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Comment by sidkshatriya | Hacker News Reader

This is a great project. Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks?

It is not possible to simply reverse engineer everything nowadays -- it could take years to build a polished system and in the meanwhile there will always be new hardware from Apple. It's a never ending game of "catch up".

Are there some scenarios where Apple might want to allow "proper" Linux on Mx to happen ? The fact that Apple has not totally locked down these machines is tremendously heartening. Could it be in Apple's interest to somehow help the Asahi guys move faster -- release hardware specifications in the open etc.?

I think that if Apple hardware releases Mx hardware specs, a high quality linux implementation can then take shape on the Mx. This will create some competition with the Apple software folks. People will benchmarks software running on Mx Linux vs Mx MacOS. This could create some healthy competition.

Just like the arrival of llvm helped gcc improve its game, a well functioning software stack on Mx Linux can create some healthy competition for the Apple software team. Their software is quite decent already -- it can achieve greater heights with some competition !

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Just to add, Apple has helped a little bit in the form of adding a raw image boot mode that wouldn't be useful internally but helps Asahi 's boot process not break in the future.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994

Apple also helped by not copying the iOS Boot mechanism to macOS, which they could have. This entire "Permissive Security" mode allowing for installation without jailbreaking took extra work to make and was not necessary otherwise.

They probably want to entice arm windows and chromeos support longer term

Reading between the lines, Apple wanted Windows support at release, but Microsoft signed an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm for windows on ARM so they weren't able to make that happen even if they wanted to.

Is that ever set to expire?

Yes, quite soon (this year? next year?) IIRC

It's fair to speculate that Microsoft likely has Windows already running on M1 machines somewhere deep within their labs. Even if it's just some engineers doing it "in their free time"

Wonder what Qualcomm had to do to get that agreement though. All signs seem to point to Qualcomm being absolutely poisonous to work with and their ARM offerings being uncompetitive with Apple's now

> it could take years to build a polished system

That's the reality of Linux support on pretty much any hardware - it can easily take years to really shape up and become polished. The Apple M1/M2 if anything are making surprisingly fast progress.

It's not comparable. I can buy brand new Intel/AMD hardware and Linux generally boots out of the box with mostly everything working except some quirks that have a good chance to be fixed within a few months.

Whereas Asahi still sports a rudimentary GPU driver written in Python... Current guesstimate to achieve hardware acceleration is... years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327

Your link just goes back to this HN comment section.

Thanks. I mean't to link this comment in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327

Thank you for show casing the true reality of the GPU progress and that there is still no H/W acceleration yet which is more straight to the point and accurately concise than most of the Linux fans vaguely screaming 'iT w0RkS'. I don't care about that.

If there is no H/W acceleration, then it is not useful as a daily driver at all.

We wait until there is proper support of H/W acceleration before using such a system. Otherwise all your memory eating programs or graphical intensive apps will run the computer to the ground.

Any hardware?

You can basically take any PC with brand new components and have high confidence that it'll work perfectly with Linux.

Desktop yes, laptops not so much.

Laptops are made of commodity parts these days. Very few have anything that Linux doesn't support.

I get that, but there are differences. There's a huge number of problems that pop up on linux laptops. Things like special functions of keys not working (volume, LCD brightness, mute, switch to external video, etc). Then things like gestures on track pads. Waking up from sleep mode. Switching from iGPU to dGPUs. Not to mention various things like Lenovo disabling linux signed bootloaders, lying about PCI-ids so they can advertise some windows specific software RAID driver.

So sure the popular GPU chipsets, ethernet, wifi, etc have drivers. But the integration doesn't necessarily work, doubly so after sleep mode. There's a cottage industry of selling "good" wifi cards for laptops (like Lenovo) that work well with Linux to replace the "bad" wifi cards that don't work well with Linux. Other problems include controlling clock speeds of GPUs, memory chips, fan speeds, etc.

So sure there are some laptops that are known to work well, of if in particularly lucky your vendor (like System76 or Dell) supports linux. But often the "linux" flavor of the laptop has different hardware then the windows flavor, particularly because the drivers for some chips don't work well.

Most of the folks I know that used to run linux on laptops have given up, they don't want to tinker with PCI-id maps, disabling features to get idle/sleep modes working, etc. They just buy an apple laptop and everything works.

It is not healthy competition only for the Apple software team ... it is competition for every hardware manufacturer. Vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters, and Apple provides premium hardware which is also usable by Linux systems. Before Apple Silicon days, the primary motivation to buy Apple devices was the software side, but now the hardware has gone to the next level, and buying for the hardware alone is tempting.

> Vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters, and Apple provides premium hardware which is also usable by Linux systems.

Apple is practically the worst computer vendor when it comes to "decent Linux support"; even nvidia is better, at least they have proprietary drivers.

It's quite a stretch to say that "vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters"; rather, the conclusion here would be that vendors should drop their game altogether since no one cares. People, even Linux users and developers apparently, buy the hardware anyway even if the vendor just totally ignores Linux (at best).

I would find it quite telling if we go back to that era where all I see are MacBooks at the Linux kernel developers conferences, specially when the other manufacturers are now most definitely not ignoring Linux. Fortunately, that is not the case, so far.

I was applying more into the future than the current situation, in case Apple would start giving better support.

Currently yes, Apple is the worst vendor.

> rather, the conclusion here would be that vendors should drop their game altogether since no one cares. People, even Linux users and developers apparently, buy the hardware anyway even if the vendor just totally ignores Linux (at best).

That's exactly the idea I was chasing - if Apple would care, then other vendors should care as well. But currently, Linux users are still in minority and it does not matter that much yet.

> This is a great project. Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks?

> It is not possible to simply reverse engineer everything nowadays -- it could take years to build a polished system and in the meanwhile there will always be new hardware from Apple. It's a never ending game of "catch up".

I would think it's very much in their favor to help. If it takes years to build a polished release, a lot of people will value years old apple hardware over whatever more recently released. Cut that down to months and they just added a new (albeit smaller) segment chomping at the bit for their latest hardware.

> Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks?

Apple doesn't have a history of helping anyone but themselves and if you read the article it looks like they're not thinking at all about helping alternative OSes by using proprietary interfaces and overly complicated hardware/firmware designs and breaking things with macOS updates.

It is a truly herculian task to get Linux merely booting up and usable on Apple M* SoCs - kudos to the Asahi Linux team for all the heroic efforts - personally it feels like it's a great reverse engineering project and they should continue fighting it but Linux on M1/2 is not going to be a daily driver like Linux on standard x64 machines is.

Thankfully Intel and AMD are doing pretty good in performance department with their latest chips and it's only going to get better.

> they're doing everything they can to hinder others by using overly complicated hardware and firmware designs and breaking things with macOS updates

This is such a shallow take. Your animosity toward Apple has blinkered you.

There is zero possibility that anyone at Apple is spending any time working to make hardware designs "overly complicated" for the purpose of hindering efforts like Asahi Linux.

Lol on animosity - now a days merely stating facts implies animosity. Also, another way to think about it is that there's zero possibility that anyone at Apple is spending any time working to make hardware designs that are friendly to alternative OSes. Those are both effectively the same things.

Also since you might have take this personally - I wanted to clarify that my comment mostly is a reflection of wasted potential for the M* hardware - making it friendly to alt OSes would vastly improve the hardware's utility without hurting Apple. (If you are to believe most HNers they are a H/W company that is not interested in selling your personal data - so it should be in their financial interest if alt OSes sell more of their hardware.)

> Those are both effectively the same things.

They are not even close to the same thing.

And if you were more familiar with the Asahi Linux project, you might remember that Apple has done a thing or two that made their work possible/future-proof.

They are the same thing. Unless Apple commits to documenting the hardware, designing with backwards compat(lol not gonna happen - but an example), or starts committing code to Asahi Linux - rest of it is all wishy washy - a variation of no guarantees anything will work or continue to work, you are on your own. It doesn't really matter otherwise if they are or are not spending time actively breaking things - as the article shows the net effect is the same.

They are not at all the same thing.

Absence of beneficence is not evidence of malevolence.

Apple is busy making their custom OS work on their custom chips. They will change either or both, as needed, to serve their needs.

It's no minor thing to ask Apple to limit their own flexibility for a tiny non-revenue-generating external project. Remember Apple does not sell Mx chips on the open market like Intel/AMD/some ARM mfrs. They do not publish hardware specs as a service to customers, because they have no customers.

> Absence of beneficence is not evidence of malevolence.

Except it absolutely is evidence of malevolence. It's not conclusive evidence (i.e., irrefutable proof), but almost nothing has conclusive evidence.

Yay semantics.

I did not make breakfast for you this morning. Is this evidence that I want you to starve?

> Is this evidence that I want you to starve?

It's not conclusive evidence (i.e., irrefutable proof), but almost nothing has conclusive evidence. ;)

This is ridiculous reasoning (which is also being trounced by quesera), and you should just take the L at this point.

Helping Asahi would tangentially benefit Apple (such as increasing mac sales... something that is reasonable to assume might happen a little bit, given how much more efficient the M chips are to Intel, and the fact that most Linux stuff already compiles just fine on it) while also possibly garnering some goodwill. It'd be great if they sold or licensed the chip to others so that it would have to be documented publicly, but we're not there yet.

The thing is, we're moving from CPUs that at least had their external behaviors and interfaces documented to CPUs which are _not_. Apple has already missed plenty of opportunities to generate goodwill or even minimal assurances of interoperability, and the argument that "at least it's not as locked down as the iPhone" (where this would be outright impossible instead of just ridiculously complicated) is hardly reassuring.

The CPU is documented; the documentation is written by ARM.

ANE is not, AMX is not, secure enclave is not... plus a lot of proprietary registers

ANE and SEP aren't the CPU, they're the SoC ;)

Apple explicitly does not make an ARM CPU, they make an "Apple Silicon CPU", and the fact it currently resembles ARM (and not fully) is an implementation detail.

What about the GPU portion?

That isn't the CPU.

No one is claiming mal anything - I was pointing out that the results are such that it doesn't really matter if it was done purposely or not. To get different results they would have to actively think and invest in support for alt OSes. So long as they don't do that it doesn't matter if they actively hinder or passively - you can't prove one way or the other anyways - all you can hope for is better results.

I quote you:

> doing everything they can to hinder others by using overly complicated hardware and firmware designs and breaking things

That's malevolence. And it's completely certifiably and demonstrably false.

You omitted "It looks like" before that sentence - for a person who is so bent on rigid meaning and precise wording omitting that part looks a little out of character :)

Again you cannot really prove this from where you and me sit - so it is implied that even without "it looks like" I meant their externally visible actions / results make it looks like they go out of their way to hinder - that can be a combination of thoughtless hardware design and resolve to not help anyone else. And none of those are necessarily "malevolence" (which is a word you used) - it's just business practices.

Apologies for improperly excerpting your quote, if that was the determinate clause!

...but it does not look like they do those things either.

You'd have to ignore all of the reasons it makes no sense for Apple to make decisions like that, in order to believe or even wonder about such a thing.

If you had said "I wish Apple would work with Asahi to make their distro a full-fledged citizen on Apple's desirable hardware." ... then I would have upvoted your comment and moved on.

Instead I saw you describing a hostile and active thwarting scenario, which is unfounded and nonsensical.

I won't even address your "thoughtless hardware design and resolve not to help anyone else", except to say that ... you're doing it again, and you're still wrong.

> There is zero possibility that anyone at Apple is spending any time [..] for the purpose of hindering efforts like Asahi Linux.

Ah, that argument. Apple is, like Microsoft, actively trying to get people to run Linux and applications _under_ their OS -- Microsoft is shipping an entire Linux emulator for graphical applications and Apple is going to ship an x86 Linux emulator in a future release too.

And then, both companies have a lot of incentive that you continue to run their operating system as your main OS -- they can show you ads that way, they can continue to sell your their subscriptions and services, their partners', etc.

Combine the two, and I no longer believe the argument that "they couldn't care less about people who run Linux".

Of course Apple wants macOS to be your preference. They sell hardware and services that depend on macOS.

Things Apple does to make macOS more useful or appealing are in service of that goal. Absolutely.

I have not heard, and cannot find, any rumors about Apple shipping a Linux emulator. Links?

Regardless, I would not argue that Apple doesn't care about Linux. I would argue that Apple does not overcomplicate their hardware engineering with the goal of preventing people from running Linux on their hardware. And that is what I said.

macOS drives hardware sales. Apple makes money on hardware sales. They will not compromise their ability to change hardware or software to support a tiny noncommercial project, of course!

But at the end of the day, thinking as commercially as I can: Apple would prefer that you buy a M1 Mac and run Asahi, than buy a Dell running Windows or Linux instead. They have no opportunity to sell you macOS services in either case, but if you buy the M1, they capture hardware sales revenue.

> I have not heard, and cannot find, any rumors about Apple shipping a Linux emulator. Links?

It was even on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31644990 , https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/macos-ventura-will-e...

> macOS drives hardware sales. Apple makes money on hardware sales.

Not as clear specially when the money they make from macOS hardware sales is actually less than what they make from services or iOS hardware sales.

The era when we had an open computing standards Apple that tried to interoperate with others is long gone. This is the era of the captive Apple who is trying to bind you into their ecosystem, and I won't believe the "0%" argument any more than I believe it for MS.

The extension of Rosetta2 to work in virtualization contexts is not the same as Apple shipping a Linux emulator / environment like WSL / WSL2.

Please note that I said a x86 Linux emulator, and it is exactly that. It is:

1. A Linux binary, 2. Which translates Linux/ELF code from x86 to ARM, 3. And translates Linux x86 syscalls to amd64 Linux, 4. With the explicit intention of allowing the user to run x86 Linux binaries under macOS.

If you want to be this level of nitpicking, then WSL is not a Linux emulator either; after all, they also require an existing Linux kernel to work, and may not even emulate anything whatsoever. But BOTH WSL2 and this emulator serve _exactly_ the serve purpose: to facilitate running of Linux binaries under a native host OS that is not Linux, thus my point.

> Thankfully Intel and AMD are doing pretty good in performance department with their latest chips and it's only going to get better.

I often wonder if AMD was able to use TSMC's cutting edge fabrication node how would their laptop chips compare with the M1. Apple uses TSMC's best node as I understand it.

I think the performance wise Intel 12th gen and Ryzen 6000 are already a little ahead. Power draw will be helped by moving to TSMCs latest node but general purpose x86 will always have some power disadvantage compared to specialized ARM hardware and software that Apple makes.

Yes, x86 will always have some power disadvantage because ARM's heritage is low power embedded devices (and RISC). x86 has other advantages like a very mature and optimized software stack with good compilers.

Apple also has the advantage of cramming every thing on a single piece of silicon while AMD has gone in for the chiplet approach. The single piece of silicon reduces yields but increases performance with a lower power draw. The chiplet approach followed by AMD is more modular, less risky and cost effective.

So if both AMD and Apple use the same TSMC node _and_ AMD went in for "cost is not an objective" and cram everything on a single piece of silicon _and_ add HBM (aka unified memory) it would be real interesting for the two to go "head to head".

I would definitely be interested in paying good dollar for such X86 client system !

I hope someone at AMD is listening !

It's all about tradeoffs isn't it. Can't have diverse, extensible, open ecosystem like x86 and get every ounce of performance and power efficiency - something's gotta give. But the good news is you can get pretty close with great Engineering and competition keeps that up. Maybe one of the many x86 vendors will build such a system - Lenovo and Microsoft are working with AMD on their new custom designed Thinkpad Z series lineup and I hear good things about it.

AMD does use the same node as the Apple now. But that will most likely change with the M2 pro or M3 at the latest.

Far as I know Ryzen 6000 chips use 6nm node - 7000 series will use the 5nm node and they are not out yet?

Ah yes. You are right! It does use 6nm.

Apple has had a lead on using TSMC's latest process. However the lead in iGPU performance and perf/watt is a fair bit larger than you'd expect from the process differences.

I'm still puzzled why during a long GPU shortage where supply was short and prices insane that nobody in the x86-64 world managed a > 128 bit wide memory interface to benefit of an iGPU. Apple desktops and laptops have options for 256, 512, and even 1024 bit (on the studio) wide memory systems.

Arm has some structural advantage in the decoding stage (instructions have the same length) and a huge lead in low power systems they got by heritage, not to mention less historical baggage (x86_64 cpus still have a 16 bit mode and a 80 bit fpu)

I think the lead the M1 has is bigger than what can be attributed to the different node.

Linux was booting within weeks. Hardly a herculian task. I'm really not sure where this idea comes from. Yes of course initial investment is pretty high because of the new architecture. But it's pretty clear they have proven they can do it. M2 was working with a few hours of coding. GPU prototype driver has over 90% compliance. Like when does this idea die?

God it gets tiring - Did I say booting Linux on M1 was a herculean task? I even used the words daily driver - making that a daily driver is definitely a herculean task - it is still not there - the GPU driver piece is pretty herculean by itself.

This is what you said: "It is a truly herculian task to get Linux merely booting up and usable on Apple M* SoCs". And you can use the M1 macs today and it's usable. Whether it's daily driveable is an entirely different, subjective, question. I could probably daily drive it just fine with some manageable pain points. That doesn't mean it's daily driveable for you or anyone else. But whether it's usable is really not in question at this point.

Hey, what about that usable part? Are we going to argue your usable is the same as everyone else's or even the same as Linux on x86 usability?

> Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks?

I would guess that the best way to incentivize them is to let them know—en masse—that a large number of people would want to buy new Apple Silicon-based Macs to run Asahi Linux on if it were in better shape.

It's very difficult to do more to help Asahi Linux. If they upstreamed things properly into Linux (which is arguably the most cost-effective way to support hardware on a broad scale), Mesa, QEMU and related projects, Asahi Linux as a separate project would turn obsolete fairly quickly.

They are upstreaming as much as they can

But Apple isn't, that's my point.

Ah, I didn't read it that way, too many pronouns.

I wonder if Apple has a secret internal Linux distribution in use on Mx.

I seem to recall reading that they had an x86/x86-64 internal distribution but maybe I am thinking of another company...

Apple had an internal project of OSX running on x86 (amd64?) for a while before they got serious about it.

It's less likely that they have an internal ARM/Mx Linux project though. Doesn't serve any known purpose that I'm aware of.

There's a rumor that they have an internal Linux distro that the silicon validation team at Apple uses on their hardware so that they don't have dependencies on the software division.

I recall reading that was only for bringup though, not full peripheral support?

Either way, that's a good point and does have clear internal utility. It's certainly easier to get Linux running on a new chip than OSX!

> It's certainly easier to get Linux running on a new chip than OSX!

I'd say that's wrong. From the outside view, perhaps, but an internal Apple team can certainly get macOS to sing and dance on whatever they need very quickly.

Good point. The x86 OSX port was created and initially maintained by a single person, if the folklore is accurate.

A similar effort for Linux would usually benefit from related work by many people. For OSX or macOS it would need to be an explicit project, starting with fewer initial bits. But the internal Apple team would be exactly the right experts for the job, so it would be easier to organize at least.

What operating system(s) do they use to run their cloud services? Given that MacOS has moved in a different direction for many years, it seems a bit unlikely that they run that at this point.

I think it's all Linux these days.

I don't know for a fact, but I am pretty sure they probably do. The question is, what role does it play in the organization? So for me, what I think they probably have an internal distro for is for their some of their servers. If that is the only case, it probably doesnt mean much, but that may not be the case. I could definitely see them having an internal distro that helps with some low level development and testing.

According to marcan’s twitter Apple likely has an internal one for silicon validation, but it’s probably not complete / something you’d want to use as a daily driver.

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