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Author here. As explained in the intro, folks like antirez are considering moving back to Linux and in his linked HN comment he specifically talks about trying

by l1k 10y ago

Author here. As explained in the intro, folks like antirez are considering moving back to Linux and in his linked HN comment he specifically talks about trying Linux on the MacBook he's currently using to see where he's headed. The article seeks to give these folks in particular a helping hand in understanding what works and what doesn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820490 That said, the kernel developers working on Mac hardware support aren't Apple haters. We're fans. I also don't share the "not for professionals" criticism that was widely directed at the new MacBook Pro fully: E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is.

andrepd 10y ago
> E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are you implying a MacBook cluster is an effective HPC platform?
- l1k 10y ago
  Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data center or don't want to raise suspicion) and need to crack some passwords. 5x Skylake CPU + 5x Polaris GPU would be a sufficiently beefy platform for Hashcat, and it would fit into your backpack. Or let's say you want to quickly set up a Hadoop cluster to crunch some data. Five machines is certainly small as HPC clusters go, and in reality you'll probably have to cap this to four machines because you need one port to attach to a power socket if you need the cluster for more than 2-3 hours. Nevertheless the 4x 40 GBit/s Thunderbolt ports offer some really interesting possibilities, and I'm not aware of any other portable machine that has this right now.
  - skynetv2 10y ago
    Can you run network stack at 40 Gbps on those ports?
    - l1k 10y ago
      Yes, but as stated in the article only on macOS or Linux on non-Macs. Not with Linux on Macs unfortunately. Someone needs to scrutinize the Intel-developed code for non-Macs, figure out how to port it to Andreas Noever's driver, and fill in the missing parts by reversing the macOS driver. Also, the Alpine Ridge controllers are attached with PCIe 3.0 4x lanes, that's 31.504 GBit/s, so you can't exhaust the available bandwidth fully.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    There's 4 40Gbit/s ports, but their total bandwidth is not 160Gbit/s. IIRC, the ports on the right side of the machine have less total bandwidth because of how they're connected, for example.
    - l1k 10y ago
      That is correct. The Thunderbolt controller has two DisplayPort sink ports which are wired to the GPU, in addition to the PCIe 3.0 4x interface which goes to a root port in the CPU. So to actually max out the 40 Gbit/s, you need to drive external displays and also max out the PCIe 3.0 4x interface. Which is another way to say that 8 Gbit/s are reserved for DisplayPort.
scotu 10y ago
maybe, but not all pros are computer science pros, e.g. photo and videographers for example are pretty pissed that the sdcard reader was removed as far as I know... but then again that's solvable, ram limits far less (3d artists might like it?)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  There are computer science pros that only care about Swift and Objective-C programming, not UNIX.
- asragab 10y ago
  That's right. But it seemed for a while that the MacBook Pro had the feature set, hardware configurations and broad appeal that allowed both groups to be aligned on their hardware choices (i.e. a MacBook Pro). It is perhaps too early to wave goodbye once and for all to that coalition, but it does seem like some of the design directions that Apple has taken have drifted away from that user base. That said, this war on the professional and creative class of users began sometime ago - I think the introduction of Final Cut X was the first salvo, while the platform has significantly evolved from the first couple of problematic releases, I personally know some who considered the product a literal betrayal and abandoned ship to Premiere Pro or AVID. I sense Microsoft is attempting to reassemble that coalition with their offerings, namely the Surface line (especially that gorgeous looking Surface Studio) and the introduction of Bash on Windows, which while still quite limited in its functionality, can be a seen as a step. I really like my MBP 2013 (NVIDIA GPU) and I guess I am going to keep it a while longer.
willvarfar 10y ago
Really liked the article. Quickly jotted down my own progress as a user http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/154376389528/linux-on-my-mbp-sucks http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/154376389528/linu... Really appreciate people making this stuff work, and hope I can use my retina MBP in the long run.
- l1k 10y ago
  Thanks! The FileVault2 driver for Linux that you couldn't find is probably this one: https://github.com/libyal/libfvde/wiki https://github.com/libyal/libfvde/wiki It's experimental though. Better back up your data. I'd recommend to create a partition for ZFS and move data there that you want to use on both OSes, or outright install Linux on a zpool and mount that on macOS. This has worked remarkably well for me, even with lz4 compression and all the other great features. Layer ZFS on TrueCrypt if you need encryption, I wrote a howto a while ago but never had the time to update it: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/wiki/Dual-booting-OS-X-and-Debian-Jessie-with-ZFS-root,-cross-mounting-and-full-disk-encryption/1e61fbb42b596b528072d199e7b02c9ed3bf2816 https://github.com/zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/wiki/Dual-booting-OS-X...

by l1k 10y ago

andrepd 10y ago

> E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are you implying a MacBook cluster is an effective HPC platform?

l1k 10y ago
Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data center or don't want to raise suspicion) and need to crack some passwords. 5x Skylake CPU + 5x Polaris GPU would be a sufficiently beefy platform for Hashcat, and it would fit into your backpack. Or let's say you want to quickly set up a Hadoop cluster to crunch some data. Five machines is certainly small as HPC clusters go, and in reality you'll probably have to cap this to four machines because you need one port to attach to a power socket if you need the cluster for more than 2-3 hours. Nevertheless the 4x 40 GBit/s Thunderbolt ports offer some really interesting possibilities, and I'm not aware of any other portable machine that has this right now.
- skynetv2 10y ago
  Can you run network stack at 40 Gbps on those ports?
  - l1k 10y ago
    Yes, but as stated in the article only on macOS or Linux on non-Macs. Not with Linux on Macs unfortunately. Someone needs to scrutinize the Intel-developed code for non-Macs, figure out how to port it to Andreas Noever's driver, and fill in the missing parts by reversing the macOS driver. Also, the Alpine Ridge controllers are attached with PCIe 3.0 4x lanes, that's 31.504 GBit/s, so you can't exhaust the available bandwidth fully.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  There's 4 40Gbit/s ports, but their total bandwidth is not 160Gbit/s. IIRC, the ports on the right side of the machine have less total bandwidth because of how they're connected, for example.
  - l1k 10y ago
    That is correct. The Thunderbolt controller has two DisplayPort sink ports which are wired to the GPU, in addition to the PCIe 3.0 4x interface which goes to a root port in the CPU. So to actually max out the 40 Gbit/s, you need to drive external displays and also max out the PCIe 3.0 4x interface. Which is another way to say that 8 Gbit/s are reserved for DisplayPort.

scotu 10y ago

maybe, but not all pros are computer science pros, e.g. photo and videographers for example are pretty pissed that the sdcard reader was removed as far as I know... but then again that's solvable, ram limits far less (3d artists might like it?)

pjmlp 10y ago
There are computer science pros that only care about Swift and Objective-C programming, not UNIX.
asragab 10y ago
That's right. But it seemed for a while that the MacBook Pro had the feature set, hardware configurations and broad appeal that allowed both groups to be aligned on their hardware choices (i.e. a MacBook Pro). It is perhaps too early to wave goodbye once and for all to that coalition, but it does seem like some of the design directions that Apple has taken have drifted away from that user base. That said, this war on the professional and creative class of users began sometime ago - I think the introduction of Final Cut X was the first salvo, while the platform has significantly evolved from the first couple of problematic releases, I personally know some who considered the product a literal betrayal and abandoned ship to Premiere Pro or AVID. I sense Microsoft is attempting to reassemble that coalition with their offerings, namely the Surface line (especially that gorgeous looking Surface Studio) and the introduction of Bash on Windows, which while still quite limited in its functionality, can be a seen as a step. I really like my MBP 2013 (NVIDIA GPU) and I guess I am going to keep it a while longer.

willvarfar 10y ago

Really liked the article. Quickly jotted down my own progress as a user http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/154376389528/linux-on-my-mbp-sucks http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/154376389528/linu... Really appreciate people making this stuff work, and hope I can use my retina MBP in the long run.

l1k 10y ago
Thanks! The FileVault2 driver for Linux that you couldn't find is probably this one: https://github.com/libyal/libfvde/wiki https://github.com/libyal/libfvde/wiki It's experimental though. Better back up your data. I'd recommend to create a partition for ZFS and move data there that you want to use on both OSes, or outright install Linux on a zpool and mount that on macOS. This has worked remarkably well for me, even with lz4 compression and all the other great features. Layer ZFS on TrueCrypt if you need encryption, I wrote a howto a while ago but never had the time to update it: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/wiki/Dual-booting-OS-X-and-Debian-Jessie-with-ZFS-root,-cross-mounting-and-full-disk-encryption/1e61fbb42b596b528072d199e7b02c9ed3bf2816 https://github.com/zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/wiki/Dual-booting-OS-X...