Linux Running on Apple M1

https://twitter.com/cmwdotme/status/1351838924621099008

by ig0r0 • 6 years ago

378 275 6 years ago

rvz• 6 years ago

Great progress already thanks to Corellium for the M1 linux projects [0][1], the PongoOS project and to all others involved.

Getting GPU acceleration is now the real challenge.

[0] https://github.com/corellium/preloader-m1

[1] https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1

kzrdude• 6 years ago

Can someone explain what a .dts file is?

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

It's a device tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree

JustFinishedBSG2• 6 years ago

Well. GPU, networking, power management, disk... There's more than 1 huge challenge

rowanG0772• 6 years ago

Networking and disk will be relatively trivial I'd expect. GPU and power management will be very hard.

unix_fan• 6 years ago

Disk isn't all that complicated. Once people figured out that apple's NVME implementation was custom, writing a driver for it wasn't all that hard, even with the t2.

uncledave• 6 years ago

That is some insanely fast progress. Well done and hats off to all involved.

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

This was quite fast considering that Apple opened up booting custom objects sometime last week…it seems to still be software rendering for now, but it's good to see this progressing so quickly. It seems that there is effort being put into upstreaming this too (despite a couple of unfortunately hitches :/) so we might be seeing this ready for general-purpose use quite soon!

cillian64• 6 years ago

Apple officially opened up booting custom images on the M1? Do you have any more information about this? I had a quick search and couldn’t find any news stories.

kevinbowman• 6 years ago

This is probably what was being referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25772462

"macOS Big Sur 11.2 beta 2 is out with full custom kernel support" ... "The OS now finally includes the firmware and bootloaders and tools necessary to replace Big Sur with not-Big-Sur. That was previously not possible."

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

It’s not something that would probably get reported widely, but the bputil command (which manages boot policy, as the name suggests) and kmutil now work as of the second beta of 11.2 and allow for you to provide your own code to run.

mprev• 6 years ago

I hadn't thought about Yellow Dog Linux in years until seeing this. Discontinued in 2012, which is understandable after Apple's switch to Intel.

gorgoiler• 6 years ago

Ah the memories of yaboot blessing /dev/hda1 with holy penguin pee...!

geogra4• 6 years ago

Their great contribution to the rpm world is yum

ficklepickle• 6 years ago

For some reason it was the distro that ran best on the ps3, I seem to recall.

Jonnax• 6 years ago

The reason is that Apple used PPC CPUs in their Mac's before Intel

And this was a distro geared towards PowerPC hardware.

pantalaimon4• 6 years ago

These days it would be T2

https://t2sde.org/

laktak• 6 years ago

This is cool but technically I'd say it would need to use the disk in the Mac to be running "on" the Mac.

JosephRedfern2• 6 years ago

Why's that? If I netboot Linux on my desktop PC, is it not running "on" my desktop PC?

Is the CPU/SoC not the thing on which then operating system is running?

coldtea• 6 years ago

Technically yes. But people want to have an M1 laptop on which they can run Linux. Not a laptop + external disk + other baggage.

dastx• 6 years ago

I think running it on disk is probably the least of their worries. As I understand it, the GPU is the biggest hurdle to jump.

viraptor4• 6 years ago

There's a bit of competition now going between asahi and corellium. While most of the spicy tweets have been removed, there's a summary https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1350547056679477250

Essentially, while this project may be quicker to get visible results, they may not be able to release all the code kosher for merging upstream. It will be interesting to see the next steps.

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

Competition is fine, but the "spiciness" was really just drama+pettiness on both sides :/ I'm hoping they're both past that now, as they should know better, but having two competing projects unable to assume good faith from each other is generally not healthy at all.

Geminidog7• 6 years ago

The more spiciness and completive things are the better the overall results. We all like to think that collaboration, harmony and love drives innovation but much of innovation is built around intense rivalry and competition as well. Don't be idealistic to a fault, much of the qualities we view as petty exist because they passed millions of years of natural selection. Those who compete, thrive.

Winner takes all.

usrusr• 6 years ago

Haven't followed this at all so I have no idea how far I'm off, but I could easily imagine that the type of person who dives deep to take on the M1 Linux challenge is exactly the kind of person who could enjoy, after noticing another team taking on the same project, to celebrate each other by not only agreeing to disagree, but agreeing to disagree * with all the drama they can muster*. "Hey, you're cool, let's publicly sling mud at each other!"

I wouldn't dare considering it the most likely scenario, but it's surely the most lovely.

pantalaimon4• 6 years ago

But patches have already been submitted upstream

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20210120132717.3958...

arghwhat8• 6 years ago

Everyone can submit, doesn't mean it'll be included.

viraptor4• 6 years ago

This is from the Asahi project though, not the corellium one linked here. Also, it's only a tiny part of what's needed.

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

Reading the comment thread that arose from your comment reminded me, and maybe you'll appreciate this...

I like to view competition as a form of collaboration, for example:

When companies compete, they compete in a collaboration we call the market.

When sports teams compete, whether as groups or individuals, they compete in a collaboration we call the game, or even a tournament.

When the other side is beating you, you might look at their strengths and weaknesses, their knowledge and ability, and work out if there's anything you can learn, how to adapt your behaviour to strengthen your position.

Employees, or players, can move from one company to another, through hiring or acquisitions, bringing skills and experience with them. Here we have companies competing for employees, and then those employees collaborating anew.

Or a company might license certain IP from another, this is a form of collaboration too.

In this sense, collaboration and competition aren't necessarily opposing paradigms, they can be tools to apply to the situation.

thomasfl• 6 years ago

A Raspberry Pi powered by something similar to the M1 or A14 bionic processor would be something. The Broadcom 1.5 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 that powers the latest raspberry pi, is nothing compared to the new processor beasts from Apple.

flyinghamster• 6 years ago

We already have the Mac Mini, but an A14-based SBC would be less of a stretch than an M1. A picoMac, so to speak? That would almost inevitably run MacOS by default rather than Linux, though.

The GPU is make or break for Linux. No GPU means it's just another server in a different form factor.

geerlingguy• 6 years ago

That's basically the Apple TV.

Let that thing have more standard IO, and run Linux, and it'd be a heck of a fanless machine.

bayindirh• 6 years ago

While Raspberry Pi may not be as powerful as an M1, I'd not discount any of these small boards.

I have a OrangePi Zero w/ 512MB RAM at home and it handles a lot of stuff (Syncthing, DNSMasq, rsync based backups and more) without a glitch.

The only thing it doesn't like to handle SFTP encryption at high speeds. Processor gets visibly strained and overheats after a 4MB/s or so.

MisterTea• 6 years ago

An Ampere or other Arm server chip would fit the bill. Aside from Apple, no one is making arm chips to serve the laptop/desktop segment. So there's this HUGE gap between the endless sea of embedded/mobile Arm chips and then jumps to a handfull of mega-many-core server chips.

Apple is finally filling in one of the Arm gaps with a mid-tier chip that can handle a desktop load efficiently while an efficient GPU can handle graphics without thermally clobbering each other.

coder543• 6 years ago

Aside from Apple, no one is making arm chips to serve the laptop/desktop segment.

You can argue that their chips in this segment are not very good, but Qualcomm is actually specifically addressing the laptop market, and they're not "no one".

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15210/qualcomm-expands-lineup...

jcstryker• 6 years ago

Love to see the competition between the projects trying to get linux running on the m1. Though I think they will hit a wall trying to enable GPU support.

I think opening up just enough to enable this effort also serves as some good nerd marketing for Apple. This race keeps the m1 in the news regularly, giving hope to those who want a low-power and performant ARM machine that wouldn't otherwise consider an apple machine.

Twisell• 6 years ago

What will be interesting though is to measure the raw performance of this initial CPU only rendering. For now on it's a still image we don't know if it's sluggish as hell or actually pretty decent even without a GPU.

If the latest is true that could prove to be another prestige point for the M1.

varispeed4• 6 years ago

Does it actually require any serious development or it is just mostly tweaking and changing things here and there? I am sorry if that sounds ignorant, but I thought these are just low hanging fruits to harvest. Also why Apple wouldn't do that themselves? To me it is an opposite to "nerd marketing", a big middle finger to Linux users - essentially "you are on your own".

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

A middle finger from Apple would be locking the bootloader–keeping it open, plus providing minimal tooling and telling people to figure it out, is about as close to "we'd love to see what you'll do with it" as Apple could possibly give.

(Dealing with the GPU is going to be the majority of the work, I'd think.)

maratc2• 6 years ago

The interesting thing here is that now, when they own the CPU and GPU, and when MacOS is free, they probably might be more open to letting anyone install any OS on it. You want a Linux/BSD/Windows on M1, and you're not hurting any of their possible revenue streams, so why the hell not let you buy their hardware and throw whatever OS on it.

Somebody wants to copy the hardware over and sell it for half price? Yeah, good luck reproducing the M1.

Opening the boot loader to allow for Linux is quite an opposite of a middle finger, tbh. I don't know if they will divert some guys from working on MacOS towards Linux support, but this is already looking much better than before.

eyelidlessness2• 6 years ago

To be honest I’m amazed Apple even cares enough one way or another that they mentioned Linux virtualization in the M1 announcement. But it’s not a middle finger, this was more or less exactly how they handled multiboot on Intel: let the community figure out a solution, see if it gets uptake, support it with a first party solution if it does. That’s how we got Boot Camp, as there was a lot of interest in booting Windows at the time.

It’s a good sign that the latest betas (11.2 IIRC) officially support multiboot in the UI. That’s a good indication Apple sees the level of interest in Linux on M1 that they intend to at least let it happen.

I’d say it’s still up in the air whether they’ll go for full first party support with drivers or an open spec, but it’s definitely not out of the question. And they may even have direct interest in it, as I’m sure they’d like to get the benefits of their hardware in their data centers.

asveikau2• 6 years ago

Just from a skim it seems like there is a new interrupt controller driver. The copyright header credits Linus Torvalds so they probably got started based on copying an existing one, but that sounds like substantial work and ongoing maintenance.

mhh__2• 6 years ago

Even Nvidia publish stuff for the Nouveau drivers now.

I wouldn't bet on it. Apple are very insular on matters like this, it's their toy, end of.

arafsheikh• 6 years ago

A good number of comments here mention dealing with the GPU is going to be a major hurdle. What makes porting GPU drivers significantly more challenging than everything else?

izacus4• 6 years ago

They're very complex, very stateful devices which also run their own compiled shader code. Not to mention auxiliary DSPs like video decoders (not sure if M1 has it as part of GPU or a separate block), power gating control and many many more.

They may have in order of 100 registers to talk to them and they're horribly proprietary with pretty much no standardisation.

Reverse engineering that is hellish at best - you can see projects like nouveau which barely manages to get nVidia cores up and working without help from the manufacturer. And that's after years and years of development.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

What makes porting GPU drivers significantly more challenging than everything else?

Multiple reasons:

1) GPU manufacturers are notorious for not publishing documentation out of IP/patent concerns. Worst offender is NVIDIA here.

2) For embedded GPUs there isn't much interest in open source drivers... the big customers (think Samsung and the likes) have direct support from the chip design vendor and get drop-in drivers as part of the board support package (BSP, basically a conglomerate of bootloader, kernel+modules+initrd, firmware blobs for components such as wifi) so they don't need OSS drivers

3) The mobile GPU space is... splintered. With desktops you got the three major players AMD/ATI, NVIDIA and Intel's built-in Iris, in the GPU space there are more.

giomasce• 6 years ago

Someone has begun digging the GPU.

https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html

JustFinishedBSG2• 6 years ago

It's not just someone, she's responsible for the Panfrost drivers so there's hope :)

jug• 6 years ago

Nice, that was a HN worthy article by itself.

coding123• 6 years ago

Ha nice, she expects to find an eldritch horror in there somewhere.

freedomben• 6 years ago

heh, between my clicky keyboard and his, I'm losing my mind a bit lol

Someone• 6 years ago

I know it’s entering (dark?) gray territory, license wise, but has anybody ever attempted to wrap a Mac OS driver in a Linux compatibility layer?

tyingq• 6 years ago

Oh, like the old ndiswrapper approach for various windows XP NIC drivers. Which worked reasonably well...I remember using it for some laptop with a Realtek chip. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper

captn3m0• 6 years ago

marcan had answered it in one of the live streams - his opinion was that it was a last-ditch effort that shouldn't be required for most usecases.

Perhaps for some of the peripheral stuff (such as the touchbar), but the GPU ought not to need it.

exikyut2• 6 years ago

(Waiting for page to load) "Nice, so they finally got a kernel to boot. I wonder what fancy way they'll be showing the dmesg infor--"

"Oh."

I think I need to recalibrate my idea of a 10x developer...

(The standard would seem to have ratcheted up somewhat as the years have gone by!)

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

When the kernel boots, and you have a framebuffer working, all of userspace and gnome will probably just work with no modifications.

You might have to play shenanigans like copying a complete filesystem into a ramdisk from the bootloader if your kernel doesn't have support for any IO/networking/storage devices. But you'll still be able to get this screenshot!

Having said that, they have USB working, which is quite an effort, although I'd guess it's an IPCore that a driver already existed for, so it was a simple matter of figuring out memory mappings etc. With USB working, you can make a very usable system, because pretty much any peripheral will work over USB.

floatboth9• 6 years ago

Yes, USB is the same Synopsys DesignWare piece of..hardware that you can find on all the Allwinners/Rockchips/Amlogics/whatever. They wrote a driver for the "binding" crap around this to make the controller work, yeah. And some Type-C stuff (Apple handles it in software)

wmf• 6 years ago

Note that this team already ported Linux to the iPhone, so what they did recently was update their iPhone port to support M1.

exikyut2• 6 years ago

I see. The hardware history stories/narratives are getting absolutely hilarious, IMO... :)

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

What's DART?

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

"Device Address Resolution Table"–essentially an IOMMU.

vespakoen• 6 years ago

marcan, who is working on AsahiLinux, is streaming at this time of writing and just got the framebuffer working, this is one of the most interesting live-code-streams I have seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxnWuXgj3JI

monopoledance3• 6 years ago

Started streaming 8 hours ago

WTF.

aorth• 6 years ago

Started streaming 9 hours ago

Still going. Don't think even stopped to eat, drink, or bio break. I'm also surprised his computer hasn't crashed or something! Really fun to watch him work.

2bitencryption• 6 years ago

saving this for later. this is where the rubber meets the road. super interested in seeing the workstream these super-techncially-skilled devs use

BrawnLongHaul• 6 years ago

Can I have a Beowulf cluster of those? (yes, I am a grey haired BOFH)

CarVac• 6 years ago

One thing I've always wondered is... what did one do with a Beowulf cluster back when that was a thing?

joosters• 6 years ago

Compile linux kernels and boast about the speed?

acomjean• 6 years ago

I understand there is a thing with trying to run Linux everywhere, and it’s a fun exercise.

Even if Apple does do some open source support, Even if that hardware isn’t quite as nice, I prefer to buy/support hardware and vendors that support Linux at this point.

iSnow3• 6 years ago

Understandable and I was ready to buy a Dell XPS as I like the "small and light" form factor. I was just waiting for the COVID buy spike to subside and see how my financial situation would evolve.

But I have pushed the decision back to see how Linux will be running on the M1. From first reports, it is simply tailor-made for a laptop computer that doesn't get burning hot or dog slow because of thermal throttling.

I hope intel and to a lesser extend AMD are looking at this thing red-faced. But they will need some time to play catch-up.

hitpointdrew2• 6 years ago

I hope intel and to a lesser extend AMD are looking at this thing red-faced. But they will need some time to play catch-up.

I think it raised their eyebrows a bit, but don't agree that they need some time to play catch-up. Bottom line is the vast majority of Intel and AMD chips are running Windows. You can't even buy Windows 10 for an ARM processor. Microsoft flirted with the idea at one point, but has pretty much abandoned it. So why would Intel or AMD market ARM chips at all when Microsoft isn't supporting them at all?

If you are talking about servers that is a different story (since lots of servers run Linux). AMD already made a server with an ARM processor, the latest "Opteron" series was ARM https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100 These came out in 2016 and don't think they sold nearly as well as Epyc has. Taking a second look at offering ARM for the datacenter in the fture might not be a bad idea for AMD though.

varispeed4• 6 years ago

I have fairly recent XPS and indeed it is a shame how poorly it runs in terms of throttling and getting hot. On Linux when you launch Teams, forget about being able to keep it on your lap for too long. Teams eats the CPU for breakfast and probably you could fry an egg on it if you closed the lid. Of course it has to be plugged in at all times as battery life is a joke after few months.

oblio7• 6 years ago

If you're planning that device to be your daily driver, I'd definitely get the XPS. A stable Linux distro running on M1 is probably 3-5 years away, at least.

macNchz• 6 years ago

It’s also just a more enjoyable experience to run Linux on hardware that’s actually supported...I’ve been using Macs since I was a kid in 1993, and have at some point or another run Linux on each of them. It has pretty much always been easy to get up and running but frustrating to actually use. There is a wide chasm between “it runs” and “I want to use this every day”, usually involving sleep/wake issues, wifi problems or driver issues for other internal hardware (backlights, camera etc).

Perhaps the M1 is sufficiently compelling to muster the engineering resources needed to get every piece working nicely, we’ll see!

CivBase2• 6 years ago

I'm excited for Linux support on the M1. I don't even have a Mac Book, but more incentive for Linux apps to support ARM is a good thing.

fabianhjr• 6 years ago

Most distros have had ARMv8 (AArch64) support for a while now, Apple didn't invent RISC/ARM this year.

The most common AArch64 distro usage is on RaspberryPies

CivBase2• 6 years ago

Yeah, but there wasn't consistent ARM support like there was for x86. It was only a few months ago that the desktop release of Ubuntu didn't support ARM.

ianai• 6 years ago

I wonder whether linux could benefit from the specific architecture changes of the M1. Apple's made a big technical claim of the hardware acceleration of reference counting - another OS and toolchain optimizing around it to any extent would test their claims.

This both reads a little overly optimistic to me knowing how proprietary things are - but linux and foss software have history of running on all manner of platforms. Arguments based on: "you can only get a client machine with at max 16 gig of ram" or "you can't plunk an M1 into a server chassis with all the hardware you need" and so on may be various amounts of preliminary (we only have 1 chip from them yet and it's clearly a 'first out the door' type near-beta) to actually relevant.

throwaway22442• 6 years ago

This guy also got pardoned by Trump.

Happy to see frame buffer, excited for great linux experience on m1.

asddubs• 6 years ago

wow, he really did get pardoned by trump. that's kind of interesting

mlindner• 6 years ago

Pretty sure that's a different Chris Wade. For example this one: https://twitter.com/saywhatagain

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

It's the same one.

nedsma• 6 years ago

Any information on battery life?

pantalaimon4• 6 years ago

Yes, there is no battery on the Mac mini.

midrus3• 6 years ago

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand.

A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensive paperweight.

In my opinion, other than doing it for the sake of learning and the challenge of it, this will lead nowhere in the long term unless you get any kind of commitment or support from Apple. And I hope I'm wrong but that's very, very unlikely to happen any time soon.

Wowfunhappy5• 6 years ago

I have confidence in the parallel efforts being spearheaded by Marcan. He knows what he's doing and he's working on it full time.

midrus3• 6 years ago

And that's why this has no long term future. There are not that many people able to achieve this. One single person can't do it forever.

hitpointdrew2• 6 years ago

Yeah, other than an experimental exercises I don't get why anyone would ever want to do this. You will spend WAY more money for the Apple hardware, you will struggle to get things to stay consistent. If your goal is to run linux then don't buy a Mac.

monopoledance3• 6 years ago

You will spend WAY more money for the Apple hardware

I think right now the new M1 machines are actually priced pretty reasonable. If they'd run Linux, I would buy them in an instant.

I mean, try to match the Air with a Thinkpad, especially if you consider the screen. I think there is not even one recent AMD Thinkpad with a > FHD screen. And who wants a 2020 Intel machine?

Edit: To make this clear: No Linux, no Mac for me (as I don't believe in MacOS's future at all). But even considering the horrible keyboard, I think the M1 macs are totally worth it just for the hardware. That's a first. And I am the kind of person who feels all warm and fuzzy over ejecting an ultrabay hard drive, or changing RAM/display in < 5 minutes in a laptop.

jonfw• 6 years ago

If you care about display, trackpad, and battery life, the M1 macs blow everything else out of the water, and for pretty cheap.

PragmaticPulp• 6 years ago

No one should be purchasing a brand new M1 Mac with the expectation of perfect Linux support any time soon.

However, I’m optimistic that these will be mostly usable on Linux before they’re too obsolete or outdated. The platform is so popular and iconic that it’s drawing a lot of attention from Linux devs and reverse engineering crowds.

CharlesW• 6 years ago

No one should be purchasing a brand new M1 Mac with the expectation of perfect Linux support any time soon.

That's sound advice.

As someone who doesn't use Linux as their daily driver, can I expect Linux to run perfectly in a VM on an M1 Mac?

oblio7• 6 years ago

So the advice is to buy a second hand one 5 years from now?

kelnos6• 6 years ago

I'm not at all as optimistic as you are. You still need out-of-tree drivers to run Linux on a 2017 MacBook Pro, and various things don't work at all on Intel Macs from 2016 (possibly earlier) to the present.

Sure the M1 is the new shiny, and people will be attracted to it in the short term, which might boost reverse-engineering efforts. But I expect that to die down as people get frustrated, and we'll have the same (or worse) situation as we do running Linux on Intel Macs.

simonh• 6 years ago

On the contrary, this could be fantastic for a headless server running on an M1 Mini to build and test ARM code before deploying to AWS Graviton. It doesn't all have to be about laptops.

midrus3• 6 years ago

Agree, this could be a good use case.

axaxs• 6 years ago

While a valid use case, it feels like overkill. There are much less expensive and more stable ways to accomplish this.

StillBored2• 6 years ago

For the about price of a mac mini:

https://shop.solid-run.com/product-category/embedded-compute...

You get upgradable ram, a PCIe slot for your favorite GPU/etc, and actual mainline linux support sufficient to boot most random linux distros (ok the onboard 10G+ nic might not work without patches).

Its not the fastest machine around (A72s) but there are 16 of them, so it does a decent job of building ARM software, and running VMs.

troyvit2• 6 years ago

This is how a lot of people used Linux on PowerPC macs in the early aughts. It set them up for larger projects on IBM hardware and the goofy risc engineers got to walk around looking cool because they had a powerbook.

meibo2• 6 years ago

Even on old + modern thinkpads it feels like a lottery which hardware feature will stop working at a particular time, with the distros i've worked myself through.

Ethernet, waking up from sleep mode, brightness adjustment... take your pick.

titzer8• 6 years ago

I discovered last week, to my chagrin, that the RAM on my x1 carbon Stinkpad was starting to fail--memtest x86+ confirmed it. Memory corruption is insidious, so I rushed to the internet to buy new DIMMs, opened the sucker up...and there's no DIMM. The RAM is just soldered into the motherboard. No upgrade, no fix. This is now a pile of unreliable junk that randomly flips bits in memory. So data evac commences, with MD5 hashes and double, trip-checking everything.

A reminder that not only software bitrots, but hardware too. Make sure not to buy a Stinkpad (or any hardware) with non-replaceable parts!

(and I just bought an M1 Macbook Pro...)

arghwhat8• 6 years ago

Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac.

I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads.

I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn't support displayport MST), dock connectivity problems (macos freezing or crashing when connected except when it suddenly works for a day, Windows playing disconnect/reconnect sounds in a loop when the machine goes idle), and more, including just today out inexplicable crashing.

Install Linux or plug all the "made for windows/macOS" hardware into a Linux box, and all the problems went away.

My conclusion, supported by having been a proprietary kernel driver developer for Windows, FreeBSD and Linux, is that any hardware and driver combo tends to be a coin toss, irrespective of platform.

But with Linux, drivers that would otherwise be abandoned after a project was shipped, get a chance at being fixed and improved that their proprietary counterparts can never even dream of.

oblio7• 6 years ago

The thing is, many more people are using Windows, than Macs and many more people are using Macs, than desktop Linuxes. So your anecdata goes against a mountain of anecdata from people using those platforms.

crubier• 6 years ago

MacOS a coin toss and Linux being robust regarding drivers/hardware support on desktop? Are you talking about Hackintosh, or do we not live on the same planet?

shimonabi• 6 years ago

Then tell me why my Elantech touchpad keeps freezing randomly on my Huawei Matebook 14d running Linux, but works fine on Windows.

tw04• 6 years ago

Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac.

Based on...? Apple is pretty straightforward: they support hardware until they don't. And they're quite explicit about ending support and it's almost always a major release. You might be able to hack support after that, but I've literally never had it be a "toss-up" about when Apple was or wasn't supporting their own hardware.

As for Windows... I've got a 10 year old 2600k based desktop that runs the latest version of windows flawlessly. I guess if you go back 20? 30? 40? years you might find something that can't run the latest version of windows, but you're going to be down a really, REALLY obscure rabbit hole. I can't say I ever recall it being a coin toss, it was about 10 seconds on google of finding or not finding a driver.

Linux on the other hand... the support of hardware is awesome, but determining if something is or isn't supported is generally an afternoon of reading mailing lists.

danudey2• 6 years ago

I'll do you one better:

macOS does support MST! It actually does! But it only supports it for splitting one display image over multiple streams, to overcome bandwidth limits on Displayport streams.

For providing a signal to very-high-pixel-count displays, macOS uses MST.

For providing multiple displayport signals to multiple displays? Nope, not implemented.

Imagine my frustration after a day of googling and finding out that macOS supports the feature we wanted, but not the use that we wanted.

matheusmoreira2• 6 years ago

having been a proprietary kernel driver developer for Windows, FreeBSD and Linux

May I ask how you learned how to do this? I'd like to learn too! I had a great experience developing a Linux user space driver for my own laptop's LEDs. Couldn't figure out how to control the fans though.

ogre_codes2• 6 years ago

A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensive paperweight.

There are Mac desktops as well. That said, I'd say the list of mandatory components on a laptop is:

- Decent GPU Drivers

- Workable power management with sleep/ awake

- Trackpad (this should be straight forward)

The webcam, and brightness controls are stretch goals. I can't imaging the trackpad is vastly different from currently shipping ones. The Webcam might cause some significant headaches since Apple secures that fairly tightly.

The onboard wifi modem is likely worthless, from what I recall, many of them are even in Windows laptops due to proprietary drivers.

floatboth9• 6 years ago

Most Windows laptops thankfully use Intel Wi-Fi. Apple is unfortunately completely married to Broadcom. There are open drivers for Broadcom Wi-Fi, at least not-the-newest ones, but they do suck.

rowanG0772• 6 years ago

I'm not sure why you are so pessimistic. There are many community supported linux devices that work fine. The Microsoft Surface line being a prominent example. There are patches available for all recent kernels. And afaik all generations are supported. Here custom drivers have also been written.

fomine32• 6 years ago

Microsoft Surface don't use special hardware as much as Apple's laptop. Especially for M1, they uses original GPU, boot system, power management, etcetc...

na85• 6 years ago

subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls

Honestly this sounds exactly like my experience with linux on any laptop, including three thinkpads.

Linux is a great desktop and server OS but the UX of a laptop actually demands a certain level of polish/fit-and-finish that linux desktop environments just don't have, otherwise it's constantly getting in your way.

kiwijamo2• 6 years ago

Suprisely to me even, all these work work fine on Debian. Debian needed me to slide load the intel wireless drivers (a disappointing aspect I grant) but otherwise everything just worked right out of the box. Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th Generation.

rgomez• 6 years ago

Well about the hardware support, i.e. the Ubuntu Desktop certified hardware list is quite long [1], and I'm quite sure there are a lot more perfectly working brands/models that are just not appearing there. I've been using a Dell Inspiron model, for 8 years now not appearing in that list as a daily driver and every major distro worked perfectly out of the box, some tweak required from time to time but that's it.

[1] https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop

sneak2• 6 years ago

The first week that XNU ran on ARM, it didn't have very good hardware support either.

Kwpolska• 6 years ago

Apple has all the documentation needed to write drivers for all the custom hardware found in an iPhone (the original XNU-on-ARM device) or in an M1 Mac. The Asahi volunteers and Corellium don’t, they will need to do much more work, including reverse-engineering. So, what’s your point?

IOT_Apprentice2• 6 years ago

Linux does run, and it also runs on the M1.

heavyset_go4• 6 years ago

Agreed. Check out the state of Linux support on Intel Macs that were released in and after 2016[1], it's abysmal. Once Apple started adding non-standard hardware, Linux support never caught up.

It isn't like the lack of support is Linux developers' fault. Apple doesn't provide datasheets for their hardware, and they don't cooperate with developers writing drivers for their custom hardware.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ARM SoCs that "run Linux", but that doesn't mean much because they're actually running Linux forks, and someone needs to maintain those forks, and build and release custom images for each SoC. I don't see M1 Macs diverting from that fate without significant support from Apple themselves.

[1] https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/

Skunkleton3• 6 years ago

that doesn't mean much because they're actually running Linux forks

Many of these Arm SoCs are running linux forks because there are some terrible baked in drivers, and no spec associated with them. Still, that is a step ahead of the M1 as there are at least drivers that don't have to be decompiled and reverse engineered.

dis-sys• 6 years ago

Not many people want to run Linux on intel based mac because you can run Linux on a much cheaper intel machine.

IOT_Apprentice2• 6 years ago

Apple is a hardware vendor. How are the parts they use "non-standard"? What are the "standard" parts that Linux uses and further what consumer or business hardware has Linux indicated is standard?

It appears what should be being asked for is Apple to commit resources to natively support things like: Docker, Kubernetes, Virtualization and Linux drivers on their M1 Macs going forward.

plauribre• 6 years ago

Apple's poor support for Linux on Mac hardware may reverse if the company gains data center ambition for the M1. Partnering with a cloud provider (maybe Microsoft?) to deliver seamless Linux deployment on M1 would be significant...

floatboth9• 6 years ago

Microsoft already has a good partner in Ampere, a company fully dedicated to servers and standards.

Apple clearly doesn't seem interested. The M1 is just a scaled-up version of the iDevice SoCs. From the reverse engineering we've seen so far, it is extremely clear that not even a single step towards any standardization was taken. It's very much the ad-hoc hodgepodge of embedded crap companies build when they only care about their own complete product and don't allocate any budget towards any "refactoring" that doesn't directly benefit the end product.

They use some ancient Samsung UART for debug (because the first iPhones used a Samsung SoC?), old P.A. Semi I2C controller, the Synopsys DesignWare USB 3 controller (just like some random cheap Allwinner/Rockchip/etc), and here's the fucking kicker, a custom Apple interrupt controller and a custom IOMMU too. These probably predate GICv2/3 at least. But there was no reason for them to switch to the standard Arm GIC and SMMU so they didn't >_<

linuxhiker• 6 years ago

I haven't run into that problem in years. As long as you are running a mainstream laptop (Asus,Acer,Dell,HP etc...) you will likely not have a problem. I will grant that you should still do a review of the hardware against supported drivers (especially around Wifi)... 9.8/10 it will just work.

kelnos6• 6 years ago

Yup. The last Mac I ran Linux on was a 2016 MBP. And even then, audio and suspend/resume didn't work (well, suspend was fine, resume... not so much), and battery life was terrible. When I first installed it, the keyboard and touchpad required an out-of-tree driver.

That driver has been upstreamed, but I hear the 2017 and onward touchbar MBPs still require and out-of-tree driver, and a similar level of things don't work.

In 2019 I finally gave up and got a Dell XPS13. It's... basically perfect? The keyboard doesn't suck like recent MacBooks, though the touchpad isn't quite as nice (though really, it's perfectly fine). The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader, but I knew that going in and didn't care. And subjectively the hardware isn't as pretty, but... oh well. On the plus side, I really do like the "soft touch" palm rest better than the harsh aluminum of the MacBook.

I'm definitely interested in the Linux-on-M1 project's progress from an intellectual curiosity standpoint, but I'm expecting long-term as a user it'll be just as -- if not more -- frustrating as running Linux on any Intel MacBook from the last 5 years, which means I won't bother.

bangonkeyboard• 6 years ago

And even then, audio and suspend/resume didn't work (well, suspend was fine, resume... not so much)

The computer never woke and needed to be hard-rebooted if it was ever allowed to suspend? I ran into this after installing Linux on a MacBook, downgrading the kernel to an old LTS release eventually worked.

Teknoman117• 6 years ago

My last Mac running Linux was a 2011 MacBook Air 13". My Linux (work) laptop is an XPS15. Now that optimus on Linux is completely transparent (merged into Xorg in April '20). Sleep doesn't seem to work well though. Fans keep spinning and it drains about 10% of the battery per hour. If anyone knows how to get around that "active sleep" mode I'd appreciate it.

My personal laptop is an HP Envy X360 with a Ryzen 5 2500U. That was rough when it came out. Windows update updated the bios on the laptop which installed a new GPU firmware that wasn't supported by the Linux driver for a few months. It's been solid since kernel 5.0 came out.

IMHO, the Linux experience on the AMD APUs is better than the Windows experience due to how rough the AMD windows drivers can be for the APUs. The fans are always shrieking at me under Windows but at idle they are off in Linux and the battery lasts significantly longer.

shmerl• 6 years ago

I don't see any reason to do it from practical standpoint, but to do it for fun - why not.

If you want something working, I'd also not recommend using hardware from someone like Apple.

noizejoy• 6 years ago

Not all M1 chips are in laptops. I’m kind of intrigued by the potential of a cool and quiet linux server.

mehrdada• 6 years ago

This is a depressing thought to hear on a site titled Hacker News. Looking back at the past 20 years, I am quite confident it is just a matter of time before people get a couple drivers working fine on M1 systems (esp. considering Apple does not seem to be actively fighting this). I am sure folks will make it work considering the relative popularity of the device compared to all the esoteric devices that no one uses and Linux still supports.

Sure, documentation helps, but it is overrated--people get lots of things working by reverse engineering.

uberduper• 6 years ago

Until I have a post-EOL OS option for an M1 mac, I'm not buying.

titzer8• 6 years ago

Qemu is also several kinds of broken on M1.

I was able to get qemu to boot an x86 Linux after applying a huge pile of patches I found on a forum.

If you are expecting to get up and running instantly with a VM to put all of your comfy old software in, not so fast!

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

How so? I've been using QEMU to boot Intel guests without issue for almost six months…

titzer8• 6 years ago

On the M1? I could only get it to work with some patches I found on some forums from < 1 month ago. The issue seems to be hardware wx protection, among other things.

glitchc3• 6 years ago

Until the Linux kernel leverages instructions specific to Apple M1's extended ISA, this is a waste of time. The whole point of the M1 experience is that out of the box, it's fast, silent and runs for days. Yes, Linux will run, as it would run on any ARM processor, but it will be slow, hot and run the battery down in a couple of hours.

It will take years for the open-source community to reverse-engineer the ISA and write kernel code that optimally utilizes it. There's no shortcut here. Until then, it's not worth buying a Mac just to run Linux on it.

izacus4• 6 years ago

What specific instructions? I've been told by Apple fans on this site before release that Apple doesn't use non-standard instructions in their ISA and doesn't need special compiler treatment?

Who's right now?

glitchc3• 6 years ago

See my response above.

Plus, what do Apple fanboys know about hardware?

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

Both are correct. Apple uses non-standard instructions themselves, but for third-party developers the standard ARM ISA is provided for use.

alexhutcheson2• 6 years ago

What instructions from an extended ISA are you referring to? The only ones I've seen written up have been:

1. Instructions to change the memory ordering mode, which allows Rosetta2 to skip some expensive memory fences when translating x86 binaries to ARM.

2. Some instructions for matrix math.

I wouldn't expect either of these to affect typical usage or battery life much, unless your workflow involves running things that do a ton of matrix math.

my1235• 6 years ago

And the former isn't even an instruction, set a single bit in ACTLR_EL1 and off you go.

The second is an extension that talks to a coprocessor that's quite application specific. And that has an unstable ISA that changes every year. Probably not the biggest priority for anyone.

glitchc3• 6 years ago

Wow, I guess Torvalds himself must be wrong then:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/__trashed-6/

saagarjha20• 6 years ago

I think you're misunderstanding Apple's custom instructions and how useful they are.

mastrsushi• 6 years ago

I understand someone always has to do this when something new comes out, but God what a waste.

Linux Running on Apple M1

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