Linux on Apple Silicon with Alyssa Rosenzweig [audio]

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2024/10/15/linux-apple-silicon-alyssa-rosenzweig/

by tosh • 2 years ago

280 226 2 years ago

AI_beffr• 2 years ago

its insane to me that people are working so hard on reverse engineering apple silicon. like, the diagrams are right there in cupertino. it just seems like such a waste. its like during some kind of economic depression there are people starving and struggling while a bunch of food and resources are just sitting around not being used. existential grid-lock.

asdasdsddd• 2 years ago

whats the point of reverse engineering this again?

umanwizard• 2 years ago

To run Linux on MBPs

fragmede• 2 years ago

Some people really like the hardware but can't stand the software, and have the skills to do something about it.

risho• 2 years ago

if you want an arm laptop with incredible specs, incredible build quality, incredible battery life and incredible performance that runs linux what other option is there?

Teever• 2 years ago

It is an inspirational demonstration of the hacker spirit and a way for the individuals involved to both expand their technical abilities and demonstrate them to prospective employers.

I personally consider it very inspirational though I recognize that I will probably never be able to undertake such a difficult task. I can imagine that it is very inspirational to the next generation of extremely proficient and dedicated teens who want to master software development and explore leading edge hardware.

linguae2• 2 years ago

1. Even if one loves macOS, Apple doesn't support its hardware forever. Being able to run an alternative operating system on unsupported hardware helps extends that device's useful life. My 2013 Mac Pro is now unsupported, but I could install Linux on it and thus run up-to-date software.

2. Some people want to use Apple's impressive ARM hardware, but their needs require an alternative operating system.

baq• 2 years ago

macOS sucks. It does a disservice to the greatest laptop hardware package ever made.

dougall• 2 years ago

It's fun :)

runjake2• 2 years ago

I think it only fuels the possibility that Apple would open up the architecture documentation where it otherwise wouldn't if you didn't have people diligently reverse engineering it.

Something similar to this happened in the early days of the iPhone, with the iPhone Dev Team. Initially, iPhone "apps" were going to be web pages, but then these reverse engineers came along and developed their own toolchain. Apple realized they had to take action and their "webpages as an app" strategy wasn't going to work.

hu35• 2 years ago

That's a rather incomplete, revisionist and rose tinted glasses view of the history of native vs web apps in iPhone.

A much more plausible theory is that Apple likes their 30% app store commission from big players.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/developers-generated-...

"App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022"

People forget the only thing fueling big corps is profit.

qubitly• 2 years ago

Exactly! It’s like, Apple never budges—until someone reverse engineers it. Maybe Asahi can finally give them a nudge

sschueller2• 2 years ago

Apple would close down their macos just like iOS if they could get away with it so they can get their 30 percent on apps installed .

However since their moat is now filling with European soil this is not something they will attempt at this point IMO.

talldayo3• 2 years ago

A recurring theme you'll encounter across most of Apple's products is that any feature that forces first-party Apple software to compete on fair terms with other products is conspicuously missing.

hu35• 2 years ago

Specially because Apple seems to not care much about the project even after current progress.

m3 support still not there (let alone m4) because things broke. Which is expected from Apple, they are just doing their thing and improving their products.

If they cared they would have at least hired these people by now. It wouldn't make a dent in their budget.

Twisell• 2 years ago

M3 and M4 is not there because the Asahi Teams have a roadmap and stick to it.

They don't want to leave M1/M2 half botched before moving on to the next gen that will ultimately support more features.

If you are not happy with the pace go on and contribute, but don't invent false issues.

almostgotcaught• 2 years ago

You think that's bad? Imagine how much churn there is because NVIDIA doesn't have open source drivers. I'll actually do you one better: part of my PhD was working around issues in Vivado. If it were open source I could've just patched it and moved on to real "science" but that's not the world we live in. And I'm by far not the only "scientist" doing this kind of "research".

moffkalast2• 2 years ago

If people wonder why some of us don't like Apple, this is the fundamental philosophy why. It's not about the M series, it's been their modus operandi since time immemorial. It's like if Microsoft owned x86 and nobody could run anything on it but Windows. And people would like it because it's a "cohesive ecosystem" or whatever.

rched2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure that's really the same thing. Apple doesn't own ARM and the main issue here seems to be the GPU no? Is this much different from how things work with Nvidia? I guess the difference is that Nvidia provides drivers for Linux while Apple does not. As far as I know Nvidia Linux drivers aren't open source either though.

robbiewxyz2• 2 years ago

This definitely sucks. I feel similarly about e.g. the jailbreaking community: I appreciate the work they do and at the same time I very much wish it wasn't necessary.

If Apple and other companies like them were a little less greedy we could have far more nice things for free and Alyssa and other brilliant engineers could go work on other great projects. Also if regulators were a little more vigilant and a little less corrupt.

Someday.

WD-428• 2 years ago

To me what makes it suck even more is the fact that Apple has no qualms exploiting FOSS themselves. BSD, WebKit, their new “game porting toolkit”. And look what they provide in return. It’s so gross.

cheesycod• 2 years ago

For many people, the Apple Silicon GPU is an interesting problem to solve given that the firmware is loaded by the bootloader and all and its actually generally easier to interact with than say NVIDIA while having decent perf. Also GPUs in general are really complex beasts involving IP from tons of companies in general. Would not be surprised if even Apple doesn't have the full schematics...

vlovich1232• 2 years ago

and its actually generally easier to interact with than say NVIDIA while having decent perf

I’m pretty sure that Turing and newer work the same way. The drivers basically do nothing but load the firmware & do some basic memory management if I recall correctly.

FooBarBizBazz• 2 years ago

I get what you mean. I'm glad that they're doing this; it's great that the best laptop hardware is going to run Linux before long; it's a fun endeavor -- but when you zoom way out and take the philosophical view, yeah, it seems silly that it should be necessary, in the same that way it feels absurd that impressive and courageous feats in battle should have actually needed to happen.

tonymet• 2 years ago

blame the lawyers. any effort to share specs would be an implicit license.

robbiewxyz2• 2 years ago

I'm not familiar with this. Suppose Apple released docs under an "as is" type disclaimer like is so common in the open source community: would doing so potentially come back to bite them?

kaba08• 2 years ago

Is it really a far comparison? Apple has a proper bootloader capable of secure booting 3rd party OSs. What part of the open-source ecosystem was built differently?

It just so happened that after possibly even more painstaking reverse engineering, the responsible hardware vendor later realized that server machines are de facto linux, and they better support it properly. Like, that Intel chip working that good was not achieved differently, we just like to wear rose-tinted glasses.

WD-428• 2 years ago

Honestly I can only imagine it's because the team enjoys the challenge. Once they get bored/fed up, goodbye Linux on Macs.

If you think you want to run Linux, don't buy hardware from a company that views it as a threat to their business model, simple as that.

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

You're just stating the problem the parent content was upset about. It's all well and good to state the facts and say "face reality" but in this case we all apparently know that it's a fragile state of affairs.

kaba08• 2 years ago

If you think you want to run Linux, don't buy hardware from a company that views it as a threat to their business model, simple as that.

Show me any hardware that is 100% "libre"? Even the pinephone itself has plenty of closed source blobs running as firmware.

ryukoposting3• 2 years ago

My wife's 2017 MBP has gotten so dog-slow since Apple dropped support for it that it can't handle more than 3 Chrome tabs at a time now. The reality of Apple products is that the manufacturer sees them as eminently disposable. As early ARM macbooks age, the ability to run something, anything that isn't MacOS will be an asset. Otherwise, they're all landfill fodder.

bschwindHN3• 2 years ago

My 2014 MBP is still going strong and can handle more than 3 browser tabs, not sure what's up with your wife's machine but that doesn't sound normal.

You can also trade it back in to get recycled, no one should be straight up throwing computer hardware in the trash.

jcul• 2 years ago

I have an old google nexus 7 tablet that I recently installed uboot and postmarketos on. I can ssh to it, run X apps over ssh, print directly from it. It's pretty cool.

I also have a really old iPad 2. It works perfectly HW wise, screen, wifi etc. But is effectively a paper weight due to software.

I am logged into it from my old Apple account, that was only ever used for this tablet. I have the username and password but cannot log in as I don't know the security questions, so I can't reset the device or try to install apps. I even phoned apple but they said there's nothing they can do.

It pains me to just dump a perfectly good piece of hardware.

_lvbh• 2 years ago

Seriously, Macs would be so much more attractive if Apple just straight up supported Linux

tim--• 2 years ago

In a roundabout way, Apple tried this in the x86 era with OpenDarwin, and there was no interest for an Apple led open source operating system.

Apple does not have a reason to support any other operating system.

Apple engineers do however both officially and unofficially support Asahi, so there's that.

robgibbons• 2 years ago

I have to agree with this take, as much as I appreciate the indelible hacker spirit of jailbreaking closed hardware and making it available to freedom loving individuals... A huge, vocal part of me also feels like the entire effort is truly just empowering Apple to sell more closed down hardware and even the freedom loving nerds will buy it because it's sexy.

There's no getting around the sexiness of Apple hardware. But there's also no getting around how closed it is. You implicitly support Apple's business model when you buy their hardware, regardless of whether you run Asahi or Mac OS.

esjeon• 2 years ago

Yeah, I agree. I do respect the effort itself, but it always feels like a huge waste of talent. Imagine what could have been created with all that time and energy.

I believe the best solution to proprietary hardware is not to buy them in the first place. Buy from vendors who are more open/supportive, like Framework and Thinkpad. This helps those vendors keep supporting open source.

imiric10• 2 years ago

Godspeed to the Asahi team, but as much as I envy the performance and efficiency of Apple silicon, I could never depend on a small group of hackers to reverse engineer every part of a closed system and to maintain it in perpetuity so that I can run free software on it. As brilliant as this team is, and as much progress as they've made, fighting against a trillion-dollar corporation that can decide to shut it down at any moment is a sisyphean endeavor. Spending thousands of dollars on that bet is a hard sell, even for tech nerds.

Not to mention that you'd be supporting a corporation that has this hostile stance towards their customers to begin with.

Meanwhile, other x86 and ARM manufacturers are making substantial improvements that are shortening Apple's lead. You're not losing much by buying a new CPU from them in 2024 or 2025, but you gain much more in return. Most importantly, the freedom to run any software you choose.

Wowfunhappy• 2 years ago

Aren't tons of Linux drivers for x86 laptops based entirely on reverse engineering? Maybe even most of them? I haven't used Linux seriously in almost two decades, but that's my memory.

zeusk2• 2 years ago

Most of the x86 platform (ACPI) is well defined and openly accessible (not free but open).

There’s still some offenders (Surface, HP, Broadcom) that introduce quirks that break sleep and some HID accessories but most of it works out of the box.

ARM has been the Wild West for a while but they’re going in the right direction with device trees et al. Apple however doesn’t have to care about the “wider” ecosystem since they left x86 for their own silicon and tighter integration from bottom up allows for some really nice end user experience.

I still think it’s much better to use the VM infrastructure and just run Linux as a guest. Mac as a platform is very end user friendly as-is unlike Windows.

imiric10• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if "tons" is accurate, but some of them are, yes. And most of them are not great IME. Not discrediting the talented programmers who work on them, it's just the nature of supporting hardware in the dark, without any support from the manufacturer. Though this was more common during the early days of Linux, and nowadays many manufacturers offer some kind of support.

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

We are well beyond the days of NDISWrapper, most of the kernel contributions come from hardware manufacturers or integrators

renewiltord• 2 years ago

OpenChrome far exceeded Unichrome Windows drivers in performance. But things have changed. Modern engineers prefer “official” software. I understand why. Systems are more complex now.

binkHN• 2 years ago

You've been out of the game for too long; almost every major hardware vendor has at least one or two people that are regularly submitting patches to the Linux kernel. My ThinkPad work computer running Linux is a major thing of joy; in many ways it performs more reliably on Linux than it does on Windows.

wslh4• 2 years ago

I am genuinely looking forward to a Dell XPS 13 or Lenovo X1 Carbon which is fanless and have the battery duration and performance of the Apple Macbook Air.

andrewmutz• 2 years ago

Is the Linux support not there yet? How close is it?

somat• 2 years ago

What is the difference in battery life between linux on and macos on the Apple M1?

That is, I would be surprised if linux on the M1 had close to macos levels of battery life. My theory being the better battery life on the M1 is more due to the tight integration between the OS and the hardware power profiles than the power profiles themself.

vlovich1232• 2 years ago

As brilliant as this team is, and as much progress as they've made, fighting against a trillion-dollar corporation that can decide to shut it down at any moment is a sisyphean endeavor

Apple historically cares very little about Linux on Mac whereas it seems like you’re talking about the non-Mac product lines. Indeed, they go out of their way, if I recall correctly, to make it possible and easier in the first place.

sys_64738• 2 years ago

Apple does new hardware bring up using the Linux kernel.

imiric10• 2 years ago

I wouldn't describe leaving the bootloader unlocked as "going out of their way" to make all of this possible. Clearly, if just booting another kernel would be sufficient, running Linux on their machines should be easy. Yet none of this is. "Going out of their way" would at the very least be providing documentation and support so that reverse engineering their hardware wouldn't be necessary.

Also, what's not to say that they will decide to lock the bootloader just as they do on all their other devices? What does Apple practically gain by leaving it unlocked? If they're doing it as a gesture of good faith to their users, they're doing an awful job at it. Doing it so they can sell a negligible amount of machines to a niche group of hackers also doesn't make business sense.

Depending on the good will of a corporation that historically hasn't shown much of it to the hacker community is not a great idea.

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

I’m with you in spirit, but most of the work has already been done. Purchased hardware won’t change. Firmware updates could be held if needed as well. Another team could take a crack at it.

Worse case you restore macos and possibly sell at a medium loss. That said I’m still waiting.

jasoneckert2• 2 years ago

While I don't feel I have enough information to comment about the likelihood that Apple would try to stop the Asahi project, those who are knowledgable are of the opinion that they would not.

However, as a Mac Studio M1 owner that has used Asahi as a daily driver for software development since the first release (originally Arch, later Fedora), I can confidently say that I could care less. By running the software I want to run far faster than macOS could on the same hardware, Asahi has saved me countless hours and made me far more productive. And I'm incredibly grateful for this tangible benefit, regardless of what happens in the future.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

They won't stop Asahi with a frontal assault, they'll stop it by churning out new chips every year until the work to support them all is unsustainable.

7e• 2 years ago

You claim that your apps are faster on Linux on an M1 than macOS on the M1; can you add more detail? Which apps, and did you run benchmarks? I find it hard to believe that Apple hasn't optimized apps to be faster on their own OS and hardware.

skybrian3• 2 years ago

Don't let worries about future hardware get in the way of using gear that works in the present. If future Macs aren't supported for some reason, that doesn't break your current hardware, and you can buy different hardware next time.

There are people running Linux on abandoned hardware from companies that went out of business, and that's okay.

amelius2• 2 years ago

No, because from your perspective you are supporting the wrong company. Competition is good for consumers, especially if you're a minority group.

pmarreck4• 2 years ago

other x86 and ARM manufacturers are making substantial improvements that are shortening Apple's lead

x86 has fundamental issues that I believe prevent it from ever achieving the MIPS per watt efficiency of anything from ARM. I mean... the newest M4 laptop will have a 24 hour battery life. That exceeds anything remotely possible in the same laptop form factor but with x86 by nearly an order of magnitude.

So now you're talking just ARM. Linux has been compilable on ARM for a while now, so where are the competing ARM laptops that are anywhere close to the power of Apple's version of ARM?

I do get what you're saying though (I'm definitely a Linux fan and have a Linux Framework laptop), but I wish it wasn't an x86 laptop because its battery life is crap (and that is sometimes important).

talldayo3• 2 years ago

so where are the competing ARM laptops that are anywhere close to the power of Apple's version of ARM?

Better question: where are the incentives for them to make it? Apple is pretty much the only company with an outstanding architectural license to design ARM cores, and the best off-the-shelf ARM core designs don't even compete with 5-year-old x86 ones. If you're a company that has Apple-level capital and Apple-tier core design chops, you might as well embrace RISC-V and save yourself the ARM licensing fee. That's what Nvidia does for many of their GPU SOCs.

If SoftBank offered ARM licenses under more attractive terms, there would be genuine competition for good ARM CPUs. Given that Apple has a controlling stake in SoftBank, I wouldn't hold out faith.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Apparently Qualcomm's new ARM laptops are pretty close.

However I think ARM platforms tend to be way less open source friendly than x86, at least on mobile. Maybe the laptops are better because they have to run Windows and Microsoft probably wouldn't put up with the shit vendors pull on Android. I don't know.

imiric10• 2 years ago

the newest M4 laptop will have a 24 hour battery life. That exceeds anything remotely possible in the same laptop form factor but with x86 by nearly an order of magnitude.

Honestly, why is this such an appealing feature? Are you often away from an outlet for 20+ hours?

I use 6+ year old laptops that last 4 hours at most on a single charge, even after a battery replacement. Plugging them in every few hours is not a big inconvenience for me. If I'm traveling, I can usually find an outlet anywhere. It's not like I'm working in remote places where this could even be an issue.

Then there's the concern about fan noise and the appeal of completely silent computers. Sure, it's a bit annoying when the fan ramps up, but again, this is not something that makes my computers unbearable to use.

And finally, the performance gap is closing. Qualcomm's, AMD's and Intel's latest chips might not be "M4 killers" (or M3, for that matter), but they're certainly competitive. This will only keep improving in 2025.

hybrid_study• 2 years ago

Sadly, this is the exact reason why I hold back trying Asahi and run the chance of liking any of it :-(

Recently saw someone wondering why no one has tried building a laptop with as much quality as an Apple? A special version of Linux to run on such a laptop would offer more long-term commitment and maybe pull in more adoption.

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

Not to mention that you'd be supporting a corporation that has this hostile stance towards their customers to begin with.

Is the "this" in that sentence your previous paragraph of concern that Apple will purposefully break AsahiLinux?

arnaudsm3• 2 years ago

Indeed, the Apple Silicon hype stemmed from the terrible Intel gen at the time (unlike AMD), and because Apple monopolized the TSMC N5 node for months.

Most of that lead is gone, x86 is cheaper, open, and as battery friendly now.

Philpax4• 2 years ago

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016931, it looks like M4 is very much still in the lead.

It's also not just the CPU: the laptops themselves are simply phenomenal. I have never had a x86 laptop that's this much of a genuine pleasure to use (ignoring macOS, which is my least-favourite operating system). Some of the newer Windows laptops are ahead, but they're still worse in at least one metric.

jorvi• 2 years ago

You're not losing much by buying a new CPU from them in 2024 or 2025, but you gain much more in return

That's just false. Performance-per-watt, AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm still get smoked by comparable M-series chips.

On desktops the equation is different because CPUs and GPUs can go ham with the wattage.

racked• 2 years ago

Exactly this. All that work, for reverse-engineering a handful of laptops made by a company whose only desire is to lock its users into its ecosystem and ergonomics. Even more demotivating is that the M1 and the M2 are already superseded.

Similarly, I completely do not understand the popularity of Apple's laptops in this community. Endemic mindless fanboyism.

jsheard2• 2 years ago

I haven't listened to this podcast yet so I don't know if this comes up, but a particularly scary part of running a custom OS on Apple Silicon machines is that the internal speakers temperature is regulated in software. The Asahi devs have had to painstakingly reverse engineer and reimplement the safety DSP that macOS uses on each device, and add some safety margin, because if they get it wrong they could literally destroy the speakers (and IIRC at least one of their own MacBooks did have its speakers sacrificed along the way).

I wonder if there will be a similar issue with the displays when Asahi gets around to supporting HDR on machines equipped with FALD mini-LED backlights (or XDR, as Apple calls it). HDR displays usually regulate their brightness to keep the panel from getting too hot, and if Apple does that in software too then Asahi will need to replicate it.

Arch-TK2• 2 years ago

The control loop is handled by the OS? What if the (relatively complex and therefore much more likely to crash) OS crashes? Why would there not at least be some kind of basic thermal throttling implemented in hardware as a fallback? Oh wait, it's Apple, never mind.

userbinator7• 2 years ago

In the late 2000s I remember hearing of PC laptops which if left in the BIOS setup would overheat and shut down due to the fan control being exclusively done by OS drivers, so this sort of "planned fragility" isn't exclusive to Apple.

kccqzy3• 2 years ago

It's managed by the Linux kernel communicating with a user space daemon (speakersafetyd). If the user land crashes or if the user space daemon is too slow the kernel can still fall back to a ridiculously low limit that will not damage the speakers for any audio. If the kernel crashes, well you get no audio in that case. IIRC the reason they couldn't do it completely in the kernel was because the temperature model uses floating point which is not allowed in the kernel.

userbinator7• 2 years ago

The fact that speaker temperature even needs to be considered is something that boggles the mind. I can't find any other references elsewhere on the Internet. Are you sure it's not DC blocking that they've cheaped out on somehow? It somewhat reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7205759

jsheard2• 2 years ago

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/speakersafetyd#some-background...

They do it because it lets them drive the speakers much louder than they could do safely with a simple power limiter. Apparently there are amplifier chips which can do that smart regulation internally but Apple decided to do it in software for whatever reason. Maybe they can squeeze out more sound quality with a more complex DSP that way, I doubt it's cost-cutting given their margins.

neya• 2 years ago

As someone who builds speakers commercially, there aren't any devices that will actually monitor a speaker's temperature. I think what you mean is perhaps, wattage? The speaker's temperature arises from the coil, which is what moves to produce sound. In large speakers, I've seen manufacturers attach some sort of sensors pointing at the moving coil to produce an estimate, but for the speakers used in the Macbooks, they are so thin that this would be a near impossible feat. Maybe Apple uses an estimation from the DSP based on the watts supplied vs time. But, certainly, you cannot attach any sort of device to the coil without making it distort or non-functional.

I know that Apple like to supply the speakers with slightly more power (Watts) than they can deal with to get them loud, but I haven't seen nor heard of this temperature monitoring so far. I couldn't find anything related to it either. Please share citations, if you have.

mcpherrinm• 2 years ago

The temperature is modelled based on how much power is put through it. Power, not temperature is measured.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/speakersafetyd has a readme and the code

rmu09• 2 years ago

I don't know what apple is doing, but in theory, it should be possible to measure ohmic resistance of the coil, and infer temperature via PTC coefficient of coil material. The effect isn't very big at temperature differences you could tolerate in a loudspeaker coil though (~0,5%/K).

BoingBoomTschak• 2 years ago

You're probably right. I looked at Neumann ("Independent soft clip, peak and thermo limiters for woofer and tweeter; Woofer excursion limiter; thermo limiter for the electronics and amplifiers") and Genelec (https://www.genelec.com/key-technologies/protection-circuitr...) for info - as they're the reference in the monitoring world - and my guess is that it's implemented like Apple, via some simulation function from time-integrated wattage and frequency to bool (limit on/off).

Apple isn't the first to use advanced limiters to get the most of loudspeakers, if I remember well, this trick is what allowed Devialet to make the Phantom what it is.

Which is why loudspeaker measurements should _always_ include something like this: http://0x0.st/XG1y.png

throwaway9843932• 2 years ago

What they've been able to accomplish in such a short time is nothing short of amazing, and I applaud them for their efforts.

That said, I've been using Asahi for a month, and I'm ditching it. Maybe in a year or two it'll be stable, but for now it's got too many bugs and unsupported features. A lot of the problems come down to Wayland and KDE/Gnome, as you literally have to use Wayland. But there's plenty of other buggy or challenging parts that all add up to a very difficult working experience.

One of the biggest challenges I see is support for hardware and 3rd party apps. Not only do all the apps need to support this slightly odd Arm system, but so do hardware driver developers. I never realized before just how much of a Linux system works because most people had an incredibly common platform (x86_64). Even if Linux on Mac became incredibly popular, it would actually take away development focus on x86_64, and we'd see less getting done.

(This kind of problem is totally common among Linux laptops, btw; there's a ton of hardware out there and Linux bugs may exist in each one. Adding a new model doesn't add to the number of developers supporting them all. If anything, the Mac is probably benefited by the fact that it has so few models compared to the x86_64 world. But it's still only got so many devs, and 3rd party devs aren't all going to join the party overnight)

imiric10• 2 years ago

I don't get why you were downvoted to oblivion. A perspective from someone who actually used Asahi is very valuable, so thanks for sharing.

You're definitely right that having a usable system is not just about supporting first-party hardware. Linux on its own is a huge mess of different components that all somehow need to work together, and it's a miracle of engineering that it works as well as it does, even on well-supported hardware. I can't imagine how difficult it must be getting all of this to work on hardware that requires reverse engineering. It seems practically impossible to me.

kccqzy3• 2 years ago

On HN downvotes are usually because of disagreement. OP's experience doesn't match mine: I have used Asahi for quite a bit longer than OP and I have experienced no serious bugs.

But then again I only use those software that's available in the distribution or those that can be compiled by me. So naturally I don't deal with incompatible third party software.

Philpax4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I can definitely see this being an issue going forward for quite some time. The existence of non-Apple ARM devices should hopefully lead to general interest in addressing these issues, but there's so much hardware and software out there, and only so many devs with the time, interest and access to fix them.

On the other hand, I suspect people will start making choices for their hardware/software that maximise compatibility, as they already do for Linux x86. ("Don't buy NVIDIA if you want functioning Wayland", etc.) It'll be tough, but things will hopefully get better over time.

timeon• 2 years ago

'Non-Apple ARM' is still a bit like second class citizen, at least on Arch. But at least there is option to compile things by yourself.

unit149• 2 years ago

Reverse engineering the first bit of Apple's flagship M1 CPU, which was implemented in the original iPhone released back in '08, through an ARM-based architectural analysis, and integrating it into Linux kernel system calls is an extreme measure. This reduplication of the original dump, checking its hex value, then altering it to see if the application is functional. Doing x,y, and z, then seeing if it works inside VM hypervisor-space.

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2024...

chubs• 2 years ago

What would be possible if everyone interested in Linux-on-macOS chipped in $5 each month? I wonder if this could fund a big enough team to make this super-polished.

ajdude• 2 years ago

I definitely respect them for everything they're doing, and I really want to like this project, but my very first exposure to this project was when someone linked to it on HN, I clicked the link, and the website told me that since it detected that I was from HN I am not welcomed and it refused to show me the article... it just left a really weird taste in my mouth.

I don't know if they still do that but that's the first thing I think of every time I see Asahi mentioned or I think about giving it a try.

bschwindHN3• 2 years ago

Just based on the quality of the comments that comes from HN towards the Asahi project, I don't blame them for doing that.

dymk• 2 years ago

Honestly, I'd want to donate to them more for that

sliken• 2 years ago

That was the result of an previous thread on asahi. It was the only time I've been embarrassed by the HN community and it's treatment of people contributing to open source.

grahamj• 2 years ago

For those who didn't get my joke, she commonly dresses up as a witch at XDC :)

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/995383/34dc5950cab5e739/

SG-2• 2 years ago

the negative comments in this thread are frankly disappointing especially for a place called "hacker news". like Linux doesn't have roots in reverse engineering and continued reverse engineering and people here constantly "advocating" for open source drivers from likes of Nvidia instead of the close source binary blobs.

yet here someone makes great effort and most comments are negative Nancy's asking why it's being done or bringing up support issues with newer hardware revisions from a 1-3 person outfit that everyone said would be impossible to do.

ddingus• 2 years ago

This effort is fantastic! I just ignore the drama and appreciate being able to learn something about the intense Apple environment.

thefabsta• 2 years ago

Does anyone have experience running Asahi on a home server? Does the silicon’s power efficiency when running macOS translate to Asahi? I’d also be really curious to hear if there are any gotchas and/or reliability issues. For example, features such as hardware video decoding do not seem to be supported (yet).

Linux on Apple Silicon with Alyssa Rosenzweig [audio]

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