[HN Gopher] OpenBSD/arm64 on Apple M1 systems
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OpenBSD/arm64 on Apple M1 systems
Author : brynet
Score : 274 points
Date : 2022-03-19 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marc.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (marc.info)
| messe wrote:
| Damn, that's awesome. If I wasn't using my M1 air as a daily
| driver at the moment, I'd already be attempting an install.
|
| I guess I'll keep an eye out for a second hand M1 mini, or wait
| for a refurbished mini to show up on the Apple online store (in
| Ireland). Would love to add another RISC system to my home fleet
| of machines running OpenBSD (and a couple of FreeBSD).
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Whatever happened to NetBSD being the version that ran on
| everything? I discovered the other day that it took them years to
| even run properly on the Raspberry Pi.
|
| Are they short of money or developers, or is the famed
| portability of it just not as true as it used to be?
| 1500100900 wrote:
| The Raspberry Pis are hostile towards non-Linux systems.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah they're even borderline hostile to non raspbian systems.
| When a new Pi comes out it usually only works for raspbian
| for quite some time until others put in the work of getting
| the right stuff together for other distros.
|
| I love raspberry pi but they are definitely not as "open" and
| drop-in compatible as most people think.
|
| That seems to be a problem with most ARM devices, so may not
| be specific or the fault of the Pi people.
| hhh wrote:
| Non-debian would be better, no? Never had an issue with
| Ubuntu.
| hda111 wrote:
| I also never had an issue with Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi.
| They even provide packages to update the EEPROM.
|
| But it doesn't surprise me that it just works since
| Ubuntu is a commercial distro. They even sell products
| for the Raspberry Pi version.
| freedomben wrote:
| How soon after a new Pi model comes out do you try? If
| you wait 6 months then yes, Ubuntu tends to work fine
| (although you do still need a specific build. You can't
| just download a generic one).
|
| I used to use Ubuntu MATE on pi, but when the Pi4 came
| out it took a long time before it was supported.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Ubuntu is very closely related to Debian. I'm not sure
| I'd count it as a "different distribution" so much as "a
| weird variant of Debian".
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes but Raspbian is also 'a weird variant of Debian' by
| that line right? I think you're in agreement with GP; I
| find a similar thing coming up with Arch & Manjaro (an
| Arch derivative) - for almost any purpose when someone
| says 'Arch' it applied to Manjaro too (just less often
| vice versa).
|
| So, yes, 'non-Debian' which (Debian) includes Raspbian,
| not 'non-Raspbian' which (Raspbian) precludes Debian.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah I agree, I consider Raspbian "a weird variant of
| Debian." They add a bunch of packages (some that override
| upstream debian) and they have some custom software, plus
| a lot of other customization.
|
| Raspbian is probably closer to Debian than Ubuntu is, but
| it's still quite clear that you're not on Debian.
| Maursault wrote:
| Ubuntu _is_ Debian (architecturally), plus the stuff
| Ubuntu added, so I believe the latter is more practically
| accurate.
| heinternets wrote:
| How so?
| burnte wrote:
| They were designed to run Linux to be cheap so other OSes
| need drivers.
| Sirened wrote:
| A lot of the hardware on the board has vendor support in
| Linux and only Linux. Vendors will write drivers and
| upstream them to Linux and then just call it a day. You
| can't get the manuals for those components except under
| NDA, which makes open source development for non-Linux
| operating systems a huge pain in the ass.
| lowrider919 wrote:
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Is openbsd support for puri.sm laptops any good? I don't want to
| buy a macbook.
| barelyusable wrote:
| What's the battery life like?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Do you mean to ask what the battery management functionality is
| like (i.e. does the battery drain noticeably faster using
| OpenBSD)?
|
| If so, I don't know what it's like on the MacBook or MacBook
| Pro, but on my Mac Mini, I can reliably say that the battery
| life is dismal ;-)
| lolpython wrote:
| > but on my Mac Mini, the battery life is dismal.
|
| Possible typo? The Mac Mini does not have a battery.
| foodstances wrote:
| That's why the battery life is so dismal.
| sroussey wrote:
| No, no, that's why the battery life is amazing!!!
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Not sure on OpenBSD, but Asahi said they could get 6-8 hours
| without any real energy efficiency features enabled.
| spockz wrote:
| What are the benefits of running (open)BSD on a workstation?
| Especially a laptop?
|
| Edit: this could of course also be used for running a server on a
| M1 mini!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'd see it as stability, in the "won't need upgrades" outside
| of security ones.
|
| A bunch of us have a trail of old macs that are weird to use
| because of the whole system is stuck on the last supported OS,
| which happens to be the most bloated for that hardware, and
| doesn't receive updates anymore. Moving to another simpler
| system altogether makes it a better proposition. As a matter of
| choice, BSD is more familiar than linux in many ways.
|
| M1 laptops are not in that position yet, but in 2 years I'd
| totally imagine getting rid of macos on sub machines.
| zokula wrote:
| atmosx wrote:
| Benefits? If you are not developing _for_ the platform or don't
| have specific use cases (e.g. package creation) literally none.
| It will be an uphill battle where you will spent man-hours
| trying to find workarounds to things elsewhere are trivial. Or
| have another system laying around which IMO beats the purpose.
|
| If you are an OS & BSD aficionado, you like to spent time
| working with OpenBSD because <reasons> ok, but otherwise I
| would advise against it.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It's great, if you don't need something like zoom, or to
| interact with those weird 'usb button' projectors or whatever.
|
| Or video accelerated YouTube.. Or Microsoft office..
|
| Really, I love OpenBSD, but I only really use it for (internet)
| networking these days, FreeBSD looks after my storage, and it's
| all proxmox with ubuntu 20.04 vms running k8s for apps.
|
| Someday I'll switch back, but working as a freelancer with a
| lot of different customers bsds are just too painful to run
| bare metal (def works with ssh/mosh/tmux though!)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Most people do most things in a web browser these days. Can't
| Microsoft Office be used as a hosted app in a browser, at
| least the bulk of common functionality?
| messe wrote:
| Honestly, the biggest advantage OpenBSD has always had for me
| was its internal consistency and excellent documentation. If
| you're a heavy command line user, you can usually figure out
| either what command you need to run or what you need to look up
| in the man pages. It's also great for C development, as it has
| far better docs for libc than glibc does.
|
| If you have supported hardware (and that's a bit if and caveat;
| smaller than it used to be, but still quite large), then
| everything just works. Even little things like the built-in
| screen brightness buttons, just work regardless of if you're in
| x11 or a terminal (same with volume buttons), because it's
| designed as a complete system rather than a distribution of
| otherwise unrelated open source projects.
| paulmd wrote:
| Ya, same for FreeBSD. You can literally operate a system with
| nothing but the handbook in most cases - the documentation is
| much more systematic and developed than Linux. What you get
| isn't just a "how to use a GUI" tutorial or manpages, it's a
| comprehensive look at how you do routine sysadmin tasks. The
| kind of thing that Linux pushes off to web tutorials or
| stackoverflow.
|
| Compare:
|
| https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/index.html
|
| https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/13.0-RELEASE/usr/local/share/do.
| ..
|
| It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land.
| After 50 years of development, they are largely feature-
| complete and are not going to be doing massive changes just
| for the sake of massive changes. As such they get much lower
| levels of "documentation rot", things rust a lot slower when
| nothing ever changes and as such it's a lot easier (and more
| productive) to build comprehensive documentation.
|
| But the amount of churn in linux is insane, Ubuntu has used
| _three completely different init systems_ in the 15 years
| since I started using Linux seriously. For java development,
| I routinely see and use StackOverflow answers from like 2009
| that are completely valid still, and yet answers from that
| era are completely useless for Linux, which has invalidated
| that acquired-knowledge _twice_ since then. You can pretty
| much sysadmin FreeBSD out of the handbook, and if you need to
| search then an answer from 2009 is usually still valid.
|
| It's absolutely a cathedral-vs-bazaar situation. Cathedral is
| presented as a negative in that metaphor, but the cathedral
| ensures enough stability that you can start Having Nice
| Things instead of just constantly scrambling to rewrite
| everything every time a vendor thinks they've built a better
| mousetrap.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ...it's a comprehensive look at how you do routine
| sysadmin tasks. The kind of thing that Linux pushes off to
| web tutorials or stackoverflow.
|
| A lot of useful material with near-official status is kept
| under the Linux Documentation Project, https://tldp.org/
| They have a git repository at https://github.com/tLDP/LDP
|
| There are some cases of real churn in Linux but they're
| rare. The new init systems and such come with plenty of
| useful features that simplify many administration tasks:
| the reason for people being so unsatisfied with them is
| that they bring lots of what's effectively cowboy-coded
| hacks and prototype-quality code in order to enable these
| features. But rewriting all of this stuff from the ground
| up with a clean, Unix-like design (or rather, Plan9-,
| Limbo- or Amoeba-like, given that Linux now supports the
| needed foundational features for these) while preserving
| its feature set would involve _more_ rather than _less_
| churn.
| silverlyra wrote:
| > or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like [design],
| given that Linux now supports the needed foundational
| features for these
|
| I'd be curious to hear more about what you're referring
| to, if you were willing to expand. What foundational
| features are new to Linux that would be really useful for
| cleaner init system (etc.) designs?
| brundolf wrote:
| Sounds like it might address a lot of the misgivings I have
| with using Linux as a workstation; maybe I'll play with it
| some time
| messe wrote:
| It's not a perfect OS, but it's definitely pleasant to use.
|
| These days I'm on macOS, mainly because of the hardware but
| also a few pieces of software that I have hard time
| replacing (Scrivener and Mathematica).
| tksb wrote:
| Scrivener is a gem for sure, but I'm always curious if
| anyone actively using it has tried Highland? I guess I'm
| biased as it feels extremely "at home" on macOS.
| ori_b wrote:
| Simple, consistent, well documented, easy to debug, and easy to
| administer. Comfortable.
| messe wrote:
| I think "comfortable" sums it up better than anything else.
| When I run OpenBSD, I know what's running on my system (up
| until the firmware at least), but more importantly I
| understand it. Even the kernel is easy to dive into.
| eatonphil wrote:
| That's really neat, so you install Asahi Linux first and then
| after that it's easier/possible to install OpenBSD.
| generalizations wrote:
| I don't understand the details, but it looks like you use the
| uefi-only option in the installer to install the UEFI
| 'firmware', which then lets you boot the openbsd installer.
| brynet wrote:
| Yes, there's an "UEFI environment only" option that only
| installs m1n1+u-boot (not Linux), OpenBSD/arm64 uses the EFI
| implementation provided by u-boot.
|
| Mark Kettenis' from the OpenBSD project is responsible for
| upstreaming Apple M1 support for u-boot, and has been
| collaborating with the Asahi Linux team.
| Yanker wrote:
| I was quite literally trying to install OpenBSD on my M1 air
| yesterday. How about that?
| vaxman wrote:
| Maybe don't boot your Macs into third-party operating systems
| (high potential for thermal damage or even misconfiguring
| mainboard components such that it might cause data loss even when
| rebooted back into macOS ..if the BSP devs at Apple were sloppy
| in their initialization code or an "unknown state" is created).
| Linux on Mac, A/UX, etc. was a Thing back in the day when clock
| rates were lower and component densities were lower and the
| machines came chalk full of holes to let the heat out, so running
| the system "out of spec" had less potential for permanent damage.
|
| Apple-sanctioned alternative operating systems such as VMware
| ESXi have also caused problems in the past and should not be used
| at all anymore because Apple does not seem to play well with
| others on that level (by releasing uncoordinated firmware
| updates).
| Maursault wrote:
| > running the system "out of spec" had less potential for
| permanent damage
|
| You may have a point, unless this insinuated physical damage
| from altOS on Apple Silicon never appears.
|
| > Apple-sanctioned alternative operating systems such as VMware
| ESXi have also caused problems in the past and should not be
| used at all anymore because Apple does not seem to play well
| with others on that level (by releasing uncoordinated firmware
| updates).
|
| VMWare currently supports running their bare metal hypervisor
| on (at least) Intel Mac hardware (except for Mac Pro _due to
| COVID straining VMWare development_ , and not because ESXi
| causes Mac Pros to detonate), but does not consider any Mac
| with VMWare an enterprise-grade setup.
|
| Please accept some humble advice: since there are three and
| only three reasons to update anything: bugfixes, pressing
| security issues and the last a need for new features,
| generally, one should never update firmware, and this is
| especially true the moment the update appears. In the first
| case, unless the bug prevents booting, it couldn't be less
| important, secondly, worrying about firmware security issues is
| silly, because if you can't physically prevent access to the
| computer, it's pwned anyway no matter how secure the firmware
| is. And in the last case, if you have a functioning system in
| production, then _it doesn 't need new features_, get out of
| here with needing new features on production. The notion is
| absurd on it's face.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| OpenBSD is known for its high quality standards, quality software
| is resource-intensive to develop, and they are a relatively small
| team.
|
| As a practical / project management matter, how do they manage to
| support a diversity of hardware? What proportion of their
| resources is spent just keeping up with hardware?
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