[HN Gopher] Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
___________________________________________________________________
Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
Author : mrzool
Score : 355 points
Date : 2021-04-29 21:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.intuitibits.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.intuitibits.com)
| lebrad wrote:
| Why do they use Broadcom silicon for their wireless stack?
| userbinator wrote:
| It might be a matter of tradition/long-term contracts - Apple
| has used Broadcom for a _long_ time.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Broadcom makes some good stuff now and then (Rpi's)
| SilverRed wrote:
| Isn't broadcom the worst part of the rpi? It's impossible
| to boot the pi without loading a binary blob backdoor first
| dannyw wrote:
| How about the fact that Broadcom essentially enabled the
| Pi to be created in the first place?
| userbinator wrote:
| Broadcom is neither the first nor only company making
| SoCs. The RPi people just happened to have someone
| working there.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Nobody said any of those things. The Rpi is good.
| Broadcom makes it.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Broadcom "enabled" the Pi to be created because the SoC
| for the original RPi 1 was a flop. They wanted to use it
| for Set Top Box (Cable TV, Google TV etc) devices but
| couldn't find any buyers
|
| One of the engineers who worked on it worked out a deal
| with Broadcom to simply reuse the design and market it
| toward education instead
| StreamBright wrote:
| And it boots with the GPU which is not 3D accelerated in
| version 4 because the whole project was done by one
| person who just left. This is one of most popular SBCs
| out there. I wish it was a bit better.
| skohan wrote:
| Are there any high performance single-board computers on
| the market currently? I use a lot of Rpi's in personal
| projects, and I've been thinking about a home file server
| in a super small form-factor. What I would like is an SBC
| somewhere on the size scale of a smartphone, with
| performance in the range of a current flagship phone.
|
| Does something like this exist?
| StreamBright wrote:
| This is exactly what I want too. What comes close is the
| Pine64 Pro.
| wyager wrote:
| The Broadcom SoCs used in the RPi's are not "good stuff" at
| all - they are one of the worst pieces of junk I have ever
| had the displeasure of using.
|
| They are extremely unstable, and if you want any kind of
| moderately reliable deployment of an RPi, you need to use a
| watchdog timer to reset the device if it freezes. Except -
| guess what - the watchdog timer itself is broken on the
| RPi! (As of the last time I tried this, iirc with an RPi 4)
| Either it's busted in hardware or the driver is broken.
| Most semi-high-reliability devices built using RPis have
| elected to use external watchdogs, which is super annoying
| and would not be necessary on a correctly designed SoC.
|
| Their clocking and boot schemes are also totally insane
| garbage, with random peripherals breaking if you change the
| GPU clock, and with the GPU silicon running the bootloader
| or something ridiculous like that.
|
| I would prefer almost any other ARM SoC to the BCM used in
| the RPi.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| "They are extremely unstable," Really? Because they are
| used by millions every single day.
| philistine wrote:
| It sounds as painful as making sure every card is in the
| culturally agreed slot with an Apple II.
| StreamBright wrote:
| And the lack of 3D accelerated video with rpi4. I wish I
| knew about these prior purchasing rpi. There is a good
| market for small form general purpose computer with 4g
| ram + decent gpu. I am still not sure if Intel's NUC
| would worth a try in this category.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| any advanced development on new macs is pretty rip
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than
| Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just
| deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the
| notifications. I'm worried for the future of the Mac.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26987508.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| Early versions of Catalina were also not great. (Heck, early
| versions of any major macos release tend to be relatively
| buggy!)
|
| I think people tend to forget things like that, and only
| remember the later releases of an OS since that is the version
| they are likely switching off of it to the newer one.
|
| I personally have found big sir no more buggy than most
| releases. Better than some[1], worse than others. About
| middling. Not bad for it including new hardware (m1)!
|
| [1]: ye gods, remember how bad 10.10 was with discoveryd before
| they rolled back to mdnsresponder! yikes!
| tolmasky wrote:
| Later versions of Catalina remain not great. The problem is
| that each version of macOS compounds onto the next, since
| there's no time for the "tock" after the "tick" anymore.
| Sure, catastrophic bugs may get fixed, but some stuff just
| seems to degrade forever (I can't remember the last time drag
| and drop worked like I expected to... even on Apple apps).
| The OS usually launches around November, and By WWDC, we're
| already being told about macOS N + 1 and getting betas of
| that, so you basically get half a year of "bug fixes," before
| focus shifts to the next release. There's no "stable" period
| anymore.
|
| Tiger through Lion had a 2-year release cycle. Ever since
| Mountain Lion, it's been a 1-year cycle. Further complicating
| this is that these have included unintuitively "ambitious"
| (or at least "labor intensive") changes. Big Sur was a UI
| redesign that touched the entire system. But let's not forget
| that Mojave was _also_ a huge undertaking to get everything
| working with Dark Mode (both for Apple developers and third
| party developers). Meanwhile entire suites of apps get thrown
| out and the rewrites are used to dogfood Catalyst. It 's just
| infinite churn. The core of the technology has taken on the
| properties of fashion. And that is just not a great recipe
| for stability.
|
| I've personally chosen to try to approximate the missing
| "tock" cycle by upgrading to every other macOS. Clearly this
| is nowhere near the same benefit of Apple actually dedicating
| a full year and a half to a release, but at least I don't
| have to go through the (largely arbitrary) UI changes every
| year or so, and I have the "bugs I know" to deal with vs. the
| ones I don't yet know about.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I really, _really_ wish they 'd ditch the yearly cycle for
| macOS. It's a mature operating system--older now than
| classic Mac OS was when OS X launched. It's not missing
| huge chunks of functionality like iOS, nor is it in
| lockstep with yearly hardware like the iPhone.
|
| At this point all I do with my Mac is work. I would much
| rather it be rock solid and reliable than be crammed with
| new features and change for the sake of change every year.
| Most of the features that get added for iOS
| parity/compatibility could probably be delivered in point
| updates anyway.
| photojosh wrote:
| I just moved on to Big Sur since I got an M1... the
| previous MBP was on High Sierra, so you can imagine my
| culture shock! Big Sur reminds me of nothing more than
| Windows XP, and that's not a compliment.
| philistine wrote:
| I've taken a big liking to Big Sur. It is a graceful
| evolution of the UI that needs a lot more precision work
| (like Preferences, the menu bar shortcuts and
| Notifications) but it's a solid base for the next couple
| of years.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I have to wonder if all issues with Apple's software quality
| are due to Apple redirecting resources to gracefully handling
| the Apple silicon transfer.
| photojosh wrote:
| The Apple Silicon transition is arguably something they
| _have_ handled extremely well, with the only unknown being
| what the pro-level chip will be like. Hopefully it can all
| be over sooner rather than later and they can get back to
| work on general software quality.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Catalina was a significant downgrade in quality and as far
| as I know the M1 wasn't a thing yet.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I assumed dropping 32-bit support was part of the wind-up
| for the M1 transition but maybe not.
| BigBathtubLobby wrote:
| Big Sur made it worse. For probably the greater part of
| the last 6-7 years I've felt Windows performs better on
| equivalent hardware (even after Mac OS fresh installs).
| By Big Sur it's so bad the latest Intel MacBooks chug on
| it.
|
| That said, the M1 changes things, IME. It's just sad it
| takes that much.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| macOS quality has been declining for years. It can't _all_
| be due to the M1 transition.
| acdha wrote:
| This is a popular trope but I'd really want to see some
| supporting data. It's notoriously hard to correct for
| only hearing from people who found something they don't
| like, people assuming their experience is universally
| shared, and for people to tend to forget old problems.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Anecdotally, I think Big Sur is better than either Mojave
| or Catalina: in my experience, it solves a lot of the
| bugs I was trying to avoid by sticking with High Sierra.
| S_A_P wrote:
| You would think that with each release being so much
| worse than previous versions that eventually OSX would
| quit booting up and become nothing more than a proof of
| concept.
|
| So much hyperbole in this thread. A solid subset of users
| declares that the sky is falling and this is the end for
| Apple. Rinse and repeat with each iteration. I am not
| saying there haven't been missteps, but it ain't all bad.
| My personal experience with Big Sur has largely been a
| non event and I have tons of boutique usb synthesizers
| audio interfaces and software. I use windows Mac and
| dabble in a few Linux distros. None are perfect but
| they're all pretty good.
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| Does Big Sur let you loopback audio out yet, or are
| third-party extensions still required? Do Soundflower &
| BlackHole even work on M1?
|
| The fact there hasn't been native loopback for so long is
| mind-boggling. I'm a Mac user and use BlackHole.
|
| I've lost count of the number of times I've been on a
| call and someone with a Mac has gone to share screen and
| been confused as to why their audio isn't being shared.
| COVID/WFH has made this a regular occurrence.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Counterpoint: I don't know or care what that feature is
| and I've never encountered anyone complaining about it.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's basically sending your system audio to an audio
| channel (e.g. to an app). You could e.g. route a Skype
| call audio to record it.
|
| Handy when you need it, not exactly a metric for OS
| quality to offer one.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Does Big Sur let you loopback audio out yet, or are
| third-party extensions still required? Do Soundflower &
| BlackHole even work on M1?_
|
| How is that relevant to a discussion about worsening
| software quality? OS X never had native loopback.
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| Software quality is a moving target. iOS 2.0 was
| exceptional quality in 2008, if a competitor released
| something akin to iOS 2.0 now they'd be laughed at.
|
| Additionally, the comment was in response to a comment
| about audio interfaces, so it's relevant on multiple
| accounts.
| S_A_P wrote:
| Agreed, this isnt a datapoint. And I have an app called
| Loopback by Rogue Amoeba that does this job very well.
| There are plenty of reasons that you could assume OSX
| doesnt include this natively. The biggest I can think of
| is if you can capture streaming audio at no quality loss
| then you kinda blow up some business models.
|
| I dont hear any detailed descriptions of how the software
| quality has declined. What I generally see is bugs being
| reported which is then called evidence that apple
| software is bad. I think the UMN story has shown that
| _all_ OS software is large, complex and bug ridden.
|
| I personally dont love how OSX is becoming more of a
| walled garden, but I also think that given the fact that
| bad people exist to make sure we cant have anything nice
| its a reasonable reaction to try and make the OS more
| secure. The days of the OS is your playground are ending.
| I wish that werent true but there are crappy folks out
| there that want to steal your data, identity, scam you,
| commit computer crimes against you.
|
| I will reiterate that I think Big Sur was probably the
| smoothest big release of MacOS Ive been through(since
| Tiger). Others may have different experiences, but I can
| only speak to mine.
| coldtea wrote:
| Any real data, except of anecdotal "had this or that
| problem"?
|
| It seems to me macOS quality has been fine for years.
|
| And I've used it since 10.2.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I disagree. As a 20 year Mac user, Catalina has waaay worse.
| Big Sur has been painless. So much so that we've rolled it out
| enterprise wide at [Giant Internet Company]
| foobiekr wrote:
| Mail and calendar notifications are both a huge mess in Big
| Sur and a major downgrade.
| philistine wrote:
| With the two previous transitions, Apple went through all sorts
| of weird pains. This time is no different, but unfortunately
| they still have to release yearly and implement the macOS
| version of each new service.
| CrLf wrote:
| "Apple went through all sorts of weird pains"
|
| Surely you mean Apple's customers went through all sorts of
| weird pains.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| As Linux laptop user, I'm bemused when the competition gets
| worse.
|
| Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in
| a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more
| than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on
| Intel macs ever was.
| rubicks wrote:
| I don't share your optimism. If proprietary firmware and dkms
| blobs remain _de rigueur_, I can't see the situation on linux
| improving w.r.t. things like graphics cards and wifi chips.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I wouldn't call it _optimism_ per se, not in absolute terms
| at least. That will certainly continue to be a problem. But
| Apple messing up their _own software_ either by accident or
| on purpose is a nice boon. And a single piece of consumer
| hardware being so good that that their a patreon for it is
| also interesting and good.
|
| For the reasons you say, I personally would rather buy e.g.
| some pine64 thing just might benefit from this porting
| work. (Probably more in the userland than kernel itself,
| tbh.)
|
| The one good path I see for hardware is that in the system
| on chip era, open designs can gain a foothold by saving the
| companies money, just as no one could compete with free
| linux for server software 2 decades prior. There was no
| hope getting a foothold with 1 design = 1 chip, but a world
| where people can mooch some free IP for their dohicky might
| do the trick.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| WiFi is literally the _only_ blob Linux will have to deal
| with as far as we can tell, and I 'll make sure our
| installer pulls it from the system firmware partition
| (which will always exist on a functional Mac) so nobody
| will have to worry about it. All the other blobs are loaded
| by system firmware before Linux even gets to run, so they
| might as well be invisible to us (UEFI on PCs does much the
| same thing).
|
| No DKMS, ever. All our drivers are headed to mainline. I'm
| not even going to bother with DKMS most likely; people who
| want to use bleeding edge drivers before they're merged can
| use our kernel trees (and we'll have builds available for
| those folks).
| pabs3 wrote:
| Progress on the Apple GPU is already at the "can draw
| cubes" stage:
|
| https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-3.html
| pabs3 wrote:
| All the Asahi Linux support for Apple M1 is going into
| Linux mainline, so the dkms modules will not be necessary
| for the parts they work on.
| kache_ wrote:
| I use arch btw
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Somebody knows I'm a NixOS partisan :D
| cptskippy wrote:
| Still no where near as bad a Linux on the laptop the last
| time I tried it. I haven't used Linux on a laptop in a decade
| because it was so bad I swore it off.
| kuresov wrote:
| 10 years is a long time. I run Linux on a Carbon X1 and
| it's been great. I think it's about 4 years old now.
| Ballas wrote:
| I have been using linux on a laptop for the past 5 years.
| The only issue I have is with Nvidia (which is a
| requirement in my case).
| j-james wrote:
| A lot has changed in the last decade, particularly with TLP
| and now suspend / hibernate being set up by default on most
| distributions. You might give it a try again.
| toinetoine wrote:
| I was in the same boat until summer of 2020. Switched to
| ubuntu 20.04 w/ gnome desktop on my home laptop and haven't
| looked back.
| konart wrote:
| I have Fedora 33-34 with gnome (initially with KDE as a I
| was a fan back in my Ubuntu\Arch days) and I only keep it
| to install updates from time to time to see if it is as
| usable for a general use as macOS.
|
| Still nowhere near.
|
| Perfect for coding though.
| jablan wrote:
| "general use" => "my specific usage needs" please.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Linux on desktop users shouldn't be bemused until Linux
| desktop experience isn't a pile of UX trash. Linux on the
| desktop is still so frustrating, ugly, and only marginally
| more useful over a Mac for extremely specific use cases, that
| I would rather use Windows + WSL2.
| knolax wrote:
| > Linux desktop experience isn't a pile of UX trash.
|
| Desktop Linux is the only bearable desktop UX. Anyone who
| actually prefers the UX of desktop Windows is mentally
| deranged and should not be allowed to make user facing
| software.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Hey, I make no promises as to my level of sanity. But
| yes, desktop Linux UX is trash. Trash being defined by
| incomprehensible design and inconsistent implementation
| of proper design lessons learned in the last 20 years.
| yakubin wrote:
| _> Anyone who actually prefers the UX of desktop Windows
| is mentally deranged_
|
| Think a bit about what you say.
| aulin wrote:
| Whenever I read these comments I really wonder what do you
| do with your desktop environment. I spend most of the time
| inside an app, mostly the browser, the terminal or the
| editor. As long as the desktop env doesn't get in the way
| it's good. The only annoyance I experience when I switch
| back and forth from GNOME to MacOS is really the different
| keyboard shortcuts and that I have to install an additional
| tool (Rectangle) to get basic window tiling on mac. I can
| even use Windows these days, as long as WSL is installed
| hderms wrote:
| I've become a wsl convert now as I can trust windows to
| deal with sleep/wakeup and wifi much better than linux. If
| macosx experiences a developer exodus I think it's likely
| many will follow suit. Especially with things like WSLg
| coming out
| 1_player wrote:
| These past 6 months with WSL2 are the most productive
| I've been since I've spent 2 years on the Apple ecosystem
| or 15 years on Linux.
|
| I don't have to debug OS wide breakages or weird Wifi/BT
| issues or unstable GUIs and it's running Linux, not BSD
| on a weird kernel and file system with... interesting
| permissions and security settings.
|
| And I can play games and use Docker at native speed.
|
| YMMV.
| valuearb wrote:
| With the M2 MacBook Pros due in a couple months, it's
| more likely Apple experiences an inflow of developers.
| rurp wrote:
| It worked in my case. The issues with Catalina and the mac
| hardware pushed me to switch to Linux for my personal dev
| machine a few years ago. The transition was tough at first
| but now I love that machine. It makes me wayyy happier than
| the MacBook I have to use at work.
| wil421 wrote:
| How does Linux handle scaled displays? MacOS handles it best,
| Windows has issues and inconsistencies, and last time I
| checked Linux support was abysmal.
| ddek wrote:
| I run MacOS almost entirely because multidpi running so
| seamlessly.
|
| Windows support is kinda funny, it works fairly well
| normally but has all kinds of strange bugs. For example, if
| you switch in/out of full screen windows will just randomly
| move between displays. There are quite a few inconsistent
| scaling bugs.
|
| I haven't played with xrandr multidpi, although I hear a
| lot of complaints about it. I've tried wayland, but I
| wasn't keen. I was very frustrated with sway (twm), which
| advertises itself as a drop in replacement for i3, but does
| many things _differently_. The fractional scaling on
| wayland can be blurry. There are still loads of bugs.
| newsHere wrote:
| But but but but its Apple
|
| Owners will casually dismiss anything negative. Post purchase
| Rationalization on heavily marketed products is bad for
| consumers.
| Black101 wrote:
| Apple devices are good for newbies that like it simple... not
| sure what else they are good for.. Apple is even lying when
| talking about privacy...
| roody15 wrote:
| Leopard = meh
|
| Snow Leopard = Awesome
|
| Lion = meh
|
| Yosemite = ok
|
| Sierra = good
|
| High Sierra = Awesome
|
| Mojave = meh
|
| Catalina = meh
|
| Big Sur = meh
|
| (snow leopard and high sierra were the best IMO)
|
| Mac Admin for 15 years
| grishka wrote:
| High Sierra was meh for me. They rewrote the window server to
| use Metal, but the Nvidia GPU driver was so terrible at it that
| it sometimes crashed and it was always sluggish. You literally
| got a performance boost when you switched to the integrated
| GPU. They fixed most of the issues with Nvidia in Mojave tho.
| It still leaks memory but at least it's usable.
|
| And I agree that you skipped Mavericks (10.9), it was one of
| the best releases. I used it for like 3 years but had to update
| to whatever was current at the end of 2016 because I got a new
| job and needed the latest Xcode for it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The Snow Leopard days of the Mac made me want one. Everything
| since then has been a disappointment. I miss the big little
| details like the Welcome intros and beautiful usage of
| CoreAnimation. Now it seems like nothing uses it, and macOS
| seems far far less magical than ever.
|
| I could never see Apple coming up with the original Time
| Machine design anymore.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| QuartzComposer was really impressive and enabled a bunch of
| really useful applications (as far as data-driven graphic
| displays go). And now it's just... gone.
| grishka wrote:
| Honestly, it's easy to hate on Apple, but you start to
| appreciate macOS once you have to use Windows or Linux for
| anything serious. Yes, there is no _good_ desktop OS, but
| macOS sucks the least, and by far.
| paulintrognon wrote:
| I think that is just your opinion, and not objective truth.
| I am a happy debian user, currently forced to use macOS at
| my current company, and can't say I have a great time
| developping on a mac. As a web developper, Linux is great:
| native docker, native linux terminal experience...
|
| I however think this is a personnal opinoin, and I won't
| argue that Linux is better that macOS. If I has been a
| macOS user from the start I would have maybe been equally
| unhappy to be forced to use Linux.
|
| What i'm trying to say is, we are all different people with
| different tastes and priorities, and I don't think we can
| objectivly say that one OS is better (or "sucks the
| least").
| xodice wrote:
| macOS also has native Docker and native Terminal.app with
| a Unix tool chain just like Linux. So those two aren't
| great examples on their own IMO.
|
| I do however agree that it's 100% totally opinion based
| on ones preferred OS.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| I don't disagree with your point, but macOS does not have
| native Docker. It runs as a hypervisor on HyperKit.
|
| It's always just been a VM on Mac, hence the constant
| performance issues it faces.
| xodice wrote:
| True enough. Upvoted.
| jolux wrote:
| macOS has a native BSD terminal experience, more or less.
| Docker is definitely slower. I like using Linux on the
| desktop, but I don't like maintaining it and my
| installations always seem to break eventually. To me,
| Windows is worse than Linux in every way except
| compatibility and stability.
| coldtea wrote:
| I use Macs for programming, music (DAW), and video (NLE), and
| don't see to have all these big problems people have. Several
| Macs over the years. And those are quite demanding applications
| (for programming, resource wise, I didn't use Docker until
| recently, but did use Vagrant, Vmware, and virtuabox for ages).
|
| My major gripes are swallen batteries (2 times in 20 years),
| and the crappy 2015-2019 keyboards (plus, whoever idiot
| designed the usb-at-the-bottom mouse).
|
| But as far as the OS is concerned there are some bugs I see
| here and there, but I don't see the big fuss. I don't have
| peripherals disconeccting at random, crashes, data loss, and so
| on.
|
| I've had way worse bugs and issues on Linux and Linux software
| over the years (which I also use since 1997), and even used as
| my main pro desktop for years (1999-2003, Debian) in far more
| optimistic times.
|
| One key differentiator might be that I don't install any kind
| of crap (I have a no-haxies policy for example, and spare for
| Little Snitch, I avoided kexts too. A vendor has some special
| e.g. keyboard driver? Fuck it, I'll use one keyboard with class
| compliant drivers), but I do install a lot of apps still.
|
| Another might be that I usually re-install fresh every 2 years
| or so (I like to get rid of accumulated junk, including
| personal documents and downloaded files, and install what I
| really need to use at the current, sort of like spring-
| cleaning).
| clajiness wrote:
| > plus, whoever idiot designed the usb-at-the-bottom mouse
|
| The batteries last so long in those mice, plus you can get an
| almost full day's charge in about two minutes. It takes a
| real idiot to run into issues with it. :)
| coldtea wrote:
| I must be a real idiot then (which is very possibly the
| case, but I'm pretty sure not for disliking this design).
|
| On top of the batteries starting dying much faster later on
| (the "last so long" thing is only true on the first 1-2
| years), the warning is shown and dismissed far too easily,
| and far too late - and then they just die.
| dandongus wrote:
| you skipped ML (meh) and mavericks (best)
| xbar wrote:
| High Sierra's hatred of all my USB devices was an experience
| like no other. I feel a reciprocal spite.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| So, I'm dumb about this stuff, but I have a wireless keyboard
| that uses a WiFi dongle to connect. I've lost connection with it
| a few times on my new m1 Mac. I had never lost connection with it
| in the previous 5 years.
|
| Could this be related to the phenomenon the authors are
| describing?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| WiFi and Bluetooth support is often provided by the same
| chipset.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Dongles are usually not Bluetooth or WiFi. But sometimes share
| the same frequencies. The M1 MacBooks have been having
| Bluetooth issues.
|
| Not applicable to your dongle issue, but for others: One weird
| trick that works without fail for me is disabling WiFi,
| connecting your Bluetooth devices, and reenabling WiFi. Don't
| know why it works.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| To elaborate on this for GP, if a keyboard has its own
| wireless dongle, it is usually in the 2.4GHz frequency band,
| same as used by microwave ovens, Bluetooth, and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi.
| The keyboard and/or dongle should list the frequency band it
| uses.
|
| The Wi-Fi chipset in the computer is not used at all here.
| The dongle presents itself to the computer as a USB human
| input device, just like any other USB keyboard or mouse.
|
| This is why you can use a keyboard like this to access the
| BIOS settings at boot time on a PC, which you can't do with a
| Bluetooth keyboard.
|
| That said, the wireless connection between the dongle and the
| keyboard is subject to interference by other 2.4GHz devices.
|
| So one thing to make sure of is to connect to a 5GHz Wi-Fi
| network, not 2.4GHz. And as you mentioned, Bluetooth can also
| interfere.
|
| I had an interesting case of this some time ago. I was using
| a ThinkPad TrackPoint Wireless Keyboard II with a desktop
| computer on the floor several feet away. This keyboard can
| either use Bluetooth or its own USB dongle; I used the latter
| so I could access BIOS settings.
|
| It worked great - except when I used my Bluetooth Apple
| AirPods with a phone (either iPhone or Android). Then the
| keyboard would start missing characters or repeating them
| wildly.
|
| The solution was to use a USB extension cable to put the
| keyboard dongle on my desk near the keyboard itself. That
| improved the signal between the two and eliminated the
| Bluetooth interference.
| dm33tri wrote:
| Yeah same I thought my laptop broke because my AirPods and
| my mouse weren't working. Turned out it's the other laptop
| connected to 2.4GHz across the room.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Is it really wifi? Or is it Bluetooth?
| SamBam wrote:
| Bluetooth wouldn't need a dongle on a modern computer. But
| I'd be surprised that it's wifi and not some other frequency
| radio communication.
| 55555 wrote:
| They always seem to come with a dongle just incase though,
| and sometimes people use the dongle despite having
| bluetooth, or plug them in and then connect to the
| computer's built-in bluetooth.
| yarcob wrote:
| The problem with Bluetooth is that it just doesn't work
| well when you want to use one keyboard or mouse with
| multiple computers.
|
| For this reason I prefer the dongles. Want to use your
| mouse on a different Mac? Just plug the dongle in a
| different computer.
|
| I don't know how often I ended up at the password prompt
| with no way to type the password because the keyboard
| didn't connect, or was connected to a different Mac, and
| I had no idea how to get it to connect to the Mac I was
| trying to start.
| marcosscriven wrote:
| This is why I like the Logitech MX keys/mouse. Can have
| multiple dongles and just press a button to choose which
| one you connect to.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Logitech also has a Bluetooth variant of this where the
| mouse will have 3 different "personalities" that you can
| associate with different devices and then switch with a
| button. As far as the host devices are concerned it's 3
| different mice so there's no switching involved.
|
| It works great and it's the best of both worlds.
| Convenient and no dongles (Bluetooth on my MacBook was
| very reliable for a mouse).
| slig wrote:
| Are you using a USB-C dongle? That is known to cause issues
| with things operating in the 2.4GHz spectrum (such as Bluetooth
| and your keyboard dongle).
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| USB-a
| exmadscientist wrote:
| It's not so much the Type C connector causing the problem but
| rather the high data rates of SuperSpeed USB (or whichever
| one it is that causes the trouble; I can't keep track of the
| USB-IF's recent garbage). So Type A (9-pin) connectors are
| vulnerable as well. But given that a BT or BTLE dongle can't
| really run very fast, I doubt they're using anything above
| USB HS (480Mbps) and therefore unlikely to interfere at
| 2.4GHz no matter what the connector.
| yarcob wrote:
| Yeah, the dongles themselves work fine, it's other USB 3
| devices that cause the problem (eg. hard drives or USB 3
| hubs).
|
| Bluetooth is also affected by the interference. The
| advantage of a dongle is that you can use an extension
| cable and move the transmitter away from whatever is
| causing the interference.
| thewileyone wrote:
| "These are new features that are improvements over older versions
| ... " - Apple
|
| /s
| my123 wrote:
| Interesting that Apple still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi + BT chips in
| most of their product range despite lots of issues with them.
|
| Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi +
| BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to
| those.
| totetsu wrote:
| Marconi is named after inventor of the radio
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi?wprov=sfla1
| late2part wrote:
| Apple was a music label before it was a computer company.
| Before that, a fruit.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Marconi was the name of my kitty. A person at the veterinary
| clinic called him Macaroni by mistake (she'd read it but not
| heard it). The vet was rather adamant about making sure she
| got it right when I was just gonna let it go.
|
| He turned to me to check that my guy was indeed named for the
| inventor of radio. Yep, that's how he got his name. I wanted
| him to have a name with dignity.
|
| Another Apple internal project was dubbed Sagan or Carl
| Sagan. It was later changed to BHA.[0] The story behind it is
| amusing. [1]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_7100 [1]
| https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-
| app...
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I know it's not pronounced like that in Italian, but I always
| read his name as "Googly-Elmo" Marconi.
| pudmaidai wrote:
| To be fair the pronunciation of GLI in Italian is rather
| unique, so I'll take Googly-Elmo!
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Wow. I can't unsee that.
| wumpus wrote:
| That just wrecked my ability to say the name of a
| prominent 15th century Italian dance master.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Ebreo_da_Pesaro
| duckfang wrote:
| I've always been more of a Caroso fan, especially his
| second treatise. I've even learned Alegrezza d'amore from
| both his first and second works and did them back to back
| :)
|
| Then again, Petit Riens is my favorite danes of
| Pesaro's... I call it mosh pit riens given how rowdy it
| can be!
| wumpus wrote:
| Yeah, but "Fabritio" can't measure up to "Googly-Elmo"!
|
| Fabric Cheeto? Febreze Cheeto?
|
| BTW Allegrezza d'Amore is also in Santucci. Happy to send
| you a translation.
| duckfang wrote:
| That'd be awesome!
|
| My email is https://pastebin.com/nRRad00N
| [deleted]
| de6u99er wrote:
| My French guy at work, would tell me now that it was actually
| the French who invented the radio.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| Inventor? Not so much. He did manage to get a patent on other
| people's prior art by keeping it in a sealed box, though.
| bdowling wrote:
| > keeping it in a sealed box
|
| A patent has to disclose the invention in order to be
| valid. An invention, however, can comprise a new and non-
| obvious combination of pre-existing components. Most
| inventions, in fact, comprise new and non-obvious
| arrangements of familiar components, some of which may be
| patented by others. If a component is patented by another,
| that just means the inventor won't be able to actually
| build his invention without buying or licensing the
| component from the other inventor. I'm not familiar with
| the Marconi case, but that may be the situation.
| ksec wrote:
| >Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi
| + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup
| to those.
|
| Apple has renewed their WiFI commitment to Broadcom for at
| least another 3 years. Marking WiFI, or in fact any Wireless
| Controller is hard, making it that is also a moving target (
| Both WiFi 6E/ WiFi 7 and 5G / 3GPP Rel 17 ) is even harder.
|
| But if Apple do intend to make their own WiFi ( Which makes
| perfect sense from an BOM cost reduction perspective ), please
| also bring back AirPort Wireless Router.
| anitil wrote:
| What are the issue with Broadcom chips?
| SilverRed wrote:
| Not sure about OP but the hardest part about getting linux on
| a macbook is getting wifi to work because there are no FOSS
| drivers.
| notaplumber wrote:
| Sure there are, it's called brcmfmac. If the AsahiLinux
| team hasn't already got it working, certainly Corellium did
| a few months ago in their much hyped public demo image.
|
| https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211
|
| OpenBSD has also added support to their bwfm(4) driver
| already for 6.9.
|
| Wireless is absolutely not the hardest problem for the M1
| Mac, or running on any Mac, for that matter.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Broadcom Wi-Fi languished for something around a decade
| under the "b43" driver before Broadcom showed up with
| their brcmfmac driver, it caused significant anger within
| the kernel community that they decided to write a new
| driver instead of just augmenting the existing one
| usr1106 wrote:
| They have various product families and more than 2
| drivers.
|
| I need the bcmwl driver (dkms) for some 4-5 year old HP
| laptop and it has severe problems with some APs and
| slight problems with others. Overall it's just bad.
|
| Debugging it showed that it's only a thin Linux wrapper
| around some huge binary blob they use. So not really
| FOSS, but of course that's what we are used to with
| firmware. This was't really firmware, they use the blob
| on the CPU IIRC. (It's been years I debugged this, since
| then Broadcom is just something that raises a red flag to
| me.)
| zodiakzz wrote:
| Genuinely curious, is it harder than getting Linux working
| with the proprietary Apple variant of ARM? Or are you
| talking pre-M1?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| The M1 still uses a broadcom wifi chip:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358, so
| presumably because it's a newer chip it'll be more
| difficult.
| [deleted]
| swiley wrote:
| Usually it's missing firmware rather than drivers.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or
| Server enthusiast markets either, they're a step above
| Realtek. Oddly Intel is well regarded though...
|
| It mostly comes down to drivers from what I understand but
| I'm not entirely familiar with all the objections.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| > Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or
| Server enthusiast markets either
|
| I always thought that it was funny that their NICs are much
| to be desired yet their ASICs power a wide variety of
| enterprise network switches capable of moving terabits of
| traffic at low latency.
|
| https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/buffer.html
| spiznnx wrote:
| Broadcom has been through so many mergers and
| acquisitions that I doubt the two product lines have much
| DNA in common.
| wmf wrote:
| Even Broadcom's wired NICs have different generations
| that came from different acquisitions: Tigon3 (tg3) came
| from Alteon AceNIC, I forgot where NetExtreme 2 (bnx2)
| came from, and NetExteme E (bnxt) is an in-house effort
| that is somewhat derived from the StrataXGS switches.
|
| So yeah, Broadcom is a rollup of two dozen different
| companies so the quality of one product tells you nothing
| about others.
| TwoBit wrote:
| If people keep buying their crap then why would they be
| motivated to fix it?
| ksec wrote:
| I dont think Broadcom's WiFI are inherently bad. If I have
| to argue ALL WiFi are bad.
|
| The only reason why Realtek dominates is because they are
| the cheaper alternative. The only reason why Intel dominate
| WiFI on PC is because they are bundled as part of their CPU
| sales for Laptop.
|
| Most of the half decent WiFI AP still uses Broadcom.
| Although increasingly Qualcomm is making inroad. So
| Boradcom is stuck in the middle of no where in consumer
| market. They dont have WiFi in PC Laptops, nor do they have
| WiFi in Android Smartphone. Apple being the largest
| Broadcom customer for their consumer grade WiFI. And that
| is why every 2-3 years you may have read Broadcom's
| intentional leaks about they want to sell their WiFi
| chipset division because they dont want to play balls with
| Apple's WiFi asking price.
| nwallin wrote:
| I would much rather have a realtek or intel controller than
| a broadcom one. My thinkpad has a realtek, my last laptop
| (an xps13) had an intel controller, and they just worked
| without issue.
|
| Admittedly it's been a while since I had a broadcom
| controller, but I had all sorts of problems with it. Random
| disconnects etc.
| userbinator wrote:
| Realteks also have documentation and thus open-source
| drivers, which was for a very long time (and very much
| still is) a problem with Broadcom's notorious closedness.
|
| In my experience, Intel has higher performance and more
| features (which might be a downside from the point of
| complexity and configuration) at a higher cost, while
| Realtek is slower, but cheap, simple and reliable.
| gspr wrote:
| I long ago realized that just buying an Intel wifi card
| and replacing whatever crap my laptop ships with is
| totally worth it. (At least many 15" laptops ship with
| replaceable cards, don't know about smaller ones).
| jrockway wrote:
| You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these
| chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and
| every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware,
| and driver. If you hack that into something good, your
| product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of
| code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if
| you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy
| some chips off the back of a truck in Shenzhen, solder them
| onto some circuit board you built in your garage, and use
| the three-years-out-of-date reference drivers written in a
| day by some random intern, the results will not be as good.
| Apple, I assume, uses the first approach when working with
| hardware vendors. The WiFi card you got for $3 on Amazon
| probably doesn't.
|
| Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or
| anything.
|
| Shitty firmware and garbage reference drivers sounds like
| endorsement enough.
| xfer wrote:
| Dell is also following the first route and they shipped a
| PC(alienware) with shitty broadcom drivers(that was a
| 4yrs ago). I have avoided broadcom ever since..
| simondotau wrote:
| And yet "the wifi is shit" isn't something you hear said
| very often about MacBooks.
| rasz wrote:
| One year ago:
|
| Broadcom bluetooth/wifi chips ran out of firmware hot patch
| ram slots long time ago. Company seems to be too cheap to
| respin the rom mask with all the fixes baked in. From what I
| remember even brand new iphone x ships with no room for BT
| firmware patching.
|
| RECON 2019 - Reversing and Exploiting Broadcom Bluetooth
| (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Mi8_9ABCc
|
| 35C3 - Dissecting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis
| Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nI9ok7iQg
| daat678 wrote:
| Would you have a link or article discussing this Marconi
| project? I'm always interested in Apple's wireless chips
| designs.
|
| A web search brings me back to this thread.
| my123 wrote:
| https://gist.github.com/woachk/943828f37c14563a607a26116435b.
| .. includes some tiny tidbits on it. The firmware can be
| extracted out of an IPSW/OTA download, where it is present in
| the Firmware directory.
| daat678 wrote:
| Great thanks I'll check it out
| relevant_thing wrote:
| Are those from Infineon->Intel->Apple modem lineage or is that
| a different team?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I think the acquisition of the Intel modem group is too
| recent to have been integrated into the Apple watch
| sroussey wrote:
| Why would they have not used them before the acquisition?
| gumby wrote:
| One of the recent phones (X or 11?) used Intel for part
| of its builds (as far as I remember you couldn't tell
| from serial number). Apple had a lot of problems and
| swore off the Intel parts, which killed Intel's wireless
| business.
|
| I assumed Apple bought the Intel product line for IP,
| especially after that episode.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Apple used Intel modems for many generations - the iPhone
| 7, X/8, XS, 11. For some generations they used Qualcomm
| chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't
| make a CDMA modem. So you could tell which chip you'd get
| from the iPhone model number.
|
| Apple ditched Intel due to Intel being at least a year
| behind on 5G.
|
| These modems were all LTE modems though. They've always
| used separate Broadcom chips for WiFi/Bluetooth.
| TwoBit wrote:
| > due to Intel being at least a year behind
|
| That's not the only thing Intel is at least a year behind
| on.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the
| models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA
| modem._"
|
| Yeah. The Qualcomm-equipped international version of the
| iPhone X notoriously got significantly better LTE speeds
| compared to the Intel-modem version sold in UK/Europe.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >which killed Intel's wireless business
|
| I was under the impression that modern laptops ship with
| intel WiFi cards (I think I saw some Lenovo laptop use
| it). Do you mean it killed their modems ?
| wumpus wrote:
| WiFi and cellphones are both wireless, but this
| discussion is about cellphones.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| the iPhone 7 used the intel wireless chip. it was a major
| downgrade for me from my iPhone 6 at the time: speeds
| were lower for data transfers, and reception was less
| (could be attributed to an antenna change?)
|
| overall, I was very happy to get a phone that didn't use
| the intel chips.
| my123 wrote:
| Apple Watch uses Intel IBIS or Qualcomm cellular modems
| depending on model (for those with cellular).
|
| Wi-Fi/BT is handled separately by Apple-designed chips
| for the newer ones.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| I'll just leave this old 2012 article link here.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/03/apple-hiring-former-
| tex...
| my123 wrote:
| For Wi-Fi/BT, it's an Apple team separate from modem efforts.
| derekerdmann wrote:
| > 1. Packet captures don't use the correct channel
|
| I've also seen this on a 2020 Intel MacBook Air. I assumed it was
| a Big Sur issue but had never tried it on Catalina.
|
| Sniffing from the command line did pick up the correct channel:
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/49317/36875
| oolonthegreat wrote:
| if wifi packet capturing is broken, then this effects web
| browsing too right? if most packets received are garbage, then
| this cuts down the bandwidth/download speed etc.?
| detaro wrote:
| Unlikely, packet capture here refers specifically to modes and
| tools for monitoring raw network frames, which are not what's
| used in normal operation.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-30 23:03 UTC)