7 ms·

Linus Torvalds doubts Linux will get ported to Apple M1 hardware

70 points by anupamchugh 6y ago

api 6y ago
I suppose he means booting up on bare metal, not running in a VM.
- HoolaBoola 6y ago
  It's always recommended to read the article before commenting :P
amamaenko 6y ago
I am wondering if,in a couple of years, Apple might face the same legal pressure to open up the architecture that Intel once faced..
- city41 6y ago
  Doesn't seem likely while Apple's market share is 8.5%.
  - gjsman-1000 6y ago
    It's also unlikely because unlike Intel, Apple doesn't sell their chips to other companies and thus can't illegally deal or try to maintain monopoly power over those companies.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  I think it would be better if the chips can be in-house only, but hackitoshes and hackiniphones have to be legal. The OS/userland interfaces are incalculably wider so those are the more important ones to disembargo to encourage competition. I know I would be much happier buying Apple hardware to run free software if I didn't feel like I was feeding the walled garden (because Samsung-made hackiniphones don't pay 30% to apple).
- alanfranz 6y ago
  Apple uses the ARM ISA, which everybody can license, with their own implementation. What should they be forced to open? Something about the GPU? I doubt anything about Apple is really bleeding edge. It's the vertical hardware-software integration which makes wonders. If AMD (which already owns a good GPU architecture) chose to make an OS, it could get the same performance.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    The ISA is open but the chip is custom and very different from any of the standard designs ARM Holdings has (or anybody else for that matter). Not exactly an "architecture" to open like OP said but just pointing out the CPU isn't some standard design with nothing to open up simply because it licenses the ARM ISA. That's like saying your book is off the shelf because it used an English dictionary for the words. The vertical software integration creates many small wins that aren't insignificant overall but it's not why they are nearly 2x ahead of Qualcomm using the same ISA at the same power level in 3rd party userspace computation only benchmarks. There isn't any vertical integration in those, the raw performance is just better. For another take on this Chrome vs Safari benchmarks put Chrome at ~90% the speed in web benchmarks and this is Chrome's 1st stable release of an M1 native version. At the same that's 45% faster than Chrome on my AMD 3950X. I remember when Apple added the Javascript rounding instruction to their chips people speculated that's why Safari was now so fast, turns out a Safari dev chimed it they hadn't started making use of it yet the new chips were just faster than before.
    - alanfranz 6y ago
      > just pointing out the CPU isn't some standard design with nothing to open up simply because it licenses the ARM ISA The implementation is not an ARM reference design; but it's Apple's own implementation. Why should they be forced to open it up? How are they limiting their competitors? > they are nearly 2x ahead of Qualcomm using the same ISA at the same power level in 3rd party userspace computation only benchmarks I'm not sure whether you're speaking about M1 or A14 here. A14 is just a bit faster than other mobile SOCs, certainly not 2x. If you're speaking about M1... well, what are you comparing it against from Qualcomm? Do they have a similar product, with a similar target and power envelope? The recently announced Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 from Qualcomm is around 6-7W TDP, which is 50% that of M1. > There isn't any vertical integration in those, the raw performance is just better. I'm unconvinced. We need to consider the 5nm production process, the everything-on-soc approach, and the fact that Intel is selling more-or-less the same CPUs as 5 years ago. The Ryzen 7 4800U is quite close to the M1 both performance wise and TDP wise. Now, take a 4800U, make it 5nm, build a SoC with it which includes the memory and build a finely tuned OS - aka "vertical integration". Would you really think you could appreciate a performance or thermal difference?
- vondur 6y ago
  Anyone can license the ARM architecture.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    The only ARM IP Apple actually used was the ISA. The architecture in the M1 -- and all the A chips -- is 100% custom. No other gadget maker has the internal engineering chops to do what Apple has done. And it'll be a few years before ARM releases a chip architecture that comes within spitting distance of the M1's performance -- by which time Apple will have released an even more powerful chip.
  - DennisAleynikov 6y ago
    apple does a lot more than just use the ARM isa so this isnt a helpful thing to say despite being objectively true
rvense 6y ago
Which is a shame. It would be really interesting to compare, to see exactly how much this is a "great chip" and how much it's a "great vertical integration of chip and software".
- Agreed99 6y ago
  What real wins does knowing that get you if the work can be done on a Mac with Mac OS? Some sort of bragging rights stored in a web forums logical DB on a physical disk which will be tossed when it goes offline?
- offtop5 6y ago
  While I can agree, I don't think it really matters to end users. I'm waiting on Unity to run natively on the M1. If it can magically beat my desktop PC ( working on an HDPR project now), I'm sold.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  For the CPU side virtualized Linux (which has already been done) should tell us within a couple of percentage points, for the GPU side I'm not sure how much can be vertical integration vs "this is what the hardware does with a mature driver".
rienbdj 6y ago
I used to say “I don’t need to run Linux day-to-day, but if Apple become too heavy handed I can always switch”. Well, that’s not the case anymore.
- kgwxd 6y ago
  You could switch and not buy Apple hardware. IMO, they became too heavy handed a pretty long time ago.
  - gjsman-1000 6y ago
    `sudo spctl --master-disable` to disable Gatekeeper, and `csrutil disable` in Recovery Mode to disable rootless/System Integrity Protection. Just like that, it's a Mac from a decade ago in openness.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      It's also immediately a Mac from a decade ago in security. Heavy-handed or not, that is something people tend to forget (and no, it's not perfect security, but definitely more secure than allowing root at runtime).
    - ccmcarey 6y ago
      The risk is, when will they disable those commands?
  - cyrksoft 6y ago
    Any particular laptop to recommend? I am looking for a new laptop and haven't found anything similar to the MacBook Air (I hate the touchbar) for a similar price (the 16GB of RAM model). Anything similar is either a lot more expensive or the build quality is a lot worse. I travel and move around a lot (not so much now, but I still move around my country and to the office), so portability is very important to me. Another advantage of the MacBook line is that I can carry one Anker dual USB-C charger and charge everything I have. Any recommendation is more than welcomed!
- 6y ago
DCKing 6y ago
It's a daunting task to get a new GPU architecture in the Linux kernel that's likely as complicated as AMD's. The AMD driver takes up a sizeable chunk of the Linux kernel [1], although that figure includes lots of autogenerated files and a lot of different product generations. Certainly a top notch high performance driver is a very daunting task without documentation, although I expect a driver that is more in the ballpark of the nouveau driver is in the realm of possibility in the long term. I can't help but smile at the prospect that Torvalds' pessimism here - while warranted - creates an incentive to prove something to both Torvalds and Apple... [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.9-AMDGPU-Stats https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....
- longstation 6y ago
  Not a kernel expert, but I am curious, couldn't we load that AMD driver conditionally?
  - mshook 6y ago
    Sizeable chunk in the source tree. The binary driver built from that is only loaded when the hardware is present... "Or all in, Linux 5.9 comes in at roughly 27.81 million lines distributed among some fifty-nine thousand source files. ... For a while now the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver has been around 2+ million lines of code making it the largest in-tree kernel driver. With Linux 5.9, it comes in at 2.16 million lines of code plus another 247k lines of code comments and another 109k blank lines... Or up to 2.51 million lines of code is the AMD DRM driver code including AMDKFD, PowerPlay, DC, and all the kernel code ultimately making up the AMD Radeon support on that driver (but not the older Radeon DRM driver -- that older Radeon driver is at around 157k lines of code). "
  - simlevesque 6y ago
    You can also build the kernel yourself. It's fun.
  - zests 6y ago
    If you build your own kernel and you can choose between hundreds of options including building many components as optionally loaded modules. Its all configured through an ncurses interface. Want a kernel that doesn’t support USB? Sure.
saagarjha 6y ago
> We strongly suspect that by the time enthusiasts could reverse-engineer the M1 SoC sufficiently for first-class Linux support, other vendors will have seen the value in bringing high performance ARM systems to the laptop market—and it will be considerably easier to work with the more open designs many will use. That’s true, but will they have the volume of Apple’s laptops? There’s a pretty decent demand for those. Nobody cares if no-name ARM chip user can run Linux.
- VLM 6y ago
  The ARM microcontroller people do care, and their sales volume is often much higher than luxury laptop sales volume.
- motogpjimbo 6y ago
  I don't know about laptops specifically, but macOS's global market share is around 9%. M1 is exciting, but it's hardly going to dominate the market.
  - JoshTko 6y ago
    The share matters less than who specifically make up that share.
    - CyberRabbi 6y ago
      And who makes up that share such that his point would be less valid?
    - thefounder 6y ago
      For who?
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > For who? Anyone wanting to make money. The wealthy and influential predominantly use Macs.
wayneftw 6y ago
Damn, I’m sick of hearing about the M1 processor and every fart noise that someone makes about it. An overwhelming majority of people don’t run a Mac or iOS. By all accounts only ~25% of programmers are using one. You know the entire platform is basically a prison complex right? Let’s give it a rest for a while why don’t we? I’ll start by flagging every article I see here for now.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Every laptop's battery life numbers are measured when it has a fresh battery, just halve the numbers or something if you want to know what it'll be like in many years.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- daenney 6y ago
  That's not what flagging is for. If it's not of interest to you, don't read it and don't engage with it. It's of interest to plenty of people here, seeing how often those articles make it to the front page and stay there for a while.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    Plenty of folks here, dare I say most that use it at all, use it to censor posts and comments bearing opinions or facts that they just don’t want to read about. Here’s an example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25110502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25110502
- 6y ago
ur-whale 6y ago
"I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new [Macbook] Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS." My feelings, exactly. Such a sweet piece of hardware, locked up to run only a nighmare OS.
dang 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179647
bArray 6y ago
> Torvalds, of course, can already have an ARM based Linux > laptop if he wants one—for example, the Pinebook Pro. The > unspoken part here is that he'd like a high-performance > ARM based laptop, rather than a budget-friendly but > extremely performance constrained design such as one finds > in the Pinebook Pro, the Raspberry Pi, or a legion of > other inexpensive gadgets. I believe he currently uses an AMD threadripper setup - there would be nothing stopping him using something like the PineBook Pro as a "dumb terminal" and having his builds done off-machine. It would mean that he is dependent on an internet connection, but it wouldn't have to be a fast one as he would only need to send deltas to the build process. (This would be on top of other mechanisms like CI.) The PineBook Pro has quite a reasonable keyboard, is quite light and gets decent battery. He could reasonably use it all day without issue. Re-flashing it can be as simple as throwing a new SD card into it, which could also help in terms of security whilst traveling (re-flash it when you get to your location). I would very much tell him and other people to seriously consider such a machine.

70 points by anupamchugh 6y ago

api 6y ago

I suppose he means booting up on bare metal, not running in a VM.

HoolaBoola 6y ago
It's always recommended to read the article before commenting :P

amamaenko 6y ago

I am wondering if,in a couple of years, Apple might face the same legal pressure to open up the architecture that Intel once faced..

city41 6y ago
Doesn't seem likely while Apple's market share is 8.5%.
- gjsman-1000 6y ago
  It's also unlikely because unlike Intel, Apple doesn't sell their chips to other companies and thus can't illegally deal or try to maintain monopoly power over those companies.
Ericson2314 6y ago
I think it would be better if the chips can be in-house only, but hackitoshes and hackiniphones have to be legal. The OS/userland interfaces are incalculably wider so those are the more important ones to disembargo to encourage competition. I know I would be much happier buying Apple hardware to run free software if I didn't feel like I was feeding the walled garden (because Samsung-made hackiniphones don't pay 30% to apple).
alanfranz 6y ago
Apple uses the ARM ISA, which everybody can license, with their own implementation. What should they be forced to open? Something about the GPU? I doubt anything about Apple is really bleeding edge. It's the vertical hardware-software integration which makes wonders. If AMD (which already owns a good GPU architecture) chose to make an OS, it could get the same performance.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  The ISA is open but the chip is custom and very different from any of the standard designs ARM Holdings has (or anybody else for that matter). Not exactly an "architecture" to open like OP said but just pointing out the CPU isn't some standard design with nothing to open up simply because it licenses the ARM ISA. That's like saying your book is off the shelf because it used an English dictionary for the words. The vertical software integration creates many small wins that aren't insignificant overall but it's not why they are nearly 2x ahead of Qualcomm using the same ISA at the same power level in 3rd party userspace computation only benchmarks. There isn't any vertical integration in those, the raw performance is just better. For another take on this Chrome vs Safari benchmarks put Chrome at ~90% the speed in web benchmarks and this is Chrome's 1st stable release of an M1 native version. At the same that's 45% faster than Chrome on my AMD 3950X. I remember when Apple added the Javascript rounding instruction to their chips people speculated that's why Safari was now so fast, turns out a Safari dev chimed it they hadn't started making use of it yet the new chips were just faster than before.
  - alanfranz 6y ago
    > just pointing out the CPU isn't some standard design with nothing to open up simply because it licenses the ARM ISA The implementation is not an ARM reference design; but it's Apple's own implementation. Why should they be forced to open it up? How are they limiting their competitors? > they are nearly 2x ahead of Qualcomm using the same ISA at the same power level in 3rd party userspace computation only benchmarks I'm not sure whether you're speaking about M1 or A14 here. A14 is just a bit faster than other mobile SOCs, certainly not 2x. If you're speaking about M1... well, what are you comparing it against from Qualcomm? Do they have a similar product, with a similar target and power envelope? The recently announced Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 from Qualcomm is around 6-7W TDP, which is 50% that of M1. > There isn't any vertical integration in those, the raw performance is just better. I'm unconvinced. We need to consider the 5nm production process, the everything-on-soc approach, and the fact that Intel is selling more-or-less the same CPUs as 5 years ago. The Ryzen 7 4800U is quite close to the M1 both performance wise and TDP wise. Now, take a 4800U, make it 5nm, build a SoC with it which includes the memory and build a finely tuned OS - aka "vertical integration". Would you really think you could appreciate a performance or thermal difference?
vondur 6y ago
Anyone can license the ARM architecture.
- bitwize 6y ago
  The only ARM IP Apple actually used was the ISA. The architecture in the M1 -- and all the A chips -- is 100% custom. No other gadget maker has the internal engineering chops to do what Apple has done. And it'll be a few years before ARM releases a chip architecture that comes within spitting distance of the M1's performance -- by which time Apple will have released an even more powerful chip.
- DennisAleynikov 6y ago
  apple does a lot more than just use the ARM isa so this isnt a helpful thing to say despite being objectively true

rvense 6y ago

Which is a shame. It would be really interesting to compare, to see exactly how much this is a "great chip" and how much it's a "great vertical integration of chip and software".

Agreed99 6y ago
What real wins does knowing that get you if the work can be done on a Mac with Mac OS? Some sort of bragging rights stored in a web forums logical DB on a physical disk which will be tossed when it goes offline?
offtop5 6y ago
While I can agree, I don't think it really matters to end users. I'm waiting on Unity to run natively on the M1. If it can magically beat my desktop PC ( working on an HDPR project now), I'm sold.
zamadatix 6y ago
For the CPU side virtualized Linux (which has already been done) should tell us within a couple of percentage points, for the GPU side I'm not sure how much can be vertical integration vs "this is what the hardware does with a mature driver".

rienbdj 6y ago

I used to say “I don’t need to run Linux day-to-day, but if Apple become too heavy handed I can always switch”. Well, that’s not the case anymore.

kgwxd 6y ago
You could switch and not buy Apple hardware. IMO, they became too heavy handed a pretty long time ago.
- gjsman-1000 6y ago
  `sudo spctl --master-disable` to disable Gatekeeper, and `csrutil disable` in Recovery Mode to disable rootless/System Integrity Protection. Just like that, it's a Mac from a decade ago in openness.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    It's also immediately a Mac from a decade ago in security. Heavy-handed or not, that is something people tend to forget (and no, it's not perfect security, but definitely more secure than allowing root at runtime).
  - ccmcarey 6y ago
    The risk is, when will they disable those commands?
- cyrksoft 6y ago
  Any particular laptop to recommend? I am looking for a new laptop and haven't found anything similar to the MacBook Air (I hate the touchbar) for a similar price (the 16GB of RAM model). Anything similar is either a lot more expensive or the build quality is a lot worse. I travel and move around a lot (not so much now, but I still move around my country and to the office), so portability is very important to me. Another advantage of the MacBook line is that I can carry one Anker dual USB-C charger and charge everything I have. Any recommendation is more than welcomed!
6y ago

DCKing 6y ago

It's a daunting task to get a new GPU architecture in the Linux kernel that's likely as complicated as AMD's. The AMD driver takes up a sizeable chunk of the Linux kernel [1], although that figure includes lots of autogenerated files and a lot of different product generations. Certainly a top notch high performance driver is a very daunting task without documentation, although I expect a driver that is more in the ballpark of the nouveau driver is in the realm of possibility in the long term. I can't help but smile at the prospect that Torvalds' pessimism here - while warranted - creates an incentive to prove something to both Torvalds and Apple... [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.9-AMDGPU-Stats https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....

longstation 6y ago
Not a kernel expert, but I am curious, couldn't we load that AMD driver conditionally?
- mshook 6y ago
  Sizeable chunk in the source tree. The binary driver built from that is only loaded when the hardware is present... "Or all in, Linux 5.9 comes in at roughly 27.81 million lines distributed among some fifty-nine thousand source files. ... For a while now the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver has been around 2+ million lines of code making it the largest in-tree kernel driver. With Linux 5.9, it comes in at 2.16 million lines of code plus another 247k lines of code comments and another 109k blank lines... Or up to 2.51 million lines of code is the AMD DRM driver code including AMDKFD, PowerPlay, DC, and all the kernel code ultimately making up the AMD Radeon support on that driver (but not the older Radeon DRM driver -- that older Radeon driver is at around 157k lines of code). "
- simlevesque 6y ago
  You can also build the kernel yourself. It's fun.
- zests 6y ago
  If you build your own kernel and you can choose between hundreds of options including building many components as optionally loaded modules. Its all configured through an ncurses interface. Want a kernel that doesn’t support USB? Sure.

saagarjha 6y ago

> We strongly suspect that by the time enthusiasts could reverse-engineer the M1 SoC sufficiently for first-class Linux support, other vendors will have seen the value in bringing high performance ARM systems to the laptop market—and it will be considerably easier to work with the more open designs many will use. That’s true, but will they have the volume of Apple’s laptops? There’s a pretty decent demand for those. Nobody cares if no-name ARM chip user can run Linux.

VLM 6y ago
The ARM microcontroller people do care, and their sales volume is often much higher than luxury laptop sales volume.
motogpjimbo 6y ago
I don't know about laptops specifically, but macOS's global market share is around 9%. M1 is exciting, but it's hardly going to dominate the market.
- JoshTko 6y ago
  The share matters less than who specifically make up that share.
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    And who makes up that share such that his point would be less valid?
  - thefounder 6y ago
    For who?
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > For who? Anyone wanting to make money. The wealthy and influential predominantly use Macs.

wayneftw 6y ago

Damn, I’m sick of hearing about the M1 processor and every fart noise that someone makes about it. An overwhelming majority of people don’t run a Mac or iOS. By all accounts only ~25% of programmers are using one. You know the entire platform is basically a prison complex right? Let’s give it a rest for a while why don’t we? I’ll start by flagging every article I see here for now.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CyberRabbi 6y ago
[deleted]
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Every laptop's battery life numbers are measured when it has a fresh battery, just halve the numbers or something if you want to know what it'll be like in many years.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
daenney 6y ago
That's not what flagging is for. If it's not of interest to you, don't read it and don't engage with it. It's of interest to plenty of people here, seeing how often those articles make it to the front page and stay there for a while.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  Plenty of folks here, dare I say most that use it at all, use it to censor posts and comments bearing opinions or facts that they just don’t want to read about. Here’s an example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25110502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25110502
6y ago

ur-whale 6y ago

"I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new [Macbook] Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS." My feelings, exactly. Such a sweet piece of hardware, locked up to run only a nighmare OS.

dang 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179647

bArray 6y ago

> Torvalds, of course, can already have an ARM based Linux > laptop if he wants one—for example, the Pinebook Pro. The > unspoken part here is that he'd like a high-performance > ARM based laptop, rather than a budget-friendly but > extremely performance constrained design such as one finds > in the Pinebook Pro, the Raspberry Pi, or a legion of > other inexpensive gadgets. I believe he currently uses an AMD threadripper setup - there would be nothing stopping him using something like the PineBook Pro as a "dumb terminal" and having his builds done off-machine. It would mean that he is dependent on an internet connection, but it wouldn't have to be a fast one as he would only need to send deltas to the build process. (This would be on top of other mechanisms like CI.) The PineBook Pro has quite a reasonable keyboard, is quite light and gets decent battery. He could reasonably use it all day without issue. Re-flashing it can be as simple as throwing a new SD card into it, which could also help in terms of security whilst traveling (re-flash it when you get to your location). I would very much tell him and other people to seriously consider such a machine.