[HN Gopher] M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro Running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch ...
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M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro Running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM
Author : nixcraft
Score : 355 points
Date : 2021-11-12 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| perihelions wrote:
| > _" So it basically ran for a whole day off of battery doing
| hardware experiments. Still had 30% left."_
|
| Are there metrics comparing efficiency / battery life of ARM
| linux and OS X, on the same hardware? This sounds promising.
| viraptor wrote:
| This wouldn't be representative yet. Software rendering will
| kill the efficiency. We'll need to wait for the GPU to be
| properly supported.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Even without the GPU, it sounds like the M1 is quiet and
| efficient, more so than any HP/Dell/Lenovo laptop I've used.
| Most heat up quite quickly doing anything, and the battery
| life quickly drops once you go past "light web browsing".
|
| If someone can pull off the GPU in Linux on these, I have a
| feeling they'll be some beastly Linux dev workstations too.
| selectodude wrote:
| I just picked one up yesterday, I pulled it out of the box
| at 70 percent, installed all my crap, set it up to my
| liking, used it all afternoon and evening, closed the lid,
| went to bed, and now I'm using it to type this comment and
| the charger is still in the box.
|
| It's frankly incredible.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It seems they're at the stage where they could do with more
| development help...
|
| For example, bringup of the wifi can probably happen in parallel
| with GPU work...
| marcan_42 wrote:
| WiFi already works, but the existing patch (which was written
| by Corellium as part of their throwaway M1 Linux PR stunt
| earlier this year) needs a complete rewrite, among other things
| because the way it handles firmware is completely backwards. I
| know how I want to do it, just need to spend a day or so on
| that one, maybe another day on hooking up firmware copying into
| the installer :)
| mootzville wrote:
| I don't understand why you'd want a Mac unless you intended to
| run it's provided OS.
|
| With Linux you can get the same hardware for half the price from
| other manufacturers.
|
| EDIT: By 'same hardware' I mean 'hardware with comparable /
| equivalent performance'
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Maybe because the M1 is a powerful, low-power-consumption CPU
| and it is very hard to get powerful aarch64 CPUs outside of
| this? Not everyone likes macOS.
| dagw wrote:
| _With Linux you can get the same hardware for half the price
| from other manufacturers._
|
| That might have been true before, but today no one else is
| selling ARM laptops that can match the M1 Pro in performance
| and efficiency.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| No one else is selling laptops period that can match the M1
| Pro in performance and efficiency. Much less the M1 Max.
| mootzville wrote:
| Agreed, but who will better take advantage of the CPI's
| architecture to utilize those gains, the same people making
| the hardware and native OS, or a Linux distro? Just because a
| CPU can do something does not mean every OS / kernel is going
| to use it.
|
| What I was getting at is if you want Linux, you can get a
| good Lenovo or Dell for about $1000-1200 that would seem /
| feel compararble to a $2000 macbook.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Some people just want Linux. Running it on Apple silicon
| (that is, aarch64) is exactly what they want-performance
| wise, it'll run circles around anything else in that price
| race.
| alimbada wrote:
| Except there's no current hardware that has comparable /
| equivalent performance to Apple Silicon chips. The tightly
| integrated SoC allows for optimisations that x86 chips can't
| even get close to in certain workloads like video editing.
| That's not to say that M1 can do it all, but for the workloads
| it excels at (and it excels at the majority) it is absolutely
| the best choice for those that need it.
|
| Even discounting the performance benefits of Apple Silicon, the
| reliability and longevity of Apple products in and of itself is
| reason enough for me to purchase them. I'm still using an early
| 2011 Macbook Pro as my personal laptop but I no longer get
| macOS upgrades; it's stuck on 10.13 and has been for some time
| so I'll be installing Linux on it at some point in the near
| future.
|
| And I say all this as someone who once hated Apple for their
| price premiums. I still find their prices hard to swallow even
| though I have the means now compared to back then. But their
| prices are easier to justify for me once you take all of the
| above into account.
| webmobdev wrote:
| The only real attraction of the M1 Apple Silicon is the power
| saving it offers, especially on laptops where it means longer
| battery life. Other performance metrics are just temporary
| gains that AMD / Intel will match up with future CPUs. (Intel
| and AMD themselves used to compete similarly, with each
| bettering the other over the years, and it will be no
| different with Apple Silicons too).
|
| Everybody understands that with soldered RAM, SSD and a
| closed SoC the M1 Apple Silicon Macs are just one step away
| from being a completely closed system like the iPhone / iPad
| platform - all that Apple has to do is lock the boot-loader
| of the Mac, like on iPhones / iPads, and tighten SIP to
| prevent installation outside of its App Store. When (not if)
| they do this, the users will be effectively trapped into the
| Apple ecosystem, with them beholden to Apple's mercy on how
| effectively and how long they can use their system (planned
| obsolescence).
|
| This is why many with common sense have ignored the new Apple
| M1 systems, and continue to stick with the more open systems
| relying on AMD / Intel. Constant hyping of "Linux on M1" is
| meant to counter the perception of the closed-box macOS mono-
| culture, and give us the _false hope_ that the M1 macs are
| just like any other Intel / AMD computer. Where as the
| reality is that unless Apple releases hardware documentation
| for it, all non-macOS operating systems on the M1 will always
| offer sub-par performance.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| > Apple Silicon Macs are just one step away from being a
| completely closed system like the iPhone / iPad platform
|
| Apple Silicon Macs are _based_ on the iPhone / iPad
| platform. Apple _chose_ to spend a significant amount of
| developer time _adding_ the ability for users to securely
| load their own kernels, which is part of the new BootPolicy
| system that iDevices do not have, and a documented feature
| with multiple official tools to support it. There is a blog
| writen by Apple 's head of XNU development detailing how to
| use it. If Apple wanted to lock these machines down they
| would've just not done any of that.
|
| As for soldered RAM, you would need _8_ RAM sticks in
| individual channels to match the M1 Max 's memory
| bandwidth, at a much higher power consumption. Modular RAM
| is no longer viable for low-power, high-performance
| laptops. Modular, low power, high performance: pick two.
| It's just the way the physics works. Carrying a 512-bit bus
| across a connector isn't free, it has a significant
| power/performance cost due to increased capacitance and
| decreased signal integrity.
|
| (Soldered SSDs, sure, that's a valid concern, but it has
| nothing to do with the OS.)
|
| > Where as the reality is that unless Apple releases
| hardware documentation for it, all non-macOS operating
| systems on the M1 will always offer sub-par performance.
|
| Funny enough, we already have better VM performance than
| macOS thanks to supporting the M1's vGIC (which macOS does
| not use yet), and we've also figured out how to work around
| a USB death issue that affects macOS, and I'm already
| putting making simultaneous DisplayPort 1.4 + USB3 work if
| at all possible on my TODO list, because I just found out
| macOS can't do it.
|
| No documentation doesn't mean we can't beat Apple at their
| own game.
| mst wrote:
| > Modular RAM is no longer viable for low-power, high-
| performance laptops.
|
| The fact that this is true makes me grumpy for all the
| obvious reasons, but even at my rather less informed
| level of understanding it's still obviously true.
|
| My "solution" here is basically to enjoy the better
| batter life while grumbling quietly to myself ;)
| capableweb wrote:
| Prefacing this with that I'm not normally a Apple fan and use
| Linux on Intel and AMD CPUs as my daily driver.
|
| Apple does do incredible hardware, but their software is really
| crappy, from UX to reliability and being general useful. Since
| the M1 appeared, I've been looking at purchasing it only for
| the hardware, but then run something like Arch Linux on it, as
| that software experience is really hard to beat.
|
| So in short, the combination of Apple hardware but Open
| Source/Linux software makes a lot of sense and is a pleasure to
| work with. The hardware Apple been producing lately been kind
| of shit though, so it's not until now it starts being
| interesting again.
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah I've been an apple fan for years. As of a couple of days
| ago my work desk has a M1 MacBook pro and a ryzen x5800
| running Linux Mint. The CPUs are remarkably similar - same
| core count, and only slightly different single core
| performance. So the only main difference is software.
|
| I expected the MacBook to blow Linux out of the water - after
| all, their hardware and software integration is excellent.
| The trackpad drivers and consistent UI is fantastic. But
| watching CPU usage on both machines, Linux mint stays lean
| and quiet while the MacBook has all sorts of weird processes
| popping up to do who knows what.
|
| On macos the "WindowServer" process sometimes just pegs an
| entire core until I reboot. My usb-c Ethernet dongle doesn't
| do hardware offload, so cpu usage goes way up when I use it.
| Firefox uses way more CPU on macos than it does on Linux. And
| there's random processes all the time reporting things to
| apple or other garbage like that. I've been googling process
| names all day trying to figure out what all this crap does.
| Spotify alone uses 10% of a core on macos sometimes, even
| when it's not even playing music.
|
| It was a pain to get Linux working how I want it to. But now
| that it's mostly[1] set up, it feels snappier and more
| reliable than macos. When I don't touch the computer, it
| settles at 0% CPU; just like it should. I suppose that's what
| the desktop looks like without the last decade of macos
| features that nobody really cares about.
|
| I'm really surprised how close the competition feels between
| my two machines; though I miss Snow Leopard.
|
| [1] Keyboard shortcuts on are all over the place in Linux
| though. And I can't even set keyboard shortcuts up how I'd
| like because intellij can't use the meta key as a modifier.
| And the Linux trackpad drivers are nowhere near as well tuned
| as they are in macos. In linux the trackpad is way too
| sensitive. I'm sure there's a way to fix it hiding in a
| config file somewhere.
| messe wrote:
| > EDIT: By 'same hardware' I mean 'hardware with comparable /
| equivalent performance
|
| Where are you finding laptops with comparable displays at half
| the price?
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| What do you want to compare about the display?
|
| - Resolution? There the macbooks are behind both in aspect
| ratio (worse than 3:2) and in pixels (4k or 4k+ vs...)
|
| - Contrast? Not OLED, so worse.
|
| - Refresh rate? Good enough, but far from top of the line.
|
| - Gamut? That is a point. But also available e.g. asus
|
| - Brightness? Outdoor viewable screens have been as bright as
| that or brighter since windows XP days, but fairly
| specialized. I guess I prefer contrast (OLED), but yeah,
| difficult to find outside a macbook.
|
| - Touch, wacom pen? Oh, none.
|
| It is a really great quality screen, but not "the best".
| ArgyleSound wrote:
| He suggested that you can't find a similar or better
| quality display for $1000, not that it's the best display
| that exists.
|
| At that price point you can find something that, at best,
| meets three of the criteria you've listed while heavily
| compromising on the rest.
| qudat wrote:
| link us with better alternatives please
| messe wrote:
| > It is a really great quality screen, but not "the best".
|
| I never said it was the best. The previous poster said that
| you can find comparable hardware at half the price. At
| lower price points than MacBooks/Dell XPS/Microsoft
| Surface, I've usually found the screen quality to be the
| hardest to match.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I was surprised by glxgears/OpenGL running, but in a later tweet
| I read this:
|
| > It's been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage)
|
| Looks like it'll be a while before this thing runs Linux with
| anywhere near acceptable performance if glxgears still runs in
| software at 60% CPU.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| The % usage is not indicative of anything considering it will
| use as much CPU as possible to reach as high a frame rate as
| possible
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I think by default glxgears has vsync enabled. But it's
| trivially possible to disable it with an env var. Considering
| the CPU usage I assume that is what was done. 60% CPU usage
| for running glxgears at 120Hz seems excessive.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| There is no vsync with the dumb framebuffer backend I'm
| using. We have a real display driver, but it needs rebasing
| and adapting to work on these laptops (it was developed on
| the Mac Mini).
| e_proxus wrote:
| I always remember glxgears running at hundreds of FPS and
| it being used as a poor man's benchmark. Perhaps this has
| changed of late though...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I always have had to set `vblank_mode=0` to get it to run
| as fast as possible.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| If networking and KVM suport exist for this (I think it does),
| then these would make great servers as well.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Yeah it's LLVMpipe, it's basically doing everything in software
| and Plasma uses quite a bit OpenGL for animations and
| compositing. A lighter WM like Fluxbox could maybe be easier on
| the CPU. In any case, looking back at Nouveau, writing decent
| drivers for a GPU nobody has specs of is definitely
| challenging. Only time can tell.
| samus wrote:
| Working off inprecise documentation or reverse engineering
| everything is nothing new in the Linux world. At least on the
| M1 drivers seem to be able to exert full control over the
| card, compared to newer Nvidia cards where firmware _signed
| by Nvidia_ is required to boost the card to a reasonable
| clock frequency!
| gigatexal wrote:
| He also mentions: "buttery smooth software only rendering"
| rpmisms wrote:
| Not a technical comment, but wow, Plasma 5 looks great on that
| hardware.
| prike wrote:
| I've been watching macran's stream on youtube in the last couple
| of days, where he had to fix a lot of stuff so this notebook can
| come to life. If you are intrested in
| ARM/bootloader/linux/drivers, I highly recommend the stream
| recordings.
| packetlost wrote:
| Mind linking me to their channel?
| anirudh24seven wrote:
| I had the same question and I found this:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxS98ISZNcuaJRCvy6JV6Fw
| runnerup wrote:
| Looks like: https://www.youtube.com/c/marcan42/videos
| hyproxia wrote:
| I really hope that all of these efforts end up failing miserably.
| Their only purpose is to encourage customers to buy from these
| companies.
|
| It'll be entertaining to watch them engage with their sisyphean
| mental gymnastics once Apple releases a new product with extra
| wrenches for their pleasure.
| simonh wrote:
| >I really hope that all of these efforts end up failing
| miserably.
|
| Deep breaths my friend. Maybe time for a walk in the sunshine.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Apple seems to draw so much actual pure hate...
|
| It's like, I can understand hating an oil company or
| something like that, but Apple? Geez.
| pbasista wrote:
| > Their only purpose is to encourage customers to buy from
| these companies.
|
| No, you are assuming too much. People who do this are typically
| not interested in boosting Apple's sales at all. They merely
| want to make a good use of a good hardware.
|
| In general, the ignorance or inability to understand why
| something is being done does not imply that it in fact is
| pointless.
|
| For instance, I do not fully see well into the physics of the
| general relativity. But that does not entitle me to imply that
| the people who dedicate their lives to exploring this field are
| wasting their time.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > It'll be entertaining to watch them engage with their
| sisyphean mental gymnastics once Apple releases a new product
| with extra wrenches for their pleasure.
|
| I mean, you're looking at the new Apple product. This project
| started on M1 and now it's being extended to work on M1 Pro.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Wrenches found so far: they changed some hardware blocks to
| scale up to ~2TB of RAM (up from 32GB theoretical max on the
| M1) and better support more CPU cores and multi-die setups
| (future product?). And they moved some fuse bits around.
|
| Seems pretty reasonable to me.
| reificator wrote:
| > _I really hope that all of these efforts end up failing
| miserably. Their only purpose is to encourage customers to buy
| from these companies._
|
| Or to enable customers to migrate away bit-by-bit because cold
| turkey is _hard_.
|
| I personally am running linux full-time on my personal
| machines, but I wouldn't have ever made the switch had I not
| been able to run linux in a VM for a few weeks and then dual
| boot for a few years and then run windows in a VM for another
| few years. If people back in the early 2000s had your mindset
| I'd probably be running a mix of windows and mac today.
| nbzso wrote:
| The only motivation for me to own Apple hardware in 2021 is the
| ability to use FOSS software in the natural habitat of Linux.
|
| I don't trust Apple's software and "ideas" of computing at all.
| Just another big company with data gathering ambitions. After
| Catalina MacOs is a total joke.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
|
| So let's hope that running Linux on M cips will be possible,
| soon.
| nomel wrote:
| > After Catalina MacOs is a total joke
|
| I'm running Monterey now, and nothing has changed for me
| between Catalina and Monterey. The security changes (like
| kernel extensions, some paths, etc) and deprecations (32-bit
| apps), that broke some of the software/devices I had, were
| already present in Catalina. What damning difference do you see
| in Big Sur and Monterey?
| andrekandre wrote:
| > What damning difference do you see in Big Sur and Monterey?
|
| the ui/ux i presume
| jmnicolas wrote:
| But if you don't want MacOS why wouldn't you buy a $800 laptop
| and don't have to worry about ARM compatibility?
| zerr wrote:
| What's Win10/11 story on m1 macs?
| viktorcode wrote:
| Wholly dependent on Microsoft. So far, they didn't say anything
| apart from indicating last year that they don't have immediate
| plans to do it.
| DHowett wrote:
| > Wholly dependent on Microsoft.
|
| Not wholly, surely? As an OEM, Apple would need to provide
| drivers. Given that their system isn't an off-the-shelf
| SBBR/ServerReady ARM64 device, that's going to be a not-
| insignificant amount of work that isn't Microsoft's
| responsibility.
|
| Seeing as the Asahi Linux project has had to reverse-engineer
| pretty much everything, I don't see how Microsoft could be
| totally on the hook.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| It's precisely it not being a SystemReady ARM64 device that
| makes it Microsoft's responsibility. The Windows kernel
| requires core changes to support this hardware; it cannot
| be done with just drivers. Nobody can make Windows work on
| this without Microsoft's help. Same reason we had to make a
| few changes to core Linux plumbing, besides adding drivers.
| DHowett wrote:
| Ah, thanks for the explanation! That makes sense.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Apple has publicly stated that they're willing to do that,
| but Microsoft refuses to license Windows for the M1:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-
| wind...
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| I'm surprised Apple stated that as macOS (ARM) have
| stretchy support for dual booting, even with two macOS
| version installed. So how could Apple be willing to do
| that if they haven't flesh out the dual-booting for Apple
| Silicon? Strange they passes the ball to Microsoft
| (deflecting to their competitor) whereas Apple should be
| holding the ball until it is capable enough.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't offer Windows 11 unless it is bundled with
| hardware. I am sure that if Apple wishes to sell Macbook Pro
| with Windows, Apple could reach out and Microsoft would be
| interested. But I really doubt that Apple would want to go
| down this route.
| blue_cookeh wrote:
| Eh? You can go out and buy a retail copy of Windows 11 from
| loads of places without hardware. E.g. here in the UK Scan,
| Ebuyer, Insight, etc. All major software/hardware sellers.
| wolpoli wrote:
| My bad. I should have specified Windows 11 ARM.
| TillE wrote:
| Buy a copy of Parallels, run the Windows 11 ARM64 insider
| preview in a VM. Works pretty great for everything but gaming.
|
| If you want to activate it, use slmgr with some sketchy third
| party KMS server.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Won't happen because it would work against their Surface
| efforts, I think
| _fzslm wrote:
| for a software-focussed company like Microsoft to deny
| running Windows on the M1 seems very strange to me...
|
| if MSFT is serious about (eventually) transitioning to ARM
| for the majority of consumer-oriented Windows machines, it
| surely makes sense for them to provide support for the most
| adopted ARM-based laptop and desktop platform out there... to
| bolster development of ARM-native applications for Windows on
| ARM, if nothing else.
|
| i don't own either machine -- but i imagine the ARM-based
| Surface Pro X would make a miserable development experience,
| especially compared to a hypothetical Windows on M1(X)
| MacBooks.
|
| we shall see i suppose, but i would be very surprised if we
| never see it happen.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Bare metal Win10/11 ARM is non functional on the M1 machines,
| Virtualised is officially unsupported [1], there is no apparent
| talk of official support for either in the rumour mill. However
| it wouldn't surprise me if there was a working dev build in
| Redmond somewhere.
|
| [1] - https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/windows_11_m1/
| trollitarantula wrote:
| no such story
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| "The End."
| sys_64738 wrote:
| A static image with no example videos of software rendering?
| [deleted]
| coding123 wrote:
| The only thing that would make it better is the M2 Pro where the
| Notch will be directly in the middle of the screen so that we can
| optimize zoom calls even more.
| darthrupert wrote:
| I love Linux but after 5 years of using Apple products
| exclusively, I have learned to hate everything except Apple
| hardware.
|
| Linux on macbooks would be an amazing dream.
| viktorcode wrote:
| You can run it in a VM
| moonchrome wrote:
| I don't get this. The only reason I feel Apple has an advantage
| compared to competition is software integration.
|
| M1 performance in laptops is great but that's only been true
| for a year or so, for the last 5 years Apple laptops have been
| hot garbage.
|
| As an owner of fully loaded 2018 mbp (i9/upgraded GPU, 32 GB
| ram) I can without a doubt say it's the worst premium device
| I've ever owned. The battery runs out on me after 1 hour
| meeting - and I have >100 cycles on it. The amount of heat and
| noise it produces is surreal, and that's after I opened it and
| cleaned up the vents (which clog easily) and added thermal pads
| to connect VRM to chassis (which helped significantly, prior to
| that the CPU would downclock so bad I couldn't use anything on
| my device after 15 mins in a Google meet connected to a 5k
| monitor).
|
| Not to mention all the bugs I had to go through with it -
| wasn't untill 6 months after I purchased the device that I
| could actually use my 5k on my USBC monitor on full resolution
| - only started working after an OS upgrade.
|
| And the keyboards failing being a known problem they replace
| out of warranty because they recognise their design sucks
| (luckily I use external keyboard 95% of the time).
|
| Apple hardware was mediocre at best for the price they charge,
| up until M1.
|
| In the mobile space, they are faster but as someone who
| switched from an iPhone to Samsung - I can't really say it
| matters. Phones are good and well rounded but nothing
| spectacular, hardware is on par with Samsung.
|
| Again using the Mac/iOS combo is really nice so the software
| integration is next level, but considering their business
| practices I refuse to get locked in to the ecosystem, it's just
| too limiting.
|
| And Linux on M1 would likely be subpar to any premium x86
| device, Linux support sucked even on x86 Macs.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| This is why Apple went to their own CPUs due to the poor
| thermal dynamics of the recent x86 chips. The recent chips
| are like the PowerPC chips of 2005.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Do you have any 5nm x86 chips that you could compare it to?
| kule wrote:
| I understand the frustration, especially if your first
| impression of Apple is a MacBook Pro is in the 2016-2019 era
| - you've probably seen the worst MacBooks available and not
| the best of Apple.
|
| There were some good things, the displays were excellent, the
| touchpad is still the best in class, and the size/weight were
| excellent.
|
| But usb-c only was step too far, the Touch Bar wasn't the
| right move for a Pro audience (i), there wasn't enough room
| for cooling the intel chips and the keyboard situation was
| farcical - it's the primary interface to a Mac (can you
| imagine the outcry if iPhones had touch displays randomly not
| working, doing extra touches etc?!).
|
| I think Apple gets a lot of leeway because the 2008-2015
| MacBook Pros were probably the best laptops you could buy.
|
| Having owned a 2009 MacBook Pro which in my opinion was the
| best laptop I'd ever owned and never made me question the
| amount of money I spent on it. The 2016 MacBook Pro was the
| exact opposite (mainly due to the keyboard being so bad).
|
| I'm glad Apple have come to their senses and course
| corrected. I do wonder though for people that have only seen
| the 2016-2019 era if they will bother to try Apple again...
|
| (i) I understand it probably would've made it too expensive
| to produce but I think the Touch Bar would've gone down well
| on a MacBook Air where I would imagine there's a lot more
| hunt-and-peck typists that'd appreciate and notice what's
| being displayed on the Touch Bar. As a touch typist I never
| looked down to see the Touch Bar so it was a mostly wasted on
| me.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I'm glad Apple have come to their senses and course
| corrected. I do wonder though for people that have only
| seen the 2016-2019 era if they will bother to try Apple
| again...
|
| I'm one of those angry bastards, and I even own an M1
| Macbook Air. The hardware is impressive, no doubt, but
| MacOS frustrates me so much these days that I cannot daily-
| drive it for my workflow. Plus, once you make the switch to
| Linux it's really hard to see Apple products as an upgrade
| anymore. You're giving away your freedom, and condemning
| yourself to paying $8 to manage your windows properly or
| $10 just to hide some statusbar icons. And when all is
| said-and-done, I can't move that statusbar to the left side
| of my screen... God it frustrates me endlessly. When I saw
| how Big Sur redesigned everything, I just gave up on the OS
| altogether. The thousand papercuts I feel on MacOS are
| reduced to a couple hundred on Linux, the majority of which
| I can automate away without worrying about some bigger
| company pulling the rug out from under me.
|
| I really wanted Apple Silicon to be a barnburner for me,
| and I was _hoping beyond hope_ that they would take the
| extra space savings to add an M.2 drive or an easier to
| repair chassis. At this point though, I think I 'm
| contented to just stop caring. Apple courageously headed in
| a direction I'm not ready to follow in, so I cut them loose
| in exchange for all my sweet creature comforts. And how
| comforting it is.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I sympathize with many of your takes, but have you looked
| into Framework[1] laptops?
|
| They're currently only Intel based, but there's a
| marketplace where you can buy or sell just the mainboards
| once the AMD, RISC V, or ARM64 models become available.
|
| [1] https://frame.work/
| smoldesu wrote:
| Framework looks great! I actually have no real need to
| upgrade my hardware right now though, as all my devices
| still run fine. I'd be very interested in picking up a
| RISC-V model once it hits manufacturing though, they seem
| very promising.
| flatiron wrote:
| Honestly I use Linux on a MacBook Air 2013. 4 gigs of ram and
| haswell i5 and it's an amazing machine. It's not my work
| machine for compiling and running a ton of apps but it's super
| solid. Great battery life. Runs chrome amazing and Stardew
| valley great.
| oblio wrote:
| It's probably going to be a cool toy, but being able to use the
| hardware to its full potential and also having Linux on ARM
| Macs be your daily work driver is going to be a humongous
| challenge.
|
| I wonder if it will ever happen outside of very limited use
| cases.
| sirwitti wrote:
| What makes you say that?
| oblio wrote:
| They need to reverse engineer the GPU, the ML cores, the
| security chips. They need to figure out power management
| and use it as well as MacOS.
|
| Apple will just throw some crap random docs at them, best
| case scenario. They won't discourage it actively but they
| won't help them either.
|
| The time budget for high quality engineers working on this
| will also be limited as there's no market that I think of,
| only itch scratching. Which generally takes you to "good
| enough/mediocre" not to "awesome for the general public".
| marcan_42 wrote:
| > The time budget for high quality engineers working on
| this will also be limited as there's no market that I
| think of, only itch scratching.
|
| That's why I started this project backed by a Patreon. I
| knew this couldn't be accomplished via itch scratching;
| it has to be a job (not quite full time yet, but a good
| chunk thereof).
|
| FWIW: the userspace GPU driver is now passing 90% or so
| of the GLES tests running on macOS; only the kernel side
| is not started yet. The ML cores are a niche use case and
| broadly not useful for anyone not doing machine learning
| on Linux (but some people are interested in them and have
| started taking a look). And power management already
| works to a significant extent; in the next week or so
| I'll be submitting v3 of the PMGR driver and v2 of the
| cpufreq driver for upstreaming, and starting work on SMC
| (needed for battery/charging info). And the security chip
| (SEP) has already been poked at; the mailbox interface to
| it is shared with other chips and has already been
| upstreamed, and the protocol on top isn't terribly
| complicated. It's mostly a matter of building a little
| driver to give userspace access to it, and writing some
| tooling to use it.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, I wish you luck!
|
| Unfortunately I'm a late pragmatist so I'm probably half
| a decade away from using your work :-)
|
| https://tbkconsult.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/05/Crossing-t...
| cute_boi wrote:
| I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so
| thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It
| will also help to bring some PR stuff to apple. But it
| seems they are too concerned and doesn't their user to
| use other os.
| oblio wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate:
|
| Apple provides the complete package. If you're
| homebrewing on top of their PCs, that's your problem and
| you're actually more of a nuisance to them. They don't
| actually get any benefit from you and you, being an
| advanced user, are very likely to have demands that are
| not representative of the general population and that
| also risk being difficult to accommodate. What could you
| possibly do that the All Mighty Apple(tm) can't do
| better?
| technobabbler wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate's devil's advocate: Maybe Apple
| is trying to cater to advanced users again?
|
| In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop
| their designs and priorities between content creators and
| content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s,
| with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually
| pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and
| arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar
| standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could
| afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with
| first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental
| value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was
| just a small niche.
|
| Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly
| overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market
| in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits,
| thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities
| shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took
| over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to
| be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs
| from workstations to, I don't know what, designer
| furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was
| obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from
| fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring
| terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design
| cooling.
|
| Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and
| they are again free to pursue the content creator market
| and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou
| vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is
| back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon),
| now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful
| & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If
| only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals
| Apple is starting to take the workstation market more
| seriously again.
|
| The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any
| ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads
| with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For
| the remaining power users, what are their options?
| Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again,
| finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro"
| workflows and tooling, and these early signs are
| encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the
| Macbook Air.
|
| If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows,
| there's no reason they can't provide similar support for
| other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or
| Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a
| M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1,
| Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it,
| Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited
| about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring
| again. Hopefully. Maybe.
|
| Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1
| in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing
| performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux
| development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may
| trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't
| think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where
| its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk
| disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll
| see if it lasts...
| pjerem wrote:
| > They don't actually get any benefit from you and you
|
| Actually they don't get any penny from me because I can't
| run Linux on M1. I like MacBooks. I like OSX.
|
| I'd love to buy one of those M1 and even keep OSX on it
| but I'm never going to buy a computer whose OS updates
| could be stopped at any time with no replacement
| possibility.
| vel0city wrote:
| My Cyrix-based machines don't get software updates
| anymore, even with any modern Linux distros :'(
| _ph_ wrote:
| I agree, I think Apple would profit from directly
| supporting Linux on their hardware. Their main profit is
| in selling the hardware and that they would do, probably
| to a lot of people who wouldn't buy Apple hardware right
| now. The Apple Silicon are some damn nice chips.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _Their main profit is in selling the hardware_
|
| Not anymore - it's now about selling services to get
| recurring income. E.g. App Store (to extort money from
| developers), Apple Care, Apple Pay and iCloud (from
| users) etc.
|
| That is why they are locking down the Mac systems too,
| and making it a closed system like the iPhone / iPad
| platform. They have been doing this for a while now. The
| only thing that now differentiates an M1 mac to an iPad
| or iPhone is that the bootloader is not locked on the M1,
| and so you can still theoretically install another OS.
| (Ofcourse, the practical reality is that due to the
| closed box nature of the M1 Apple Silicons SoC, non-macOS
| OS can't exploit the full benefit of the hardware and
| will always offer subpar performance).
| _ph_ wrote:
| No, they are not locking down the Mac, Asahi Linux is a
| good example of that. Also, they are not locking down
| users of MacOS. As I wrote in a separate post, they do
| have some incentive to sell hardware for Linux
| enthusiasts. Those wouldn't have considered a Mac
| otherwise. And if they have a Mac, they would try also
| MacOS and all Apple offerings.
| ccouzens wrote:
| Apple likes to upsell their users on additional Apple
| products.
|
| If you're not running their software, you're not in their
| ecosystem and they can't upsell you.
| _ph_ wrote:
| No doubt about that. But I think most people, who would
| buy a Mac specifically to run Linux on it, wouldn't see a
| Mac without Linux as an alternative, they would just get
| some PC hardware. If they buy a Mac for Linux, they might
| try out MacOS too and that would be an opportunity for
| Apple to expand the user base.
| LASR wrote:
| > I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so
| thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api.
|
| It's exactly because they don't want thousands of Devs
| wasting time at all. Why reimplement something that
| already works well as a computing platform?
|
| There is no good reason why they would want to do this.
| But it's not like they're blocking everything and locking
| it down. They just haven't published docs etc - which can
| carry a significant maintenance cost.
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| Shitty explanation. If they don't want people to waste
| time, give them what you already know.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| On the plus side though there is a relatively small pool
| of actual hardware targets that they have to make it work
| on.
| oblio wrote:
| True. But for example Nvidia GPUs have never been reverse
| engineered fully, more than 20 years after their
| introduction. Because Nvidia updates their tech, just as
| Apple will.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Nvidia actively sabotaged reverse engineering efforts
| with their firmware shenanigans, and also Nvidia hardware
| is way, _way_ worse to support than Apple. Apple actually
| makes very clean SoCs with neat software interfaces and
| keeps compatibility across SoCs except when they need to
| break things. Case in point: I brought up our existing M1
| efforts on the M1 Pro in 4 days, and that involved
| changing several drivers because they actually made a big
| compatibility break in order to support more cores and
| more RAM (the new versions support over a terabyte and
| probably dozens of cores, so I doubt they 'll change them
| again for quite a few chip generations).
| _ph_ wrote:
| If you look at the progress of Asahi Linux, I am very
| optimistic that Linux on Apple Silicon becomes a
| reasonable thing quite soon. Most of the basic hardware
| infrastructure is already supported, GPU support is
| coming along nicely too (90% of the GL tests already
| passing). There might be corners of the chip not
| supported for a long time, but if there were no neural
| net acceleration, it might be a pitty, but not a
| showstopper for all other tasks.
| vetinari wrote:
| The good thing seems to be, that Apple doesn't intend to
| break how they speak to the hardware across generations.
| It is to simplify _their_ driver development, too.
| davidatbu wrote:
| No OP, But its most likely that Apple's software is
| designed to take full advantage of the hardware, but to do
| that with Linux software would require (1) a lot of
| funding, and (2) documentation of the hardware, which as I
| understand it, Apple is currently not willing to provide.
| So the folks who work on this have to do a lot of reverse
| engineering.
| pndy wrote:
| I guess the global menu ignores notch in the middle and displays
| sections anyway? The difference in fonts between KDE and macOS is
| visible here at first sight (ofc I know it's not surprising...).
| And maybe that's what Apple should do - tweak GUI a bit? Because
| from what I've read, people complain that menus are getting _cut
| out_.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I guess the global menu ignores notch in the middle and
| displays sections anyway?
|
| Yep, but that's not really an issue on KDE since most widgets
| will avoid the center of your bar unless you explicitly tell
| something to display there. I'm sure some frustrated MBP owner
| will push a fix for it in the future though, it's just a matter
| of time.
|
| > The difference in fonts between KDE and macOS is visible here
| at first sight
|
| Well, in this screenshot it is. As you can see, there's no GPU
| acceleration on _anything_ here, which means they 've probably
| got subpixel AA disabled (and obviously aren't running San
| Francisco system-wide). You can configure the two to be
| frighteningly similar though, in my experience.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Subpixel AA has nothing to do with the GPU; not sure if it's
| enabled by default or not though, I didn't touch it, but it
| is pretty irrelevant with high-DPI screens. Apple does not
| use subpixel AA by default any more for this reason (and
| because they often use scaled non-native resolutions the way
| their UI scaling is designed).
| 1024core wrote:
| Are there any comparable non-Apple laptops which are well
| supported by Linux? I'd hate to pay the Apple tax, only to run
| Linux on the bare metal. Plus, I'm assuming "Apple care" goes out
| the window once you wipe out MacOS?
| fsflover wrote:
| Not exactly comparable and not ARM, but
| https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.
|
| Another one is ARM, but _very_ under-powered:
| https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/.
| michelledepeil wrote:
| It's a different aesthetic, but t- and p-series thinkpads are
| well supported by various linux distros and the experience is
| considerably smoother (and with better battery life) than 5-10
| years ago.
| sahaskatta wrote:
| Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Linux
| nacs wrote:
| Apple Care covers hardware issues so installing Linux shouldn't
| void that unless you physically open up the laptop to do some
| weird thing.
| boldlybold wrote:
| After running ubuntu on a Dell XPS 15 with varying degrees of
| success the last four years, I placed an order for a Framework
| laptop that will be shipping this month. I don't expect the
| build quality to match that of apple, or even dell, but I've
| read linux support is good, and will only get better with more
| dedicated people on the platform.
| nullwarp wrote:
| My Framework is amazing and probably one of my favorite
| laptops in quite some time. I think the build quality is
| great all things considered
| caymanjim wrote:
| I used to rant about paying so much extra for Apple hardware
| and call it the "Apple tax" too, but the truth is, no one else
| makes good laptops. You're paying for more than simply the
| brand.
|
| I spent a fortune on a Lenovo X1 Extreme, and the thing bricked
| itself three times in 14 months, the last of which was outside
| the warranty window, and it's now basically impossible to get
| repaired (I couldn't even get anyone to look at it, and Lenovo
| is no help at all). Even if it weren't bricked, the shitty
| plastic case is already getting loose (the display hinge is
| loose/wobbly and squeaky); the speakers sound terrible; it's
| loud; it gets unbearably hot.
|
| Dell laptops are pretty good with Linux, but the build quality
| is similarly poor. Linux-first laptops like System 76's are
| clunky and inferior.
|
| It's really hard to beat MacBooks on a hardware level. I'd love
| to run Linux on one.
| pqb wrote:
| From my experience - a notable percent of all Dell laptops
| (especially Precision and Latitude series) has a decent Linux
| support. I have never been an owner of laptop from System76 or
| any other brand that is targeting Linux users. However, I am
| really interested in getting a Framework Laptop [0] for myself,
| which looks nice and I have already read good opinions about
| it.
|
| [0]: https://frame.work/
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I'm not aware of any machines with comparable
| performance/efficiency from any other vendor.
|
| Apple officially supports running your own kernels on these
| machines. This isn't a jailbreak, it's an official feature of
| the hardware and firmware design that Apple added, and which
| their EULA allows you to use in this way.
|
| These machines are also not brickable, you can always do a DFU
| restore from macOS or (soon; Monterey needs some stuff I
| already figured out but haven't implemented yet, but it works
| for older versions on the M1s) Linux using idevicerestore, no
| matter how much you wipe or screw up.
|
| (That said, I wouldn't recommend wiping macOS at this stage; we
| expect most users to have a dual-boot setup.)
| saint_angels wrote:
| great news, the progress is much faster than I expected!
| oblio wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
| flakiness wrote:
| Wondering how GPU is enabled. I thought Apple silicon GPU is
| largely a black box. Or is it already reverse engineered in a
| certain level?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Wondering how GPU is enabled
|
| For this demo it's not. It's doing CPU rendering, which the M1
| is apparently fast enough to do while providing decent UI
| performance (albeit while using 60% all-core CPU to do it).
|
| > it already reverse engineered in a certain level?
|
| It is. See:
|
| - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html
|
| - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-2.html
|
| - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-3.html
|
| - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-4.html
| kzrdude wrote:
| Serious question since i don't know much, how can the display
| be used without the gpu?
| flakiness wrote:
| The frame buffer doesn't have to be on the GPU side (and
| for M1, it's unified memory architecture.) So the role of
| the GPU is just to make the graphic related computation
| faster. Things like composition and display output is kinda
| orthogonal.
| flakiness wrote:
| Wow, things like this blog series are exactly what I'm
| interested in! Thanks a lot!
| _ph_ wrote:
| I am so happy to see the quick progress of Linux on the ARM-Macs.
| In the 80ies and 90ies, there were several competing processor
| architectures on the market, but for the last 20 years for PCs it
| was x86 only. With the Apple Silicon, there is now a real
| contender, actually surpassing the current x86 offerings in many
| aspects. And that is, why competition between architectures is so
| important. And of course just interesting from a software
| development perspective.
|
| With Linux becoming a viable option on those machines, they
| become interesting for a far wider audience than just the MacOS
| users. Thanks to the great work by Alyssa, GPU acceleration
| should be close too.
|
| Then lets see when Linus gets himself a Mac, he already indicated
| that he would be interested to do so as long as he doesn't have
| to port Linux himself.
| aroman wrote:
| Linus did use a MacBook Air quite happily for several years.
| Running Linux, of course.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Big problem is that you can't buy M1 cpu like you can e.g. i9.
| I think Apple should be forced to open up their platform so
| other manufacturers could make laptops or desktops with that
| CPU.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > With the Apple Silicon, there is now a real contender,
| actually surpassing the current x86 offerings in many aspects
|
| It's absolutely NOT a real contender for widespread use until
| you can buy a mini-itx, microatx or regular ATX motherboard
| from any one of the well known dozen Taiwanese motherboard
| manufacturers, and an individual CPU to socket into it. Or at
| least a selection of motherboards with CPUs soldered onto them
| from same vendors.
|
| The hardware availability is basically a walled garden.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I don't think whether you can buy it in a form factor though
| is a good indicator of "contender of widespread use." It
| ignores any technical merits and what the chip can actually
| do. Can it enable someone to check email, watch youtube, and
| check social media? Yes. Can it render graphics? Yes.If you
| put someone infront of a Macbook with an M1, can they
| accomplish everything hey can on an intel machine? Yes.
|
| Now, is it probably priced out of being a real contender for
| widespread use? Most likely. Is it offered is configurations
| that suite everyone? Maybe not. But that doesn't mean it
| can't accomplish the same or similar tasks. If someone can
| sit at a computer and accomplish all of their normal tasks,
| then for the most part, it is a contender for widespread use,
| it is just a cost factor.
| walrus01 wrote:
| the subject matter of the parent is for widespread _linux_
| use, which is rather unlikely if it 's only available from
| one vendor.
|
| yes iphones are mainstream, in terms of market share.
|
| no iphones are no mainstream in any context related to use
| of one's own choice of GPL licensed software.
| sp332 wrote:
| Isn't that much harder with architectures without a BIOS
| equivalent? The components on the motherboard have to be told
| how to talk to each other. Swapping out the CPU would require
| some reconfiguration.
| weatherlight wrote:
| it'll happen eventually :)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxdRSCQfhyw
| https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-
| platforms/h...
|
| - Layerscape LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex A72 (up to 2GHz) - up
| to 64GB DDR4 dual channel 3200MT/s - 4 x SATA 3.0 - 1 x PCIe
| x8 Gen 3.0, open slot (can support x16) - 4 x SFP+ ports
| (10GbE each) - 3 x USB 3.0 & 3 x USB 2.0 - GPIO header -
| 170mm x 170mm standard Mini ITX form factor
| iknowstuff wrote:
| I bet Apple will sell order(s) of magnitude more MacBooks
| than the combined total sales of motherboards in those form
| factors, so your definition of widespread is surprising to
| me.
| sliken wrote:
| Sure, but Apple's proving what is possible. It's only a
| matter of time until similar chips ship from the competition.
| vmception wrote:
| Its coming
| throw0101a wrote:
| In a few more years RISC-V may become a thing for general use
| as well.
| fosk wrote:
| But will it be competitive enough?
| Y_Y wrote:
| I often find myself using ARM on the desktop nowadays. I use
| android phones, Nvidia devices, SoCs (most famously raspi).
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > With the Apple Silicon, there is now a real contender
|
| Yeah, no. It's a walled ecosystem, not a 'contender' in the
| sense that it can't be horizontally integrated with other
| technologies.
| weatherlight wrote:
| it's not a walled eco system, people really need to stop
| saying this.
|
| iPhone is a walled garden Macs are not a walled garden.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It is. You can't buy Apple Silicon without buying
| everything else including a laptop and macOS. It's entirely
| vertically integrated from iCloud account to transistors.
|
| A real contender would be Amazon's Annapurna Labs with
| their ARM processors or something with RISC-V.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| 20 years ago IBM PowerPC was still a contender too. With Apple
| no less.
|
| The x86/64 solo reign was more like 15 years.
|
| But I miss it too. The 90s with all its amazing architectures.
| SPARC, Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC. I still have several of
| those here at home :) Computers have become boring and it's
| nice ARM is shaking things up.
|
| I wonder if M1 will ever be fully supported though. With full
| unrestricted video, 3D and AI acceleration. There seems to be a
| lot of Apple secret sauce in these processors.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > with all its amazing architectures. SPARC, Alpha, MIPS, PA-
| RISC, PowerPC
|
| And here's the thing, mostly they weren't amazing. They were
| just expensive and not popular. But some things like SPARC
| were just headache-inducing
|
| https://atiqcs.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/sparc-register-
| windo...
| tyingq wrote:
| It was pretty amazing to enjoy 64 bit computing and before
| Intel had it. They were more popular in some niches, for a
| time, than anything else.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes Intel's attitude is too much based on marketing
| sometimes.
|
| "Consumers don't need 64-bit" (and trying to promote
| Itanium)
|
| "Consumers don't need ECC RAM"
|
| It holds back the industry now that they are the only PC
| platform.
|
| PS: I think Itanium was a really good idea but again
| marketing made it unviable. They wanted to position it
| purely for servers, just at a time where there was a real
| cost focus on servers using commodity hardware (e.g. from
| Google)
| _ph_ wrote:
| Every architecture has its quirks. But compared to x86 and
| its legacy, most RISC architectures were quite nice. And
| the point is, you had multiple competing archtectures, so
| there was a chance to try out new ideas and find out, which
| of those were actually good.
| lmm wrote:
| > And here's the thing, mostly they weren't amazing. They
| were just expensive and not popular.
|
| I agree with this part, but the sparc register windows are
| completely reasonable and obvious.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It might be reasonable, but it's a chore, especially on
| linux to work with it
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23709902
| mst wrote:
| "Avoiding needing to spill registers to the stack" is a
| focus of much optimisation work in lots of places - and,
| yeah, it's absolutely _work_ but the performance gains
| can still be worth it.
|
| Plus I'd argue that SPARC is enough simpler to work with
| than x86 in other ways that you could look at it as
| "spending your complexity budget somewhere else" more
| than it being _more_ headache inducing.
|
| (though admittedly I cut my teeth on assembly on an ARM2
| so basically every modern architecture is kinda headache
| inducingly complicated to me ;)
| oblio wrote:
| > The x86/64 solo reign was more like 15 years.
|
| Solo, yes, probably 15 years. But domination? Probably
| starting with the IBM PC in 1981 (ok, make that 1982 or 1983
| to allow for the sales ramp up) until 2020. That's a very
| long run for a computer architecture.
|
| I expect that the next architectures to rise to the top will
| be even more entrenched.
|
| We're way past computing's early years, childhood and
| adolescence.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Yes, PCs are around since 1981, but if you looked around,
| they were not that commonplace outside of businesses and
| quite rare in private usages. There was the age of the home
| computers, first 8-Bit (Atari, Commodore, TI), then the 68k
| Machines, the first ARM. In parallel, all the great
| workstation vendors with their RISC chips.
|
| The PC for home usage really started only in the 90ies,
| scientists would use workstations. It was only towards the
| end of the 90ies, that x86 caught up with them and well
| into the 2000 years, when they overtook them. It was
| actually AMD who dealt the killing blow with the Athlon and
| especially the Opteron. At that time, Intel was pushing
| Ithanium as the architecture for professional usage and
| kept x86 onto 32 bit with more game-optimized processors
| (P4).
| justin66 wrote:
| No offense, but that is all either wrong or ahistorical.
| You write about personal computing history like someone
| who experienced it after the fact and solely through blog
| posts. (are you writing about the PC revolution as you
| experienced it in some country other than the United
| States?)
| _ph_ wrote:
| Well, sure, I experienced it in a country other than the
| United States. Only 4% of the current human population
| lives in the United States. To be precise, I am from
| Germany and lived through all the times I described.
| While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the
| very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some
| significant home usage. And as far as I know, Apples were
| very popular in the US at that time. In Europe they were
| not very common, due to even worse prices than today :p.
| But my school hat some Apple II, which I eventually used
| with Pascal.
|
| But for home usage, the "home computers" were popular as
| named before. Universities used Suns till the late 90ies.
| justin66 wrote:
| > While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the
| very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some
| significant home usage
|
| That might have been true in Germany. It wasn't true in
| the United States. IBM PC (and moreso, PC clone) adoption
| was quite strong in the home from the mid eighties.
| That's all I meant by the question about nationality - I
| really do think there's a difference there when it comes
| to market share. (I probably shouldn't beat the subject
| to death but it was an interesting discussion)
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I don't think the US home computer market followed the
| same path as Germany's. 68K-based machines never became
| huge sellers over here, for instance, and the Macintosh
| was the most successful of the bunch -- whereas it's my
| understanding that in a lot of Europe, the Amiga and the
| Atari ST were serious contenders even on into the '90s.
| Conversely, IBM PC clones had taken the lead in US sales
| by the end of the '80s and just never had any serious
| competition by the early '90s. It's not an exaggeration
| to say that Radio Shack was selling more Tandy 1000s than
| the Amiga and the ST were selling _combined_ over here.
| (There were games with specific Tandy 1000 "enhanced
| graphics and sound," so it was actually considered a
| viable market all on its own!)
|
| > Apples were very popular in the US at that time
|
| Well, the Apple II line was popular in the US in the late
| 1970s through the mid-1980s -- at one point it was the
| best-selling 8-bit computer, taking the throne from the
| Radio Shack TRS-80 -- but the Mac was absolutely not a
| big seller in the 1990s; Apple survived because they
| dominated a few vertical markets like desktop publishing.
| For _home_ computing, the first really successful Mac was
| arguably the iMac circa 2000.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Care to give
| examples?
|
| It roughly aligns with my experience during that time.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| So am I. Op seem ok.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Not sure what's wrong with OPs account.
|
| Pretty much everything.
|
| The OP made a number of statements about the various
| platforms' marketshare over time which were inaccurate if
| applied globally, but might have been accurate in a
| certain country, hence my question to them. All of this
| in service of an idea - that x86 hasn't been dominant for
| four decades - which is so absurdly counterfactual that
| it's silly to argue about. I mean, you guys know that
| these sales figures are public, right?
|
| Regarding the assertion that PCs were _ever_ "quite rare
| in private usages." There are some pretty good charts of
| the various home computers' marketshare available here:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/
|
| It occurs to me after sharing those that one could look
| at those charts and assume all those IBM PCs were going
| to businesses (that's an AWFUL LOT of businesses!) but I
| don't have all day to spend on gathering this data...
| research game sales in the mid eighties if you have
| doubts about this! They were servicing a dying C64 and
| Apple II market, and a rapidly growing x86 market. x86
| did not wait for nineties (how is this even an
| argument... jeez).
|
| I still have the Athlon XP 3200+ system I built, but AMD
| didn't deal any kind of "killing blow" with anything.
| That's extremely silly. AMD did an admirable job of
| forcing 64-bit adoption on the PC a bit sooner than Intel
| would have liked (and driving multicore!), but x86's
| domination in the marketplace did not have to wait for
| _that._
|
| In terms of marketshare, ARM didn't matter much until it
| became an embedded standard. Regarding 68k, which the OP
| brought up for some reason, I offer this:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/
| _ph_ wrote:
| AMD did deliver the killing blow to Sun. At least in the
| company I worked by then, they were all firmly Sun for
| the large compute servers until the Opteron arrived. PCs
| were nice as desktop machines, but large servers with
| multiple CPUs and lots of gigabytes of RAM were not
| feasible on x86 until the arrival of the Opterons.
| Eventually they would replace all Sparc based compute
| servers.
| justin66 wrote:
| I believe a lot of people had the experience your company
| had at that time. But...
|
| x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the
| other architectures a lot sooner than Opteron. At some
| point in the late nineties, SGI's workstation people
| pretty much curled up on the floor in the fetal position,
| moaning, "Windows NT, Windows NT." That spectacle was
| downright undignified, although the NT box they produced
| was impressive in its way. (They made some nice
| contributions to Linux nevertheless. Would that they had
| taken Linux even more seriously.) It says _something_
| about their outlook on the future of MIPS, as well as
| UNIX, that SGI designed their Visual Workstation using
| Pentium in an era when Windows NT on MIPS was still a
| thing.
|
| You can't quite say that AMD64 killed sun. Sun actually
| made some decent, if overpriced, Opteron stuff. Sun's
| demise is a fun thing to discuss because former Sun
| employees often have an interesting opinion about where
| Sun went wrong. I'm waiting for the guy who says
| something like "yeah, that was my department's fault. We
| blew it and the company failed." So far I haven't seen
| _that._
| sliken wrote:
| Indeed, Intel got flat footed and was pushing for 64 bit
| only on itanium for a substantial price premium. AMD was
| first to market with the x86-64 instruction set and did
| quite well.
| justin66 wrote:
| I wouldn't short-change AMD by saying their big success
| during that period was about the 32 vs 64 bit issue, or
| Itanium. They made the fastest 32-bit x86 chip in the
| world with the Athlon K7, and they did it four years
| before they launched their 64-bit chip.
| sliken wrote:
| Sure, but the opteron doubled down on it. They added
| x86-64 to a server class chip for the first time and they
| moved the memory controller on chip, which made the AMD
| scale dramatically better under a variety of workloads.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I was responding to the original OP who mentioned Intel
| only.
|
| I doubt it'll remain that stable. The mobile OSes have
| already embraced a number of platforms, not even all ARM
| based. Android seems to be quite flexible regarding
| architectures with its pre-compilation. I think this is a
| sign of what's to come.
|
| RISC-V is also an upcoming player and if it's successful it
| may spawn more fully open contenders. As we move to more AI
| integration there's a whole new lifecycle opening up too in
| terms of ML coprocessors. We're in the same situation as
| early computers with multiple vendor-specific solutions.
|
| I think on the security side there'll also be more hardware
| signature checking rather than the chain-based checks of
| Secure Boot. Rather than the OS checking if a program is
| legit, the CPU could do it (already done on some custom
| like consoles)
|
| So I don't think computing is really mature at all. It just
| has had a stable phase for a while.
| loudmax wrote:
| > With Linux becoming a viable option on those machines, they
| become interesting for a far wider audience than just the MacOS
| users.
|
| While the option of running Linux on one of these M1 chips is
| intriguing to many of us, I have a hard time seeing that this
| will bring these machines to a "far wider audience" than MacOS
| users. It does open up some niches, and in particular it could
| mean that people will still be able to make use of these
| laptops after Apple stops supporting them. But we're pretty
| much a rounding error for the duopoly that owns the desktop OS
| market.
|
| I do share your admiration for the accomplishments of Alyssa
| and all of those who are porting an open source operating
| system to a new hardware design with little help from the
| manufacturer.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > It does open up some niches,
|
| I would love to be able to run Nuke, so definitely one of
| those niches. There's not much *nix only software that can't
| be run on macOS, but there's definitely lots of macOS
| software not able to run on *nix. Being 1 reboot away from
| using whichever is needed is dream a little dream territory.
| marmaduke wrote:
| I run a small Linux compute cluster for a research institute
| with a ~8 kW budget. If it ran m1s, I'd have 5x more cores to
| work with (and the cores would be faster). How niche is this?
| kcb wrote:
| Extremely niche
| dylan604 wrote:
| >How niche is this?
|
| You my friend are the specialist of special snow flakes.
| thih9 wrote:
| > But we're pretty much a rounding error for the duopoly that
| owns the desktop OS market.
|
| We are a rounding error when it comes to casual usage; but in
| the pro segment and especially for coding, Linux usage seems
| nontrivial.
|
| According to Wikipedia [1], Linux had 2.33% share in
| laprop/desktop OS. But in a SO survey 25% of programmers
| picked Linux.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating
| _sys...
| xbar wrote:
| The size of the audience is moot, but the benefit to me, a
| software developer, is sizeable.
|
| I have remained a Mac user through the most recent several
| major OS X/OSX/MacOs/macOS changes with increasing reluctance
| as Apple increases its ownership of my hardware. I "own" an
| M1 Mac. I would like the freedom to run a free OS with free
| drivers on it. I watch Asahi Linux and the associated work
| closely. I donate and I hope.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I would like the freedom to run a free OS with free
| drivers on it.
|
| I may be reading this wrong, but it sounds like you think
| this is something of a limit because of Apple. You have
| always been able to do this if you could find software that
| works. You can't "use" their OS on non-Apple hardware
| though.
|
| It's not Apple's responsibility to write code for software
| that is not theirs. Could they release "drivers"? For what?
| Why would they? The hopes of selling 1k more hardware units
| to Linux devotees? Why would they want to incur the expense
| of that support when it is such a tear in the ocean level
| of user base?
| 3836293648 wrote:
| I thought they officially supported linux on the rack
| version of the mac pro?
| novok wrote:
| It's really hard to beat apple's laptop hardware in overall
| quality. Maybe framework will be there one day, but it's
| difficult to see them with an ARM laptop any time soon. I
| know more than one person who wants to just use apple
| laptops with linux for example.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > It does open up some niches
|
| A laptop that doesn't throttle down when unplugged from the
| wall, yet still maintains an all day battery life is hardly a
| niche.
|
| Laptops are supposed to be a portable computers that work
| anywhere, not just luggable computers that must be plugged in
| to work.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Laptops are supposed to be
|
| By whose definition? There have always been trade offs to
| achieve that portability. Processing power has always been
| one mainly due to the electrical power demands. We're just
| now getting to battery tech that is impressive. We've taken
| this long to get to processing abilities that didn't
| require being attached directly to a power line to idle.
|
| If "supposed to be" means we all have been "hoping and
| wishing one day" it might be possible, then sure, "supposed
| to be" it is.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| >Processing power has always been one mainly due to the
| electrical power demands. We're just now getting to
| battery tech that is impressive.
|
| The M1 Mac laptops are using the same battery tech as
| everyone else.
|
| What has changed is the ratio of performance to power
| draw, and leaving behind the almost immediate thermal
| throttling you see in x86 laptops.
|
| >The chips here aren't only able to outclass any
| competitor laptop design, but also competes against the
| best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out
| server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max - it's
| just generally absurd.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
|
| High performance, combined with all day battery life is a
| new thing, not a niche.
| hhaha88 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| This project would open things up if it did something novel.
|
| IMO a Linux distribution is the perfect base as a metaverse
| client for the entire internet.
|
| Ditch the window manager that only acts like a desktop
| metaphor and login to a 3D capable viewport. Toggle between
| 2D and 3D representations, virtually load websites. Like
| applying AR to cyberspace. Natively relying on that ML
| friendly GPU.
|
| Something like Godot as the window manager process (controls
| abstracted behind a traditional default UX or something) and
| hacking away at its scene tree format. Update UX state to be
| a 2D UI if needed.
|
| Store the contents of a file as a hash to regenerate it like
| procedural game engines do would improve security if the
| users login unlocks things. /home need not be a traditional
| filesystem at all.
|
| There are a lot of ideas going unexplored due to the money
| being thrown at business as usual problems.
| specto wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment. Overall, we should be praising
| projects like frame.work over proprietary and hard to port
| systems like the M1. I'm hoping some day the frame.work
| laptops will have a mainboard available similar to the M1,
| but I'd rather have repairable than not.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Macs have huge penetration into the developer market. I could
| see a lot of devs whacking Linux on their M1 Macs to enjoy
| benefits like being able to run containers outside of a
| virtual machine.
|
| If Apple waited 6 months and released a significantly cheaper
| 16 inch M1 Pro Mac with a non-XDR screen and in the old form
| factor (to save money on tooling), similar how they do with
| the iPhone SE line, then they'd make so much damn money from
| devs jumping on board.
| ianpurton wrote:
| Running container outside a VM is my use case too.
|
| Would love to see some performance numbers.
| sp332 wrote:
| What is the advantage?
| saxonww wrote:
| Docker Desktop for Mac runs Docker in a VM. It has poor
| disk I/O compared to native, and IIRC it is not as
| capable as native from a networking perspective (perhaps
| not a big issue). Also, as of recently it costs money to
| use Docker Desktop for Mac for work purposes.
|
| So the advantage is you get better container performance,
| all the capability you would normally get with container
| workloads on their native platform (Linux), and you
| wouldn't have to use the Docker Desktop product anymore.
| xur17 wrote:
| In addition to performance, I also ran into weird bugs
| with the Docker Desktop vm. The VM would run out of disk,
| and other things that would not occur with a native
| docker.
| stcredzero wrote:
| I was constantly seeing a coworker at my last job in that
| sort of situation. For some reason Docker on MacOS was
| inflating RAM use, IIRC.
| saxonww wrote:
| It also has weird bouts of high CPU usage, even if
| running containers are not busy. I think it's due to
| overhead with osxfs handling local disk changes (e.g.
| you've mounted a volume with a large git repo, and in
| that repo on the host you switched to a much different
| revision). It's hard to troubleshoot because it's not
| obvious how to get into the VM to see what's going on.
|
| FWIW, https://stackoverflow.com/a/68561693/3230028 is how
| you do that.
|
| Overall, this is an issue that I think goes beyond Docker
| on a Mac. We have multiple examples of development
| targeting one platform, or involving tools native to that
| platform. But because of preference, or conflict with
| other tools, or policy, we end up with these emulation or
| compatibility layers like HyperKit/Docker for Mac, or
| WSL/WSL2, or WINE, or frankly
| WebAssembly/Emscripten/whatever. And I think the result
| is almost always worse than if people just found the most
| native set of tooling for their primary use case and used
| that.
|
| What is it about macOS that makes Docker Desktop for Mac
| worth it, if your development workflow is heavily
| container-based? At my workplace, it's mostly policy and
| preference issues making Linux unsuitable for the
| majority of the user base, even though that majority is
| working with containers constantly and targeting Linux.
|
| I guess you can pick at this and point out that we're not
| writing software in assembly for a reason, but I feel
| like there's a line where you have too much abstraction,
| adaptation, or emulation, and for me workflows _built
| around_ something like Docker Desktop for Mac just so we
| can use macOS are over that line.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Docker on the Mac is 10x slower for some of my workloads
| than Docker on my linux cloud machine. (e.g., npm install
| is literally a few seconds vs 5 minutes)
| stcredzero wrote:
| _I could see a lot of devs whacking Linux on their M1 Macs
| to enjoy benefits like being able to run containers outside
| of a virtual machine._
|
| If Apple did something about the container situation, it
| might show a lot of developers that Apple notices them and
| gives a damn.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| The containers won't run on an M1 Macs.
|
| Software packages baked into images (at least the ones
| meant to be run ultimately on the servers) are actually x86
| binaries, so no luck running them on ARM CPUs.
| dylan604 wrote:
| People can't build new containers with the appropriate
| binaries?
| duped wrote:
| In the big developer markets, the price of the device isn't
| a huge factor. Today, the available stock is a bigger deal.
| At least for a daily driver.
|
| I also want the highest resolution screen with crispest
| graphics possible if I'm staring at it all day (1080p IPS
| displays are awful for my eyes). The thing about Macs that
| makes them nicer than most comparable Linux machines is the
| display is much better.
|
| One of the only reasons to consider the Mac over something
| like an XPS today though (other than that you can go out
| and buy it) is that it supports Adobe products which you
| may need for front end work. However, if my company is all
| in on Figma and Im just working on a generic backend you
| bet your butt I'm asking for an XPS.
| nqzero wrote:
| 1920x1200 is good enough for me, i don't use anything
| adobe, don't do graphics, etc
|
| have you looked at cpu performance or cpu-only power
| efficiency of the XPS 17 vs M1 Pro MacBook 16 for backend
| work ?
| duped wrote:
| The last I heard, docker was around 2x slower than Intel
| macs and that performance was already pretty bad.
|
| I don't really care about power efficiency tbh, I'm
| plugged into the wall all day
| jmnicolas wrote:
| > In the big developer markets, the price of the device
| isn't a huge factor.
|
| You might suffer from SV syndrome. I live in a small town
| in the east of France: anything Apple is unaffordable
| (without major sacrifices and uncertainty to be able to
| replace the machine if it breaks too soon).
|
| Right now if I had to replace my current computer, I
| would have about 600EUR total budget. And France isn't
| exactly a third world country (but we're doing our best
| to get there ;)
| duped wrote:
| I'm not in SV, but my employers have all provided my
| machines. Some companies are better than others, but
| price usually isn't a factor at places I've worked. I
| also probably wouldn't work at a company that gives their
| engineers shitty computers, since that's like working at
| a restaurant that makes their cooks use dull knives (and
| there is a big market of places that will give you
| whatever set you want)
| kcb wrote:
| I would think most developers in the world are using
| corporate laptops. Don't think we'll ever see a fully
| unsupported OS installed on those.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Rich countries developer market, on the other tiers not so
| much.
| jtbayly wrote:
| No they wouldn't. There really aren't enough devs around to
| make that statement true. Plus, if so many devs would do
| that, they can buy the 6-month-old refurbs at that time and
| do what they want. If they aren't doing that, then they
| wouldn't buy the machine you're imagining.
| intrasight wrote:
| There are enough iOS developers to make some difference.
| And I think that if it weren't for those iOS developers,
| who have no choice but to run MacOS, there would be many
| fewer developers using Macs.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Not just iOS, just the issue that you need MacOS to make
| applications for the apple ecosystem regardless. Im sure
| iOS is a big part, but I also imagine all the desktop
| application that want to be cross platform, so think like
| Photoshop. Or Microsoft has to have a Mac somewhere to
| compile Office to MacOS.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| You don't need a Mac anymore.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Devs may be small in number relative to the consumer
| market, but they're big in impact when it comes to
| building out an ecosystem. People complain about Linux on
| Desktop, but the Linux on Desktop is unreasonably good
| considering its market share.
|
| As devs build out that ecosystem it'll become easier
| bring products to ARM. Eventually, we might even see
| something like the Steam Machines built on an ARM64
| platform. If it ever happens, it'll happen on the backs
| of those trail blazing devs who built out the ecosystem,
| because they were able to get a pretty rockin' laptop on
| an ARM64 platform.
|
| Devs also happen to be great evangelists for bringing
| technologies into the corporate ecosystem. This will
| create a demand for porting popular MDM and other
| corporate tooling over to ARM64.
|
| I'm a dev and I'd love a machine like that. I actually
| think the older form factor is better, I carry my laptop
| to and from work every day, so I appreciate a lighter and
| slimmer laptop and I don't think I'm alone on that
| account. I couldn't care less about a screen that can get
| up to 1000+ nits, but only when playing certain videos.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I fail to see how any of that would make Apple a bunch of
| money.
|
| I know Apple needs devs to make money. Lots of them. But
| I don't see any lack of them at the moment. In this
| context it appears we are just talking about selling more
| machines. You'd buy one. So would a few others. Apple
| wouldn't make a ton of money on that machine though.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Does Bluetooth work? Does the built in keyboard work? Trackpad?
| WiFi?
| jaggirs wrote:
| No
| varispeed wrote:
| Even if you run Linux, how to you ensure that the SoC does not
| e.g. scan memory and send telemetry to Apple independently of the
| installed operating system?
| marcan_42 wrote:
| If you want to ensure the SoC is not backdoored, your only
| option is Precursor, which can make a fairly solid claim that
| silicon backdoors for FPGAs are infeasible in the general case.
|
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
|
| If you're willing to trust that the silicon isn't secretly
| backdoored in some ridiculous invisible way, well, unlike
| Intel, the M1 does not have any hyper-privileged proprietary
| firmware by all indications, and that proprietary firmware
| which does exist is plaintext and analyzable (and not
| privileged to scan memory), so I have a much easier time
| trusting these machines than a random x86 PC (all-privileged
| SMM supervisor and ME/PSP) or Android phone (all-privileged
| TrustZone supervisor).
| hmottestad wrote:
| If you're worried about these sorts of situations then there
| aren't going to be very many choices for you. You can't choose
| Intel because they have their management engine, you can't
| choose AMD because they don't own their own fabs.
|
| You could go full air-gapped and get a machine without any
| network cards. Would still recommend a nice bunker deep inside
| a mountain just to be on the safe side.
| varispeed wrote:
| Ok, so because other companies do that it should be
| acceptable? I don't understand your patronising tone. How is
| that helpful?
| skinkestek wrote:
| It is just that many of us are fed up with people who
| immediately move the goal posts every single time someone
| presents an alternative or an improvent.
|
| The implication (intentionally or not) being that we can
| just as well continue to run Chrome on Windows 11 on open
| WiFis because everything is broken all the time and if not
| any Three Letter Agency can always kidnap you or someone
| you care about and get their secrets that way.
|
| Encryption works and massively increases the workload for
| would be drag net operators!
|
| Having a choice of technology is good and also increases
| the workload for would be drag net operators.
|
| Competition is good and forces companies to get their act
| together.
|
| Trashing every good thing that happens because it isn't
| perfect is demotivating and I'm also absolutely fed up with
| it.
| notafraudster wrote:
| Assuming your question was sincere: You cannot ensure that
| the SoC isn't doing something secret that the OS doesn't
| know about in this environment.
|
| Every respondent so far assumed you knew this (because it's
| an unusually high-knowledge question to ask and an
| unusually obvious answer) and so assumed the actual purpose
| of your post was to declare that you personally wouldn't
| use an environment where you can't be sure the SoC isn't
| doing something nefarious. The people replying don't really
| find that declaration interesting. Your subsequent reply
| says that the choice to live with this particular risk is
| some sort of tacit acceptance, which implies you are not
| tacitly accepting it.
|
| Since no such environment exists, except for edge case
| hypotheticals like only powering an air gapped computer
| inside a faraday cage in a lead bunker, most people expect
| that you too are tacitly accepting it, which makes this
| particular complaint feel like a non sequitur and not an
| invitation to discuss the broader issue.
|
| If you have an actual real life use case about trying to
| harden a system to this degree, like you are responsible
| for nuclear safety or the unlock codes for the secret lunar
| base or something, I am sure people would like to read
| about it.
| nindalf wrote:
| Your concerns mean theres no modern device you could
| possibly be using. So either you're bringing up something
| that no one, including you, actually cares about. Or you're
| commenting on Hacker news using the butterfly method on HN
| servers (https://xkcd.com/378/)
| d3nj4l wrote:
| AMD processors also have an equivalent to the Intel
| Management Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform
| _Security_Processo...
| markb139 wrote:
| I wonder if you could get around this by having a multi CPU
| machine setup (many vendors silicon) and have a "Generals
| problem" algorithm ?
| avhception wrote:
| Well, there still is
| https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html if you're not
| dependent on x86-64... You'd still be relying on other
| peoples fabs, of course. But it's a step up.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You can't. But that worry is not Apple specific. Unless you fab
| your own chip this can always happen. And in fab your own chip
| I don't mean contract TSMC to do it. Literally do it yourself.
| TSMC could also place a trojan on the silicon.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Simply put: you don't. You'll have to design your own chip
| factories and design your own chips if you want to ensure that
| the SoC doesn't leak.
|
| There's a reason China and Russia build their own CPUs. There's
| nothing else you can do to _ensure_ that nothing leaks.
|
| In practice, you could probably run the machine for a while
| hooked up to an ethernet cable and sniff the outgoing packets.
| I don't think the M1 will send Apple telemetry on its own
| (though it certainly could, if it wanted to).
| gpderetta wrote:
| You also need to design your own software to design the chip,
| your own compiler, and the OS the compiler and design
| software run on...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| All of which require trusted hardware to run on! The
| bootstrapping problem is real.
|
| I wonder how the Chinese and Russians have validated custom
| chip designs. I don't think the compiler would be bugged
| specifically for chip design software, but there's no real
| way to tell...
| Someone wrote:
| In theory, your photolithography machine could be back-
| doored, too. So better design that yourself, too, and/or take
| out your microscope (if digital, taking care that isn't back-
| doored, either)
|
| I also guess more advanced adversaries will add stuff that
| only becomes active after a long time, and may use
| steganography to hide what it's sending.
|
| So, bootstrap your system the way this guy does:
| http://paillard.claude.free.fr/video.mp4
|
| (I don't think he has gone past vacuum tubes)
| mavhc wrote:
| What if someone backdoors education and everyone's been
| learning the insecure way of programming?....
| eddieroger wrote:
| Why backdoor all of education when they could just attack
| Stack Overflow to greater effect?
| tpxl wrote:
| Put a proxy between you and the internet and reject everything
| your OS didn't send (Assuming you're using nothing but wired
| ethernet).
| notafraudster wrote:
| Assuming of course the M1 doesn't have SoC code to zero day
| your proxy server or zero day your OS and selectively allow
| itself to circumvent this.
|
| But if Apple were really clever they'd add a secret
| undocumented radio built into the SoC package that sends
| signals modulated in an unusual way over an unusual low-
| bandwidth but high signal frequency (probably sub-CB Radio)
| that no one is monitoring.
|
| Which now brings you to the scenario that you have to use a
| machine that not only never uses a network, but also exists
| in a physical place that no network signal could ever
| penetrate. And it goes without saying that having taken this
| level of caution, one should probably buy the computer with a
| fake name and all cash, ideally through a network of
| international proxy buyers, to be sure.
| tpxl wrote:
| > place that no network signal could ever penetrate.
|
| This is actually rather trivial to achieve, just put it in
| a faraday cage.
| fulafel wrote:
| You could run black box experiments observing signals from the
| machine, or use some hw reverse engineering approaches, eg by
| analyzing the firmware.
| japanuspus wrote:
| If you read the twitter thread, there is a lot of details on
| "macs are locked down" posted by OP and others below this
| comment:
| https://twitter.com/_Thaodan/status/1458581955688206340
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