Linux 6.2 and Apple Silicon clarification | Hacker News Reader

Linux 6.2 and Apple Silicon clarification

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155 pointsjasoneckert30 comments

From the tweet: ''There is an ongoing news cycle about Linux 6.2 being the first kernel to support the M1, started by @ZDNET. This article is misleading and borderline false. You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up.''

The ZDNet article at the core of the controversy:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream...

SVN getting overenthusiastic, it would seem.

Just to make sure that people understand the clarification correctly: This is about upstreaming the work by Asahi Linux team. In particular, Linux on Apple Silicon macs is quite usable already if you use their own Arch-based distribution which includes yet-to-be-upstreamed patches. I run it on my M1 Air and the only major (to me) things with no support yet are the builtin speakers (afaik support is coming soon) and the webcam.

Ditto here - I run Asahi on my Mac Studio, and all features I require work perfectly (HDMI, GPU driver, Bluetooth, sound, 10G networking, WiFi, etc.): http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/AsahiSwayM1Ult...

Do you know if hidpi and fractional scaling work well in gnome? I do admit your sway setup looks pretty slick. Share your dots :)

They do! Here are my dots: https://github.com/jasoneckert/sway-dotfiles

Fantastic, thanks much for sharing and cheers!

Sound?

Do you mean sound over Bluetooth?

Bluetooth sound, and third-party sound cards have been working for almost the entire time, IIRC. Recently the internal 3.5mm jack was enabled, built-in speakers are still a work-in-progress.

External 3.5 audio worked since the beginning on the desktops. Bluetooth back in July.

In my opinion, this Linux distro is 100% done for desktops. Asahi on M1 is an amazing RISC Linux workstation.

Regarding the speakers: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968

Funny that they didn't mention it! Seems like an obvious thing for them to plug their own distribution.

They tend to be very cautious about advertising it as usable vs in testing itself. E.g. GPU acceleration is an opt in to the edge packages of Asahi, which they consider at alpha stage itself. Even with that approach there is still a surprising number of users that join IRC confused it's not further along, largely because there is a huge variance in what one considers usable.

on my m2 power levels and sleep don't work right : if i close the lid, it heats up and smells like model airplane glue, and that's super annoying. if i leave the lid open, or just power down, it's fine.

They don’t have support for putting the cpu to sleep yet. A recent update switches it to its lowest frequency when the lid is closed but it’s still not off like with macOS. It sounds like they are pretty close to having it sorted though.

I can see why people will end up disappointed by the way this is being reported. Support for a machine in a kernel means the thing boots without crashing if you pick the right configuration. You can probably get to a bash shell in Debian with the upstream kernel if you get the build script. For non-x64 devices, building a kernel that works and boots can be a disappointingly tricky experience.

ZDNet should know that a vast amount of people think "Ubuntu" or maybe "Debian" when they hear Linux being mentioned, because there are no common desktop operating systems where the kernel and the thing you're actually using are entirely separate things managed bg separate entities. You can't add macOS to the Windows kernel or use the Windows 7 desktop on a Windows 11 kernel (as much as I'd wish that to be possible), it's just not a concept most people, even Linux users, can easily wrap their head around.

This is still great news for people who buy M2 machines for use as a server, because you don't need Bluetooth/WiFi/keyboard/touch pad support for that. I doubt many people will use their expensive Macbook as a NAS that way, though.

> I doubt many people will use their expensive Macbook as a NAS that way, though

Maybe a Mac Mini though. Could be an interesting server option in the long run, the AS ones are a pretty decent bang for the buck

That's true. You'd probably still need at least ethernet and/or thunderbolt acceleration for that use case. And to be honest, not using the GPU/ML hardware would be a waste of expensive hardware in my opinion.

I'd go for a high end NUC over a Mac mini, but if energy efficiency is important for your use case then Mac Mini is definitely something to consider.

Asking for a friend…

If you wanted to use a Mac mini as a NAS, what would you use for the disks? Is there a decent Thunderbolt/USB disk chassis that would work well, use very little electricity, and make no noise? IE, be a perfect pair for a Mac mini?

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2

I currently use the 3.5" 4 bay, but it has a fan. It's not very noisy, but I appreciate the need for quiet. The one I linked doesn't seem to and will hold 4 NVMe SSDs.

No hardware raid unfortunately.

Maybe not now. But in 10-15 years when the machine is completly outdated and unsupported by Apple, and you can get them cheaply on ebay and co., it's nice to re-use those good machines for still needed jobs.

Interested to see how the page size issues are worked out. Coming down on one side or the other seems detrimental. I've watched some of marcan/lina's work on GPU stuff, but I haven't heard their vision for resolving those issues yet.

Does support for the M1 automatically mean support for the M2 as well?

No. Each individual processor AND form factor has its own unique challenges.

Developer page has a FAQ with a table which details non-functional for each configuration.

For example, my M2Pro MINI has limited feature support, relative to an M1 MacBook Air. For a long time, the M1Ultra was not supported (and I believe currently still is not, but I am a few weeks behind since install).

So, which Apple ARM processor/device supports the Asashi Linux to its full extent?

Asahi supports M2, but I don’t think there’s a clear patch parity in both for what’s been merged upstream.

It depends what you’re talking about specifically. There are differences in how input devices are handled etc… and there may be other component differences.

So in that sense it’s the same as Linux on any other arch. It’ll support the arch but support for other pieces may vary.

It does look like they had to do extra work for the M2 so it wasn’t just a for free feature.

Could anybody provide more context about the issue regarding the page size?

Check out the IOMMU section here: https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-202...

I thought the tweet thread was quite good: Asahi laying down the state of the art without (to my read) making any self-aggrandizing claims, even though they are the distro putting in the work.

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