. Or at least I couldn't
| achieve that without lag on any hypervisor. On top of that
| you're paying the battery tax because of virtualisation.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| Every time I accidentally hit something on the touch bar, I
| hate that I still have a Mac. Every time I intentionally use
| the ESC and have to touch it two or three times, I hate the
| Mac. Every time I need an F key, or want to do something
| without looking (like change volume or hit mute), I hate the
| Mac. Thank goodness this year I stopped using it so much as I
| did not have to repair the keyboard twice and potentially get
| COVID as in previous years.
|
| All in all, I am glad to dislike Macs with their abysmally
| bad keyboards and actively hostile and negatively productive
| touch bar. WSL is pretty nice.
| skavi wrote:
| They've swapped out the butterfly switches for more
| conventional scissors. They've also added back a hardware
| ESC for all models and never added a touchbar to the Air.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I mapped caps lock to escape and liked it so much I did it
| on my thinkpad too.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I find it interesting that all your gripes are focused on
| keyboard, yet you hate the Mac
| pkulak wrote:
| I've got two 2015 Mac Book pros kickin' around my house and
| they're amazing. Add in the M1 Air I just picked up and it
| looks like my perceptions are a bit colored by skipping
| that 4-year Mac Book dark era.
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| The critiques you have of Macbooks of touchbar and keyboard
| wouldn't apply to the Mac Mini. And they have an M1 Mac
| Mini.
|
| Personally, I would love an M1 Mac Mini that ran Linux
| well. Very exciting development.
| astrange wrote:
| They don't even apply to Mac laptops, which have
| different keyboards and a physical Esc key now.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just imagine this effort being spent on improving Linux OEMs
| hardware offerings instead.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Yeah, I also see a tough situation developing a few years down
| the road when Apple inevitably closes the platform even more
| and harms features of this project. Hopefully I am wrong.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > inevitably
|
| It's been inevitable for 10+ years now.
|
| Maybe this word doesn't mean what you think it means.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Regardless of semantics, I think my comment was too
| pessimistic and you are correct.
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| If they arent actively opposing it that can be enough.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| On any other apple computer I'd agree, but I _really_ want some
| of that sweet ARM magic.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Just wait for SiFive and RISC-V, that's going to be the
| revolution I'll join :)
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Don't you still have to pay to license SiFive IP?
| nanagojo wrote:
| They simply don't have the funds or fab to compete with M1
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Oh believe me I fully intend to ride that train, but I'll
| wait for it to get to the station first.
| astrange wrote:
| RISC-V is a kind of lame and poorly designed ISA and the
| hardware designs aren't going to be nearly as fast.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Not useful for someone who wants a laptop within the next
| 10 years.
|
| Top of the line laptops are probably going to be last
| devices that adopt RISC-V even assuming it significantly
| gains market share from ARM and x86.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Yes, but isn't same true about most of the hardware?
|
| Just a fraction of notebooks comes with Linux. I'd like to but
| I've never bought one. Smartphone manufacturers are not
| cooperative, NVIDIA got finger.
|
| Personally I would not recommend buying hardware thinking it
| would be supported in the future. Linux hardware acceleration
| for Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) never materialized.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Linux hardware acceleration for Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo)
| never materialized._
|
| Ironically there is a bit of an underground effort on Chinese
| forums for getting acceleration on _Windows 9x_ using the
| leaked SGX code and docs. I came across that a while ago when
| I was looking for something else, when it was still in its
| early stages. If you do not care about EULAs and other
| Imaginary Property laws, there is a whole new world to
| explore...
| Badfood wrote:
| I'll buy our whole company these macs in a heartbeat if this
| becomes good enough
| deadmutex wrote:
| Why not support a hardware vendor that actually cares about
| linux?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Why not buy hardware that doesn't suck?
|
| I still have a Thinkpad for my primary laptop, but using a
| mac with retina, 5-10hr batt life, and a nice touchpad for
| work is such a joy compared to a 1080p matte screen with 3hr
| battery life.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| 1440p Matt screen, 24G Ram, i7. Battery life all day. Still
| cheaper than a weaker specced Mac.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| But x86, so missing the point entirely.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > 1440p
|
| > i7
|
| Surely you're joking?
| deadmutex wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Is it because 1440p + i7 is power
| hungry or something?
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, it's because they are worse than what Apple is
| shipping.
| deadmutex wrote:
| Ah, I see. I see it as an underspecified comment :). They
| didn't specify the price of their system, so it is hard
| to argue either way.
| deadmutex wrote:
| I mean, there is a wide range of products here. If we're
| comparing anecdotes, I have a personal MBA with a TN panel
| with less than 1080p screen, and crappy built-in webcam.
| But it is not fair to compare it to another laptop I use
| which was designed and manufactured later.
|
| Keep in mind that battery life is not just about hw, and
| requires careful tuning of the OS. However, the OP is
| talking about running linux on it, so the batt life will
| definitely NOT be as good as running MacOS.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Apple devices always have been usually quite attractive, but
| currently, there is no better ARM hardware for the end user
| available. A lot of people would like to use some other cpu
| than x86 and on top of that the M1 is currently perhaps the
| most attractive notebook cpu.
| Klonoar wrote:
| People value industrial design, for one.
| deadmutex wrote:
| Is the Mac laptop ID significantly different than other
| laptops, e.g. PixelBook Go? I have a MBA, and was super
| surprised at how think it was compared to my Pixelbook. I
| would say that Apple laptop ID nothing special, and is
| lacking things like a touchscreen, etc.
|
| I would say that M1 has good performance ON MAC SOFTWARE,
| which has been tuned for it (and vice versa). It is unknown
| if linux will perform as well on it.
| Klonoar wrote:
| The PixelBook is closer, sure - though still not as great
| when it comes to, say, the trackpad. Apple also still has
| a near-monopoly on amazing screens. These might seem
| inconsequential when you scan them on a list, but the
| entire package really adds up.
|
| Anyway, with that all said, the thread in question is
| about vendors who explicitly support Linux, which is a
| very different story. If I had to pick anything in that
| realm that I'm excited about, it's... maybe Purism's
| upcoming Librem 14, mostly due to them trying to do
| something custom. Relies on them actually shipping it,
| tho.
|
| I remain surprised that System76 hasn't done more towards
| a non-rebranded laptop shell. I really like their desktop
| offerings, but I've no need for a desktop in my life.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I'm pretty sure System76 would really love to design an
| build macbook level laptops with M1 level chips, but how
| the hell are they ever supposed to get there?
|
| It took Apple, what, 13 years from the iPhone to the M1,
| surfing on the wave of success of the iPhone.
|
| There isn't even a processor vendor that is capable of
| supplying them an M1 level chip.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I didn't say that System76 needs to pump out an
| M1-comparable laptop off the bat.
|
| In fact, my comment specifically notes "non-rebranded
| laptop shell" as that would go a long way to turning
| around the cheap feeling they currently have.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Yes, sorry, I was getting ahead of myself, mixing in the
| M1 stuff.
|
| But my point still stands: it's hard for them to do their
| own design with the numbers they sell. They started with
| desktops, because it's easier to do them custom. I hope
| they will be able to grow into being able to do custom
| laptops as well.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Being able to have someone on call for support is pretty
| valuable too, no?
| wtetzner wrote:
| One reason I can think of is that the hardware from those
| vendors is less appealing.
| drno123 wrote:
| I would switch our self-hosted servers to Mac M1 Minis if this
| goes through.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That's quite a hypothetical investment to make on the back of a
| project that might not exist in half a decade, or will have
| shifted resources from supporting M1 Macs to supporting the new
| Apple hardware that gets released every year.
|
| If you want actual mainline Linux support, buy hardware you can
| boot any generic Linux ISO on, which precludes all most every
| ARM SoC, including M1 Macs. Recent ARM servers implement
| SBSA[1], which means they can run ARM Linux ISOs just as well
| as x86 machines can. With ARM SoCs like the M1, you're married
| to whoever is generous enough to donate time and resources into
| rolling out bespoke Linux images for your specific SoC.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...
| ostenning wrote:
| Considering that one of Apples major revenue streams is selling
| hardware, you'd think Apple would want to actively support
| Linux.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Apple deprecates support for older Macs in new macOS releases
| after 6 to 7 years. It's part of the incentive to upgrade.
| libria wrote:
| Very interesting overall.
|
| > Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon
| macs without a jailbreak! This isn't a hack or an omission, but
| an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.
|
| Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily
| convenient oversight?
|
| > Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but
| to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS.
| Doing this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple
| Silicon is a completely undocumented platform. In particular, we
| will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and
| developing an open source driver for it.
|
| This looks like the major bullet point. The wiki is currently
| empty, but while it's WIP, it would be nice to see some of the
| major milestones or breakdown of the goal mentioned above.
|
| Best of luck to Hector and the contributors!
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| > Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily
| convenient oversight?
|
| Could not the same be said for any computer manufacturer? How
| do we know for sure Dell won't start locking down future XPS
| models?
| chpmrc wrote:
| Apple adds limitations to protect the system: "too strict!"
|
| Apple gives the chance to disable these limitations to power
| users: "they should be disabled by default!"
|
| Apple disables limitations: "temporary convenient oversight?"
|
| ...
| ciwolsey wrote:
| I see nothing wrong with any of these speculations. If you or
| Apple don't like speculation the answer is for them to
| communicate their intention.
| zepto wrote:
| They have communicated their intention openly. Just listen
| to any of the podcasts where Gruber interviews senior execs
| about this.
| machello13 wrote:
| They've plenty communicated their intention to not turn the
| Mac into the iPhone/iPad. And besides which, it would be a
| disastrous product strategy to do that, from a company
| that's absolutely top-of-the-ball when it comes to product
| strategy.
| sneak wrote:
| There are entitlements on macOS that are not provided
| outside of the App Store, such as NetworkExtension API
| VPNs.
|
| There is also no way to turn off the persistent,
| hardware-serial-number-based APNS connection to Apple,
| tracking the system from IP to IP whenever it's on, even
| when no apps are running.
|
| You also can't wipe and restore a mac with filevault
| without an online reactivation from Apple, even if you
| have local bootable install media.
|
| There are several concrete, technical advances toward the
| thing they are claiming not to be doing. macOS is indeed
| becoming more like iOS every release. It's not just
| unfounded paranoia.
| sjwright wrote:
| The matter of Filevault isn't necessarily a bad thing,
| for many people it's a highly desirable feature. I like
| the fact that iOS activation lock significantly lowered
| the value of stolen iPhones; I look forward to the same
| happening with MacBooks.
|
| And if you don't like it, just switch it off.
| sneak wrote:
| You can't switch it off. Every current mac requires an
| online reactivation, even ones without an activation
| lock.
|
| How could activation lock possibly work otherwise? Once
| wiped, it doesn't know if it's activation locked anymore.
| oneplane wrote:
| There is also no way to disable your persistent radio
| connection on your cell modem (except for turning it
| off), and your network provider will know your location
| and radio tower etc as well. Same applies to your mac:
| you turn the appliance off and then the connection is off
| as well. You turn it on and it's connected again.
| fsflover wrote:
| Are you serious?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
| machello13 wrote:
| Sorry, that seems like a total non sequitur to me. What
| about that (an outage + a failure to correctly handle the
| outage on the clientside) suggests Apple is planning to
| lock down macOS like iOS, either in terms of hardware or
| software?
|
| Or rather, maybe you'd like to explain what you think
| Apple would have to gain from doing something like that?
| fsflover wrote:
| You cannot start any non-Apple applications unless Apple
| explicitly allows them and keeps a list of what and when
| you are running. Looks totally fine...
| machello13 wrote:
| Again, I'm having trouble making the leap from this:
|
| "Apple checks which macOS applications I run in order to
| verify that the developers credentials are still valid
| and not expired/revoked, but only for macOS apps and not
| executables in general, and you can still open apps that
| are not signed with a Developer ID using a manual bypass"
| (which is certainly not ideal but seems like a reasonable
| security compromise. There's no evidence they're keeping
| a list of this information anywhere.)
|
| to:
|
| "Apple will lock down macOS and make it utterly
| impossible to run any executable or even scripting code
| that hasn't gone through a strict review process"
|
| Since you're unwilling (or unable?) to explain that leap
| without just spouting pithy 3-word comebacks, I guess
| we're done :)
| fsflover wrote:
| I suggest you read the comments in the linked thread. Why
| do I have to repeat those who can explain better than me?
| It's pretty clear that the current state:
|
| 1) cannot be called "fully unlocked",
|
| 2) more locked than what people used to have, even on
| Apple devices.
|
| It might be fine for you, but it certainly is potentially
| bad for privacy and freedom. Look up keyword "tor" in the
| thread if genuinely want to understand and not trolling.
| johnofthesea wrote:
| But isn't it possible to turn off System Integrity
| Protection and Gatekeeper?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > They've plenty communicated their intention to not turn
| the Mac into the iPhone/iPad.
|
| Of course not, because they need to differentiate. This
| doesn't mean they renounce their plans to further lock
| down macOS. Running non-appstore apps is getting harder
| and harder each year.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Apart from the fact they've actively stated (repeatedly,
| during their main presentations) that running arbitrary
| code on a mac will not be changing.
|
| For a company that seems sometimes to go out of its way
| to _not_ give any information on _anything_ it doesn 't
| make sense to clearly and concisely make that statement.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > running arbitrary code on a mac will not be changing.
|
| i wonder how much of this is thanks to peoples "gnashing
| of teeth" about mac getting an iphone lockdown
|
| in the end its speculation, but id wager a guess apple
| wouldnt have a big problem locking down macos if people
| didnt make a big deal out of it
| bun_at_work wrote:
| It's almost certainly not due to "gnashing of teeth."
| They've always marketed the MacBook line as a general
| computing device for power users. The idea that they
| would make it impossible for developers to use their
| primary computing product is ridiculous. They know how
| many of these things they sell to students, developers,
| etc.
|
| Just a note - it's often very easy to measure the
| validity of your ideas by considering the economics of
| the ideas. Apple effectively neutering development on
| their premier general purpose computer would obviously
| reduce the amount they sold. The same isn't true for the
| iPhone, which effectively no one develops on.
| sjwright wrote:
| It's also very clear that Apple sees the iPad Pro--not
| the Mac--as their vision for locked-down general purpose
| computing. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see a
| notebook iPad with a fixed keyboard, or a desktop iPad in
| the shape of a small iMac. These seem unlikely and
| perhaps absurd... but not nearly as absurd as locking
| down the platform Apple expects developers to use.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| While at the same time continuously tightening the noose
| on Gatekeeper. I wonder why people wouldn't take their
| word for it...
| DCKing wrote:
| It's a bad faith argument. The presupposition is that Apple
| is inherently motivated to actively lock things down, because
| that's what they do with the iPhone. This glosses over that
| Apple has no reason to actually do so, only has reasons not
| to do it on the Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't
| treat the Mac as the iPhone. It's based on the notion that
| Apple would be against free booting _a priori_ for some
| reason.
|
| Mind you, not all bad faith arguments are unwarranted. I kind
| of get where it comes from. But it's important to recognize
| that's that what it is, and there's no reason to actually
| believe it.
| bsaul wrote:
| The reason people assume apple will prevent you from doing
| what you want with your computer, is because it's the
| logical consequence of the strategy they've followed for
| the past 10 years over their whole product line. From
| phones, to cable, to messenging software. They're into
| vertical integration and walled ecosystem.
| DCKing wrote:
| Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it
| so.
|
| If Apple truly had this strategy they're doing a horrible
| job at it. Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on
| doing so at least) NetBSD and countless other things on
| practically every Mac they've ever released, including
| the latest ones. They're doing a horrible job at
| communicating this strategy too, because they're
| communicating the opposite. For this Apple Silicon phase,
| it seems they've also missed a huge opportunity to
| finally execute on this strategy by spending a little
| time and money to develop the tools to do the _opposite_
| of that strategy and give users a way to boot unsigned
| kernels.
|
| I just don't buy it, sorry. I don't even get why Apple
| would _want_ to do this outside of sheer malice.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it
| so.
|
| Goes in both directions.
|
| > Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on doing so
| at least) NetBSD and countless other things on
| practically every Mac they've ever released, including
| the latest ones.
|
| Gatekeeper wasn't a thing either, until it was, indeed, a
| thing.
|
| > They're doing a horrible job at communicating this
| strategy too, because they're communicating the opposite.
|
| Surely that's the whole point of a _trap_?
|
| > For this Apple Silicon phase, it seems they've also
| missed a huge opportunity to finally execute on this
| strategy by spending a little time and money to develop
| the tools to do the opposite of that strategy and give
| users a way to boot unsigned kernels.
|
| Sure, because right now they're trying to sell the idea
| of M1 Macs.
|
| > I just don't buy it, sorry. I don't even get why Apple
| would want to do this outside of sheer malice.
|
| App Store, censorship, ... You could turn that around and
| ask why they would want to lock down their iOS devices,
| and why you think that those reasons wouldn't apply to
| Macs.
| DCKing wrote:
| > Surely that's the whole point of a trap?
|
| I mean, this is exactly the bad faith argument I was
| talking about right here. If you want to view this as
| smoke and mirrors until they "trap" you by all means go
| ahead, but it does shut this conversation right down.
| spideymans wrote:
| >Surely that's the whole point of a trap?
|
| I've been hearing about this supposed secret Apple plot
| to lock down the Mac and take away third party software
| distribution and operating systems for a decade now. If
| this is indeed Apple's plot, then they're _really_ slow
| at implementing it. Maybe they 'll sort it out in another
| decade.
| bsaul wrote:
| they never had a real advantage on the desktop / laptop
| that would justify locking you in, until now.
|
| They could do it on mobile thanks to the vastly superior
| user experience.
|
| When steve jobs announced itunes on windows he said "hell
| froze over". That should tell you how much they take
| openeness into consideration.
|
| I'm still waiting for iMessage to be an open protocol, or
| for my iphone to be able to use a standard charging
| cable...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| oneplane wrote:
| Apple is trying to make a trusted computing platform (for
| various reasons) with the side-effect that activities that
| they do not feel like supporting (for various reasons,
| money and experience being the first that come to mind) are
| not available. It's not a hand-wringing evil person in a
| throne trying to think of ways to make people sad.
| e12e wrote:
| > The presupposition is that Apple is inherently motivated
| to actively lock things down, because that's what they do
| with the iPhone. This glosses over that Apple has no reason
| to actually do so, only has reasons not to do it on the
| Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't treat the Mac
| as the iPhone.
|
| What is the difference between an iPad pro and a MacBook?
| If Apple can get away with a 30% tax on all commercial
| software, and arbitrarily manage which applications are
| "allowed" - why would they not want to extend that to their
| laptops? If they still get people to buy and developers to
| develop?
| DCKing wrote:
| > If they still get people to buy and developers to
| develop?
|
| Well they won't get away with that at all, especially not
| in the long run as people abandon ship to platforms that
| do allow free development and tinkering. Apple is still a
| hardware company with hardware sales making up the
| overwhelming majority of their profits (over 75%). It
| would be beyond stupid to risk that just so they can live
| out a control fantasy, especially because they don't
| _need_ to live out that control fantasy to make good
| money from the Mac App Store.
| alwillis wrote:
| _Well they won 't get away with that at all, especially
| not in the long run as people abandon ship to platforms
| that do allow free development and tinkering._
|
| _Before_ the M1 Macs shipped, Apple 's Mac revenue hit
| an all-time high of a smidge over $9 billion [1]. During
| a global pandemic and economic crisis.
|
| The Mac will be 37 years old on January 24, 2021 and yet,
| it continues to gain momentum, not lose it. Between 1984
| and now, not a year has gone by without the same
| narrative: Apple is doomed if they don't change their
| ways...
|
| The M1 Macs are probably selling like proverbial hotcakes
| --we'll find out on January 27th [2].
|
| People seem to forget that the Mac mini, the MacBook Air
| and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are the _entry-level,
| consumer oriented_ computers in Apple 's lineup. These
| machines are the opening act.
|
| And even as stunningly fast as these machines are,
| especially on a performance per watt basis, we haven't
| even seen the take-no-prisoners, kick-ass professional
| Apple Silicon Macs yet.
|
| We'll probably see Macs from Apple that don't have the
| space and power constraints of the current lineup. If
| they cranked the current SoC beyond the current 3.2 GHz,
| added more cores and started at 16 GB of RAM... they
| would capture another huge chunk of the market, including
| a significant number of Linux users...
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-
| fourth-...
|
| [2] https://www.apple.com/investor/earnings-call/
| stopFalse wrote:
| We've seen Apple remove competition from the App Store at
| will.
|
| This is not theoretical.
| DCKing wrote:
| I'm not sure how that means anything when it comes to
| locking down Macs. If you're trying to make a general
| argument "Apple is capable of doing bad things", that's
| of course trivially true but does not at all imply
| they're interested in locking down the Mac's bootloader?
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Except for potential Anti-trust litigation, I don't see any
| reason for Apple to 'not lock' its M series computers from boot
| loader to app store in the near future as the walled garden +
| vertical integration has been their most successful business
| strategy.
|
| One should be naive to think that the conversion to M-series
| wasn't done with the intention to lock the macOS platform akin
| to iOS.
|
| I wouldn't be even surprised if doing so didn't attract anti-
| trust issues as they got away with iPhone, iPad which are not
| lesser computer than a PC especially since several applications
| are becoming 'mobile first' or even 'mobile only'; So it's
| ridiculous to compare smartphones, tablets to game consoles
| whenever this topic is brought to the discussion.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Indefinitely? How do we know it 's a feature vs a
| temporarily convenient oversight?_
|
| Basically nothing can be known to be indefinite. But Apple has
| signaled that they'd be open for ARM Boot Camp if Microsoft was
| to sell non-OEM Windows for ARM licenses. So it seems like
| Apple might consider multi-booting a feature.
| Klonoar wrote:
| >How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient
| oversight?
|
| Considering the level of GUI work that outright supports this
| feature in recovery mode on an M1, I'm inclined to think it's
| not an oversight.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| It's a feature because it's literally a whole set of command
| line options and settings in their boot policies, which is
| documented in man pages, with all the warnings about normal
| users not having to use any of this that you'd expect.
|
| It's a whole pile of code that Apple doesn't need, and could've
| just removed or never written in the first place, that was
| written _explicitly and only_ so people could run unsigned
| kernels on Apple Silicon macs.
|
| Yup, the wiki is almost empty - I was hard at working getting
| the site/IRC/branding/etc worked out. Expect things to pick up
| steam on that front starting tomorrow, as I will now focus on
| hardware documentation and getting things through low-level
| boot bring-up.
| GordonS wrote:
| This is really promising, but I do think scepticism is
| warranted - Apple _loves_ their walled gardens.
| abestic9 wrote:
| There's a not-insignificant number of people that want to
| do more with their Mac than run software from a single
| marketplace.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Yes, I am one, but is Apple really better off selling
| more machines but having fewer people inside their eco-
| system?
| tadfisher wrote:
| Presumably those people would just not buy Apple hardware
| if buying into the ecosystem was a requirement. So if
| that number is non-zero, and Apple sells hardware above
| cost, then yes, Apple is better off selling only its
| hardware and not its services to this small subset of the
| market.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Thats the thing though. The hardware is so good that
| there are people who would run Linux on the Mac if they
| could, but since they can't they cave in and just run
| MacOS. I have an M1 and its so much better than my Linux
| XPS 15 that I just end up using the M1 (and getting
| sucked into their eco-system). And this is just their
| first release!
| ravi-delia wrote:
| But it's not like they get a whole lot more money from
| someone being 'in the ecosystem'. The main thing would be
| an iphone, but even counting that I think that they'd
| make more selling the hardware with a little flexibility
| than hoping to lure people in. The fact of the matter is
| that the M1 isn't just a good laptop, it is the _best_ ,
| and the next round will be better. That's enough of a
| sales pitch that honestly the software might be holding
| them back.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Or they could, I don't know, help Linux OEMs reach that
| level.
| nyolfen wrote:
| they may be better off in future antitrust proceedings
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| > Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily
| convenient oversight?
|
| Apple could take most of the speculation/hostility away by
| simply giving their word for it. But they don't ...
| Bluerise wrote:
| First of all the feature wasn't available in the initial Big
| Sur release and it only got available during the Betas for the
| first minor patch. Second of all, some Apple developer stated
| on Twitter that (during M1 unveil) he's finally able to show
| all the boot policy work they worked on the past year(s) to
| allow users to boot foreign OSes and without opening up holes
| for attackers.
|
| Basically it boils down to: they could have just used iBoot
| without changing it at all to keep it as a brick like the
| iPhone/iPad/Watch, but instead they invested plenty of
| resources to _allow_ it.
|
| With all that work done to allow it, I'm sure there'll be
| plenty of people inside of Apple who'd protest if someone
| changes their mind and decides all this has to go away.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I'd say there might be ongoing work to support
| Windows/BootCamp but in true Apple tradition (or maybe due to
| MS delays) it is being kept secret
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Apple's outright said it's a matter of Microsoft agreeing
| to license Windows on ARM for consumers. Right now putting
| Windows on an ARM Mac is about as legal as Hackintoshing.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I don't think that's what Apple said at all-they just
| said the ball is in their court, which means that they
| want Microsoft to write Bootcamp essentially.
| DCKing wrote:
| Yeah. Someone - cough cough Microsoft - would need to be
| convinced to write a Boot Camp Assistant app equivalent
| (okay), a Windows bootloader (okay), various device
| drivers for Apple Silicon hardware revisions for Windows
| (big ugh), graphics drivers for Apple Silicon GPUs for
| Windows (VERY big ugh). Microsoft will need to _very_
| motivated to distribute Windows on ARM for this to
| happen, _even if_ Apple gives them access to all the info
| they need which is not a given by any means.
|
| ...I don 't think this is going to happen, and Apple
| probably doesn't either.
| Twisell wrote:
| Apple have developed Bootcamp and provided drivers so far
| for Intel Mac. But shipping Bootcamp for Windows ARM
| would be an EULA violation until Microsoft loosen theirs
| conditions. Changing this is literally step 1.
|
| Wether Apple would develop Bootcamp for ARM or not is
| purely theoretical discourse until then.
| DCKing wrote:
| The only driver Apples needed to develop for Windows are
| Mac specifics though, like the stuff that was managed by
| the T1. Not trivial, but not the end of the world to have
| to make. Things like wifi drivers and especially the
| graphics drivers are just the chip vendor's standard
| preexisting Windows drivers.
|
| Apple is now the vendor of at least the GPU. I don't
| think they're going to write a Windows driver for that -
| the incentives are just not there.
| ksec wrote:
| If I remember correctly Windows on ARM is still limited
| to 32bit Apps.
|
| And you can actually download Windows on ARM from
| Microsoft Insider Preview for Free. And run it on top of
| Parallels Desktop 16.
| benjaminl wrote:
| Windows on ARM supports 64bit ARM apps.
|
| What you were possibly remembering was that Windows on
| ARM when it was first introduced only supported emulating
| x86 apps. Although x64 emulation is currently in preview.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Legacy x86-64 app emulation has only just appeared in
| alpha form and still has massive compatibility issues.
|
| I'd still call it something we hope to see in the future,
| instead of a working proof of concept.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA
| Technically wrote:
| Is there any point of running windows outside of intel
| processors? I'm aware they have an ARM offering but it's
| not clear what the "killer apps" of the OS/arch pair are.
|
| I'd think linux/BSD drivers would be the concern here!
| brundolf wrote:
| That would make a lot of sense. Windows is in a tight spot
| right now because OEMs have lagged on ARM. Apple could
| offer MS a way out of that, while at the same time giving
| people one more reason to spend money on a Mac.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Right, if MS is serious about Windows on ARM, they should
| support the Mac as a show case and also to allow all
| future Mac buyers the chance to run Windows. Of course,
| Apple can't announce much until Microsoft makes an
| announcement about Windows on AS Macs.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Is MS not busy looking at doing their own ARM silicon for
| future Windows powered Surface devices after release of
| M1 and the failure Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 8cx (we
| just use ARM reference designs) ???.
|
| They do have the chops for it since they have done Xbox
| and Hololens and various other devices in-house.
| Hamuko wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-
| arm-p...
|
| There are rumors.
| unilynx wrote:
| Maybe they are already developing their own "MS1" in
| secret ?
|
| But even if they are, it would make sense to release
| Windows 10 for the M1 and getting Win-developers to start
| porting their applications to ARM, so they could leap-
| frog Apple on ARM if they manage to build a 'better' ARM
| SoC
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's a rumor. If they're starting now I expect results in
| 2-5 years and in Azure first.
|
| > They do have the chops for it since they have done Xbox
| and Hololens and various other devices in-house.
|
| Not sure about the Hololens, but the XBox contains an x86
| AMD processor.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Linus Tech Tips actually just released a video a couple
| of hours ago where they compared the Surface Pro X SQ2
| with the M1 MacBook Air. It was not pretty.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA
| danudey wrote:
| So basically, the M1 Macbook Air is two to three times
| faster than the SQ2, including comparing ARM Windows on
| the SQ2 against ARM Windows in a VM on the M1 Air.
| glandium wrote:
| Relatedly, I wrote this on Twitter a few weeks ago: cargo
| build of sccache on a Lenovo Yoga C630 (Snapdragon 850)
| in WSL: 4 minutes 55 seconds. On a Macbook Air M1: 55
| seconds
| mkl wrote:
| WSL 1 or 2? WSL 1 has very slow disk access, so compiling
| can be pretty slow. I.e. I would expect WSL to be slower
| for disk reasons even it was running on an M1.
| granzymes wrote:
| The virtualized Windows comparison was just brutal.
| uncledave wrote:
| It's 100% on the mark that video.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| He's off on the strategic focus of Apple (where he says
| that the M1 benefit because Apple is taking a mobile OS
| and adapting it for the desktop vs Microsoft is taking a
| desktop OS and adapting it for mobile architectures. The
| truth of the matter is that Apple has been consistently
| making CPUs for about a decade that blow away the
| competition on compute per watt. Like 2-3 years before
| the industry catches up to where Apple was. They're just
| bringing that same power to laptops/PCs as they've
| saturated what that buys them on mobile (not fully but
| it's not a big enough sales driver as mobile sales growth
| has slowed). That's why you see AirPods and M1 - "where
| else can we deploy our perf per watt and vertical
| integration advantage".
|
| As for "why are there so few ARM versions of apps",
| that's purely the vertical integration piece again. Apple
| makes it very clear the old tech line is dead so
| developers have a clear thing to explain to their
| management. Microsoft tries to keep everyone happy which
| means devs are like "I'll wait until this actually has
| industry buy in" which then Microsoft uses as "well
| there's no interest here and maybe the tech won't work
| out/vendors won't materialize" and "we can't ask our
| customers to pay this transition cost".
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Or they could take _significant_ market share away from
| Windows, possibly permanently, by offering increasingly
| more performant machines. Seems like a better move to me.
| r00fus wrote:
| There is a significant number of people working at
| Microsoft who use Windows on a Mac as it's generally nice
| (and expensive) hardware. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to
| see Bootcamp operational on ARM Macs.
| lrvick wrote:
| Kind of like all the work Sony did to allow Linux on the PS4
| only to kill it later?
|
| You don't own a mac. You can only do on it what it is
| profitable for Apple to let you do, today.
|
| As much as I respect the incredible RE skills required for
| this task, I feel like this is shaky foundation unless an
| unpatchable bootrom exploit is discovered. Even then new
| models would be patched leaving existing users with an
| insecure platform that they can't replace when it breaks.
| oneplane wrote:
| You don't really own any high-tech stuff anyway (with that
| interpretation). You can't boot your Intel of AMD CPU
| without their signed and sometimes encrypted code. You
| can't even initialise a single core, let alone the DRAM
| controllers.
|
| Everyone likes to point at Apple, because that's easy, but
| it's neither new nor big nor special. There are practically
| three things at play:
|
| - root-of-trust, if you have a better solution than CA-
| based signing, by all means, let the world know
|
| - NDA/IP/Lawyerisms
|
| - Apple and many others aren't selling hardware, they are
| trying to sell experiences or ecosystems, and that is the
| only reason they exist at all and also the reason a lot of
| the beige box hardware companies are either less visible,
| less profitable or both
|
| Is it fun? No. But it's not some sort of automatic malice
| or 'haha you don't own things but you thought you did' all
| the time either.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| > You can't boot your Intel of AMD CPU without their
| signed and sometimes encrypted code.
|
| Except that Intel and AMD don't care what you run on your
| machine, they don't lose money if you don't run their
| software.
|
| When you run Linux on a MAC, Apple isn't getting money
| from their iCloud subscriptions and from the store so
| they have a motive to stop you from escaping the walled
| garden.
| oneplane wrote:
| iCloud is free unless you pay for extra space or
| features, and most people I know of don't.
| Grustaf wrote:
| You don't need iCloud to use macOS. And macOS itself is
| free, as is their awesome office apps, XCode and a lot of
| other useful apps and services.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Of course but if you run Linux they're sure you will
| never earn them any money from these services.
|
| So at one point they could decide that they don't want
| people to use Linux on their Macs and there's nothing you
| could do.
|
| Look at what happened to CentOS.
| Grustaf wrote:
| If they can sell you a mac for $1500 I don't think they
| are very concerned that you're not spending 50 bucks a
| year on iCloud.
|
| I mean, if they prevent Linux you probably won't buy a
| mac at all, you won't prioritise using an M1 macbook over
| using Linux if you're a hardcore Linux nerd.
|
| Bottomline is that yes they are greedy, but they are not
| trying to stop people from installing Linux on macs just
| to perhaps earn some extra dollars.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| The same goes for any device you can buy today. We should
| demand more of manufacturers in general, I agree.
|
| But you cannot expect that Apple should give you a legally
| enforceable contract (or whatever) pertaining to a product
| you haven't bought yet and they haven't even made yet.
|
| The fact that the boot process on the M1 chip is explicitly
| not locked down on release is at least showing a modicum of
| goodwill.
| monocasa wrote:
| PS3, and supposedly that was because some jurisdictions
| treated game consoles and computers differently for import
| tariffs (computers being cheaper to import), but those
| jurisdictions changed to not having a distinction.
|
| Agreed with the underlying point you're making though. They
| allow this because it aligns with their current strategic
| objectives, and changes to those objectives can be
| arbitrary and capricious, at least from the viewpoint of
| the consumer.
| pricci wrote:
| I remember it was because _geohot_ "jailbreaked" the PS3
| using the Linux capabilities to some extent.
|
| But I could be wrong.
| svenpeter wrote:
| There were two versions of the PS3: The original model
| and a slimmed down version released after a few years.
|
| the timeline was something like this:
|
| - Sony released the original PS3 with Linux running under
| a hypervisor that locked certain things (e.g. 3D
| rendering and their DRM)
|
| - Sony released the PS3 slim without Linux. They claimed
| they didn't have the resources to make Linux run on it.
| (We later figured out all that was required were a few
| incredibly simple kernel patches)
|
| - geohot found a somewhat unstable hardware glitch that,
| with some luck and a few tries, could escalate to
| hypervisor mode and enable e.g. 3D rendering from Linux.
| Their DRM was still untouched at this point and no one
| really cared.
|
| - Sony released an update for the old PS3 models to
| disable Linux as well citing "security concerns"
|
| After that more people started looking into the PS3 and
| marcan, me and others at fail0verflow eventually figured
| out their security wasn't all that great. It was actually
| so bad that we could calculate their private keys. Then
| they sued us for that but that's another story.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Got a link to that story?
| zarvox wrote:
| https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010
| svenpeter wrote:
| zarvox already linked to the talk we gave at
| https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010.
|
| We talked about how you could compute private keys but
| didn't release any keys for obvious reasons.
|
| Essentially Sony had N different sets of keys protecting
| different levels of their system (e.g. one keyset for the
| hypervisor and another one for the kernel). What we found
| allowed to compute the private signing key given two
| public signatures.
|
| Due to some technicality this meant that you needed
| another bug which allowed to extract these plaintext
| signatures. (The best comparison today would be that we
| found a universal code execution bug but you still needed
| to find your own info leak to defeat ASLR which we either
| didn't share or didn't have for all keysets).
|
| What happened then was that geohot used this flaw we
| found together with a simple bug that leaked two
| plaintext signatures to extract one of the most important
| keys and published that one on his website.
|
| Sony responded by suing him and us as well - probably
| because they assumed that we worked together. After a few
| month they reached a settlement with geohot where he
| promised to never hack any Sony product ever again. At
| the same time they simply dropped the lawsuit against
| marcan, me and a few other friends from fail0verflow
| without having ever served us. Those months resulted in
| quite some stress for me and personal and legal issues
| for another friend.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I actually think other os got canned before the
| jailbreak. If I recall correctly it provided extra
| incentive.
|
| They may have wanted to make it harder to jailbreak.
| Another argument is that they weren't profitable to sell
| as computers but largely become profitable via the money
| they made off games sold for the platform including money
| paid by game developers.
| zepto wrote:
| "You don't own a mac. You can only do on it what it is
| profitable for Apple to let you do, today."
|
| This is a completely bullshit statement.
|
| Almost all Macs support running Windows and Linux, and
| Apple has clearly invested in supporting open booting even
| on these new machines.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| Seems to me that it would also be a great opportunity to port
| each of these builds to a homebrew package.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily
| convenient oversight?
|
| The fact that Apple documented it.
| DCKing wrote:
| > Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily
| convenient oversight?
|
| I would point out that Apple has permitted booting alternative
| operating systems throughout their m68k (at least the m68ks
| that could meaningfully boot Linux or a BSD derivative) [1],
| PowerPC [2], and Intel [3] phases. It's only on Intel they
| actively made this a feature, because Windows Bootcamp probably
| allowed to sell them a certain percentage more Macs.
|
| The only reason to believe they would change this is that the
| Apple Silicon architecture changes would have Apple be
| interested in the Mac being some sort of equivalent to an iPod
| Touch. I don't really see Apple being interested in that, and
| Apple reps have gone on record to argue similar points as well.
|
| [1]: e.g. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/ [2]: e.g.
| https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/ [3]: Uh, anything that
| boots on x86 EFI will probably boot.
| e12e wrote:
| > The only reason to believe they would change this is that
| the Apple Silicon architecture changes would have Apple be
| interested in the Mac being some sort of equivalent to an
| iPod Touch.
|
| I don't see any great difference/reasons why the iPad pro is
| locked, and a MacBook isn't.
|
| I hope Apple "computers" will remain unlocked, but I'm not
| sure I see a real business case for Apple to keep them open.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| And at that Bootcamp is a BIOS emulation layer. You don't
| need to go through the bootcamp process to run operating
| systems with native EFI support such as Linux, Windows 7+,
| etc.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I don't think recent Intel macs even support "Boot Camp"
| (CSM) any more. You need to go through UEFI, Boot Camp now
| is just a software wizard for getting UEFI Windows
| installed.
| zinekeller wrote:
| You're totally correct, it is indeed just putting the
| drivers on the installation media and partitioning magic.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| On 2017+ machines you don't even need an external drive,
| during the partitioning setup it carves out a temporary
| partition to store the contents of the ISO + their
| drivers, windows installation customisation etc. And it's
| all deleted after the installation of the drivers after
| windows is installed
| johnwalkr wrote:
| It's one of the easiest windows installs you can do.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| My 2015 Mac (running Big Sur) did that temporary-
| partition dance too.
| readams wrote:
| Solution: don't buy locked down Apple hardware. Yes, the chips
| look nice but it's just really unfortunate that they're from
| Apple and so come with all the Apple baggage. Just wait a couple
| years for competing chips that won't have the baggage.
| WantonQuantum wrote:
| For what problem is this the solution?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| The problem is a weakened or lack of reliable Linux support.
| This is an unofficial hack for an Apple platform notorious
| for having little open documentation or good interoperability
| with anything non-Apple. It's always going to be an uphill
| battle to reliably support Linux because Apple themselves
| don't seem to care (at the moment at least). Investing in
| Linux integration for a more supportive hardware vendor
| instead should yield better Linux outcomes without Apple's
| baggage.
| wmf wrote:
| Running Linux on your hardware?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| On the About page: "...requires a huge amount of work to be done,
| as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform"
|
| It "is" a well-documented platform. I'm hoping that Apple makes
| it available to the open source community to make Linux on M1
| happen sooner than later.
| saagarjha wrote:
| How so?
| jarym wrote:
| I wonder if Apple will embrace Linux as Microsoft have done. If
| they are still a 'hardware' company at heart then they will.
| ibraheemdev wrote:
| I highly doubt it. Microsoft embraced Linux because they knew
| Windows couldn't compete in the developer OS space. MacOS on
| the other hand is built on Unix and is already a very popular
| OS for developers.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Linux has been taking serious dev mindshare (and market
| share) from Apple for several years now.
|
| And I think Apple _knows_ macOS can 't compete with Linux
| as a development environment against browser, Linux, and
| cloud-based deployments. Witness how they made a point of
| demonstrating a Linux VM running on Apple silicon during
| the M1 introductory keynote, and how they continue to
| remove dev-oriented tooling, allowing third-party setups
| like homebrew to fill it in.
|
| It seems their goal is increasingly to focus on their end-
| user platform only, which for dev tooling means only
| focusing on XCode/etc. and not the Mac's capabilities for
| other deployment targets.
|
| ... which leaves an obvious gap for Linux to fill. In fact,
| given how large and capable Apple is these days, I think
| there's a good chance they'll put a bit more effort into
| helping Linux integration along (especially Linux in VMs on
| macOS -- that's probably the main plan at the moment). They
| realize they only stand to gain from such efforts.
| mhh__ wrote:
| How is it documented if there is so software developers manual
| for the ISA, optimisation manual for the uarch, and no
| documentation at all on how the subsystems like the neural
| accelerator works let alone how to access it.
|
| I assume you mean that Apple have it internally, but I wouldn't
| assume it's any good.
|
| I would also love to see someone (I haven't got and can't
| afford one) try and fuzz it for undocumented instructions.
| klelatti wrote:
| There's no software developer's manual for the ISA? Arm don't
| release any documentation on their ISA?
| hrydgard wrote:
| The GPU ISA (yes, GPUs have ISAs) is undocumented.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Even Nvidia document theirs now, and the firmware details
| are on GitHub to some extent for the Nouveau guys.
| monocasa wrote:
| > Even Nvidia document theirs now
|
| If you're talking about ptx, that's not the hardware ISA,
| but instead an IR for their shader compiler.
| my123 wrote:
| NVIDIA have this: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-
| binary-utilities/index.htm...
|
| That doesn't operate on PTX but actual hardware binaries.
| Oddly, they ship disassemblers, but not assemblers.
| mhh__ wrote:
| There are currently undocumented instructions on M1, and
| Apple aren't a regular Arm partner so I'm kind of classing
| it as it's own ISA
| klelatti wrote:
| I've seen that too! I have a lot of sympathy for what
| you're saying here but I think classing it as it's own
| ISA is a bit of a stretch! How much flexibility Apple
| have with the ISA is an interesting point - I suspect
| they are pushing the limits of what they can get away
| with (what's Arm going to do?) Might be different when
| Nvidia own Arm?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Apple exposes standard aarch64 to developers.
| mhh__ wrote:
| What are the odds Apple shit on this?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Why?
|
| If they'd intended to shut this down, they would have a locked
| down boot loader like on iOS. Instead they deliberately built a
| boot loader which supported things like this.
| m463 wrote:
| That can be changed in a software update. Is this likely?
| probably not, however I can imagine scenarios (lets say a
| worm gets out) where it might "make sense"
| ciwolsey wrote:
| Get people on board first. Lock it down once it's too late
| and everyone is invested.
| machello13 wrote:
| So your opinion of Apple is just that they're pure evil, or
| what?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That hasn't been their MO, historically. On macOS
| everything that's locked down by default can be unlocked
| (at least that I've encountered) regarding running software
| or other OSes on the hardware. They've made it "secure" by
| default, but not _locked down_ , it's a simple switch to
| open it up.
|
| If, say, the iPad or iPhone had gone this route (started
| off as open as Android and _then_ became locked down) you
| might have a point. But they didn 't, they started off
| restricted and have only (gradually, and to a limited
| degree) been opened up.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Get people on board first. Lock it down once it's too
| late and everyone is invested.
|
| Examples? Been using the Mac for 15 years and haven't
| observed this myself. iOS was more or less locked down from
| go, but they never did some kind of bait-and-switch.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The engineers who did that probably don't make the decision
| on things like this.
|
| When have Apple been open about anything recently?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| This took time and resources to make happen. This isn't
| some switch a rogue engineer pulled while management wasn't
| looking. Not only did it take time and effort to implement,
| they've also documented it.
|
| > When have Apple been open about anything recently?
|
| Darwin, WebKit, Swift, LLVM, This effort.
|
| Apple keeps iOS fairly tight the Mac, not so much.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Apple aren't upstreaming their backends to LLVM, for
| example
| ogre_codes wrote:
| What happened to "When have they been open about
| anything?"
|
| Wonderful moving goal post here.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| It wouldn't be unprecedented. Sony released the Playstation 3
| with the ability to run Linux and removed it later using a
| firmware update.
|
| https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-
| histo...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The action isn't unprecedented. But that's a separate
| company. What has Apple done to make people _expect_ this
| behavior when they've not done it before?
| eitland wrote:
| I must say I am tempted to buy a Mac mini and if this project
| succeeds it might be the thing that triggers it.
|
| That or Apple making CMD - tab customizable so I can fix it on my
| desktop ;-)
| swsieber wrote:
| Could I take this opportunity to ask the HN community what they
| use on linux for photo editing (and what they like a out it)? ...
| if anybody like that exists ;)
| hurt_and_afraid wrote:
| On one hand I'm very excited about the enormous amount of
| innovation involved in Apple Silicon, and excited about how this
| will direct the future of the computer manufacturing industry. On
| the other hand, I'm still wary of buying anything from one of the
| world's most anti-consumer companies. I'm not the least-bit
| confident that Apple won't later rescind the ability to boot
| other Operating Systems. This kind of benevolence is entirely
| uncharacteristic of a company so fond of walled-gardens.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure if Apple did provide
| documentation, people would complain that it's incomplete, or
| would complain when it changes. I'd love a world where all tech
| documentation is open, but there are competitors etc etc.
|
| Apple is a remarkably focused company with a lot of experiments
| that never see the light of day. They don't sell their chips or
| motherboards to anyone else.
|
| Qualcomm/Broadcom etc exist to make their chips for other
| companies to use and still getting real documentation from them
| is often not possible unless you are a giant OEM, commit to
| millions in orders and sign lots of NDAs.
|
| Apple's not only created a pretty great integrated CPU/GPU and
| nearly seamlessly transitioned CPU platforms (AGAIN!) but they
| are at the very beginning of this roadmap.
|
| I'd LOVE them to empower/support Linux on Apple Silicon (as they
| seem to be saying they will for Microsoft) but I expect a
| generation of two of chips before things solidify/stabilize
| enough for them to open up the platform.
|
| And, it's not like this is something within their business model
| or is going to give much value back to them.
|
| Lots of people say Apple "Needs" to do whatever... Clearly they
| don't as they seem to be surviving OK doing things how they want.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Apple needs to stop treating its customers with contempt.
| Regardless of how okay its customers seem to be with it.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Commendable effort but as someone who has spent significant time
| dealing with closed hardware, I believe that it is more efficient
| and beneficial long term to build a platform that supports linux.
| I support this project anyway because non-linear outcomes occur
| often enough in the marketplace of reality. Who can really know
| what will evolve from this work?
| miguelr2201 wrote:
| Interesting project and wish them best of luck.
|
| On the claim:
|
| >However, no modern device is "fully open" - no usable computer
| exists today that has completely open software and hardware (as
| much as some companies want to market themselves as such)
|
| Doesn't RaptorCS[1] offer a fully open modern device? Or is there
| a closed part I'm not aware of?
|
| [1] https://www.raptorcs.com/
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Is their silicon design open? Their internal boot ROM? Their
| microcode? :-)
|
| What I'm trying to say there is, there is always a line. There
| is always some secret sauce. Even if you have fully open HDL,
| you won't have documentation for the proprietary fab processes
| required to implement it in a way that performs. Even if the
| fab process were somehow fully open, you may not have public
| documentation on how to manufacture some of the required
| chemicals and raw materials available. And so on and so forth.
| The rabbit hole always goes deeper, and the lines between parts
| aren't entirely bright, and so making some kind of blanket
| statement that one is "fully open" is usually a marketing
| tactic and not actually truthful.
|
| That said, yes, Raptor stuff is pretty much as open as it gets,
| today, in the high-end space. They are pretty much the only
| modern platform which doesn't use blobs to train RAM on boot,
| for example. They are not perfect - for example, their
| motherboard schematics are only available to owners, so I
| assume they are not redistributable under an open hardware
| license.
| miguelr2201 wrote:
| Oh, I see. That is definitely a lot deeper in the stack that
| I was thinking of. Thanks for the comment.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| i would pay a LOT of money to have linux work on M1. This is
| incredible
| bartvk wrote:
| Well then, join the Patreon. Or am I misreading your comment
| somehow?
|
| https://www.patreon.com/marcan
|
| I'm not going to use it myself, but I still joined, just to get
| the updates.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Asahi, Super Dry! Sorry, had to say this.
| jd3 wrote:
| This is really cool!
|
| Does anyone know why a similar project doesn't exist currently
| using the open source distribution of Apple's Darwin operating
| system? It has always seemed strange to me that their open source
| BSD OS does not have an official distribution channel with a
| built in package manager like macports, pkg-src, gentoo prefix,
| etc.
|
| OpenDarwin and PureDarwin existed for awhile, but seem to have
| both been abandoned now.
|
| X11 (including thousands of open source and graphical x11
| programs), plan9port, and other open source software projects
| already compile and run fine on macOS, so this has always seemed
| like something that _should_ be possible but has never gained
| traction due to what I guess is lack of documentation and Apple's
| lackluster open source website.
| wmf wrote:
| Darwin isn't a good OS.
| jd3 wrote:
| Fair point! I guess what I'm getting at is the fact that,
| even though Darwin isn't great, we know that it's building
| and running on all production M1 macs, can run X11, etc.
| which generally seems like what this project is attempting to
| do.
|
| I'm not a systems software engineer[0], so I'm not positive
| where the new drivers live for the M1 (are they in Darwin?
| proprietary/exclusive to macOS?), but if those drivers are
| available for use already (either legally through Darwin or
| through copying files from macOS into Darwin or something),
| it seems like it might make sense to look into making a
| Darwin distribution rather than reserve engineering the new
| M1 hardware in order to add some drivers and userland
| programs to what is essentially another Arch Linux
| distribution (from what I've read about Asahi thus far).
|
| I think the Asahi project definitely makes sense if the
| primary goal is to run Linux on M1 macs for its robust
| server/enterprise capabilities, but if the goal is to just
| have a dual-bootable open source desktop operating system, I
| feel like Darwin might actually be the easier choice here.
|
| [0]: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.pdf
| saagarjha wrote:
| The drivers are proprietary.
| wmf wrote:
| I'm pretty sure people want Linux specifically, not any
| open-source OS.
|
| As for Darwin source code, I'm reminded of the saying that
| if an economist sees a $100 bill on the sidewalk he says
| "if it was real someone would have already picked it up".
| boogies wrote:
| The world's largest corporation is happy to accept gratis open
| source labor, but they're rather actively antagonistic to
| Free/Libre software (eg. trying to eradicate strong copyleft
| from macOS, not only shipping ancient bash, etc. but
| prohibiting third parties from shipping it through the App
| Store without mandatory DRM). The lackluster support for open
| source distributions is virtually certainly intentional. The
| other BSDs are the closest you'll get.
| astrange wrote:
| Darwin for M1 is not open source currently I think.
| balozi wrote:
| This is one of those things that sound interesting but only from
| a technical point. Why would anyone take on this level of risk?
| In a few years they will be complaining on HN about being kicked
| off Apple silicon.
| pkulak wrote:
| Then just pop Mac OS back on it and sell it for 80% of it's new
| value. Really almost no risk at all, as far as I'm concerned.
| balozi wrote:
| However noble, the risk I see is for untold man-hours and
| resources that will be expended on an ill-fated adventure.
| This project requires tons of positive tech-community spirit,
| which apple isn't exactly known for.
| pkulak wrote:
| Fair enough. But I'd counter saying that you shouldn't try
| something like this unless the adventure itself appeals to
| you.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I hope this and projects like it spearhead a movement of ARM
| laptops outside of the Apple-sphere.
|
| I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the
| first to market as "the Linux laptop on ARM". Seems right up
| their alley.
|
| Also worth noting that I understand that System76 and Apple are
| not comparable companies. One is a humble operation installing a
| custom Linux build on rebranded hardware, and the other is a
| vertically integrated powerhouse building it's own hardware.
| fsflover wrote:
| > I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being
| the first to market as "the Linux laptop on ARM".
|
| They are not the first already:
| https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Ah yeah pine64! But how does it compare to the M1
| performance? I should have explicitly stated that these ideal
| computers would match or outperform Apple's hardware, since
| that is very much the case with current intel based MacBooks
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| Pinebook does the typical "as cheap and low-end as
| possible" linux stuff.
|
| I would love to see ARM linux hardware manufacturer who
| would aim to create a high-end fanless powerhorse like mac
| mini.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| You and me both. I believe it will happen eventually, it
| seems inevitable now
| esclerofilo wrote:
| Minor correction: The mac mini isn't fanless
| zucker42 wrote:
| The problem is no other laptop manufacturer besides Apple has
| the capital and resources to build their own chip.
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| Not just their own chip, arguable one of the highest
| performance ones. At Intel, the mobile division was simply
| trying to keep pace with Arm with Apple always a distant
| dream. Later at Arm, no one had any idea what the hell Apple
| was doing. They pay for the ISA and that is basically as far
| as I ever saw the collaboration going (besides poaching top
| engineers).
|
| Most interesting thing I ever saw was that they bought
| Intrinsity[1] to create custom EDA tools for them. There is a
| decent technical moat to overcome.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Does anyone know if these EDA and other manufacturing tools
| are run internally on MacOS? I recall some comments when an
| Apple factory tour showed some tools running on Windows, on
| iMacs.
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| If it's anything like Intel/Arm there are likely huge
| internal HPC Unix clusters with attached FPGAs for
| simulation and design.
|
| I wouldn't expect them to.
| bgorman wrote:
| Definitely not true, IP blocks are available for all critical
| features and chip layout can be outsourced. ARM has a
| Cortex-X chip available for licensing for anyone that wants a
| high performance CPU core.
|
| For example, HP (who also makes laptops) has custom ASICs
| running Linux in their printers.
| wmf wrote:
| Even if you use all licensed IP the market might not be
| profitable enough to pay back the cost. We're talking about
| a $50M+ leap of faith.
| bgorman wrote:
| HP had 10.2 billion in profit last year.
|
| Source: https://www.wsj.com/market-
| data/quotes/HPQ/financials/annual...
|
| Certainly enough to take a 50 million dollar risk.
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