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Comment by iseanstevens | Hacker News Reader

It’s been 18 months on an entirely new platform and a small team of (BRILLIANT) people did such a good job discovering and porting to undocumented hardware that it worked on the M2 hardware essentially before it started shipping.

I don’t think Apple is trying to get in their way.

Also… developing for documented hardware is also an endless treadmill of work as it evolves/new products are released.

It just has much less uncertainty.

I 100% agree it would be awesome if Apple released full documentation. Broadcom too. Probably others.

(All IMHO)

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Ah, does not releasing full documentation not count as Apple "trying to get in their way"? Not trying to be snarky, genuinely trying to figure out how folks draw the line, since in my head, keeping documentation private smells like obstructionism.

If it's obstructionism it's passively so. They've done nothing to actively obstruct. They've also done nothing to help. When they say they don't support it they're not kidding, they don't just mean capital-S support.

If I had to put a label on their stance, it'd be "chaotic neutral".

Except they have helped, just not with the documentations side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578

That's not helping Asahi. Apple never mentioned the reason behind the change (or even publicly acknowledged Asahi, as far as I'm aware), and non-Marcan sources have speculated that it was added to help Apple run hardware testing firmware. It's equally likely that Apple added this in as an alternate entrypoint for Bootcamp, which wouldn't work on Apple Silicon otherwise. In other words, people are applauding Apple for fixing the problem Apple created: a perfect allegory for developers in the 21st century, if you ask me.

Putting in all the effort to design a system that allows you to install an unsigned OS without it effecting the boot security of the MacOS partition is definitely helping Ashai, NetBSD and any other OS that would like to add support for the hardware going forward.

Also, designing the boot menu so that unsigned OSes can show up as valid choices or be set as the default OS.

As well as the EULA allowing the use of unsigned OSes.

All of those things you listed also existed on x86 Macs, I fail to see how this represents a change in attitude towards supporting Linux users.

>All of those things you listed also existed on x86 Macs

Nope. Security settings on the Intel Macs were per machine just like other PCs.

The system of allowing per partition security settings so the user could install an unsigned OS without it effecting the security when booted into MacOS is new on Apple Silicon Macs.

As the Asahi Wiki puts it:

>From a security perspective, these machines may possibly qualify as the most secure general purpose computers available to the public which support third-party OSes, in terms of resistance to attack by non-owners.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...

> non-Marcan sources have speculated that it was added to help Apple run hardware testing firmware

Those sources are wrong. Apple doesn’t need to add or release anything to test their own hardware, they have an in-house Linux that hardware bringup uses.

That makes sense, fair enough, thanks!

Have you never been involved in the process of making internal information public? In most companies it's not just a case of whack that shit online, there's a lot of process involved in making sure it is fit for public consumption and nothing that legal, sales, product development, etc. don't want leaked is in there. This kind of overhead only grows with the size of the company and number of interested parties. You then have to justify expending that time and effort, and the ROI of making documentation public is.. not in your favor.

> small team of (BRILLIANT) people

I wasn't trying to take anything away from them at all. It's astounding what they're accomplishing but the fact that it's necessary for this situation to exist at all is what I'm mainly commenting about.

Speaking from experience, there is no "full documentation" to release.

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