36 ms·

Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

403 points by huhhuh 6y ago

dylan604 6y ago
I'm assuming this is for the kernel itself. After that, does the distro matter?
- wmf 6y ago
  Not really; all the distros use the same low-level components. There would be work on a per-distro basis to use the right #defines and patches though.
- Geminidog 6y ago
  A distro specifically targetting the apple form factor would be great. Even with linux as it is now there's still a huge number compatibility issues and jankiness at a per distro basis. A distro targetting just apple would greatly simplify what needs to be done and overall lead to a better user experience.
osy 6y ago
If there’s anyone in the community I’d trust to do this, it would be marcan, who, among countless other things, got Linux working with GPU acceleration on the PS4. https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016
shmerl 6y ago
Not sure. As long as Apple are hostile to running anything else on their hardware, reverse engineering it (for all the drivers and etc.) might be simply a waste of time and resources which could be better applied to something useful and actually friendly to openness. Especially since such reverse engineering will require constant chasing after changes to stay relevant.
- evolve2k 6y ago
  False. Respectfully it seems you didn’t read much of the thread. From the thread Apple have actively left the door open so other (currently non existent) OS could be booted, but as the author said, they’ve left it open but have not provided documentation. From the thread: “Linus himself has said he'd love to see Linux running on M1 macs, but doesn't think it'll happen. Not because they're locked down, but because Apple won't help us with documentation. But they at least did this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126018068955136/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551... The fact that Apple allows this in their secureboot policy is critical. Linux ports to game consoles / iPhones / etc are all fun and games, but you're always at the mercy of exploits, and the resulting cat and mouse game. That means all effort is wasted unless exploits keep up, and regular users would never want to do this and severely limit their access to official upgrades and such. But this isn't an issue with M1 macs.” Continues to discussions of limitations..
  - shmerl 6y ago
    See the comment by Linus Torvalds about it. Leaving the door open is a poor excuse, because they can close it at any time putting all your invested effort down the drain. I'd say - don't waste your time.
    - internet2000 6y ago
      People have been saying that since the first implementation of System Integrity Protection/Gatekeeper 5 years ago. It's been long enough to the point I think your comments counts as FUD... yes they can do it, but there hasn't been any indication they would.
      - shmerl 6y ago
        I wouldn't trust Apple with anything. Lock-in is their bread and butter. Just because they didn't lock something down for some time means nothing given they are very aggressive with lock-in in other areas. You don't need FUD to know their infamous reputation.
- lxgr 6y ago
  > As long as Apple are hostile to running anything else on their hardware Are they? Apple isn't only iOS. Macs have always had unlockable bootloaders.
cute_boi 6y ago
No. I am not going to spend time on anything to that company tax every developer, takes 100$ yearly, virtue signals that they focus on privacy but phones home every time when binary is executed. I am sorry but I don't like to build home inside walls.
kmeisthax 6y ago
Wait, did Apple actually add an option for unsigned boot on M1? I remember their WWDC overview saying they were only going to have either iPhone-style latest-version-only or any-version options, and them later saying they'd only be supporting virtualization. If they have an owner override for the secure boot on M1, then that's absolutely fantastic, and I suppose puts more support around Apple's assertions that Microsoft needs to license Windows on ARM for M1 before we can have Boot Camp back.
- Cu3PO42 6y ago
  Yes, you can turn off all of the secure boot features. Booting other OSs is most likely coming.
  - sethhochberg 6y ago
    Well, from what I understand its less "turn off secure boot features" and more "create/add a signature for your custom code to secure boot". https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/status/1326315741080150016?prefetchtimestamp=1605311534821 https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/status/13263157410... I can't find a primary source for the comment in the tweet, but it seems widely regarded as true at this point, so fingers crossed it pans out that way.
    - Cu3PO42 6y ago
      Hm, interesting. I can't seem to find my source anylonger either. The wording "kernel" does suggest to me that this is about a check a bootloader performs. If you were to boot another OS, you'd probably have a different boot loader as well. This tweet https://twitter.com/never_released/status/1332436771020435457 https://twitter.com/never_released/status/133243677102043545... from the same author suggests M1 is "not any more locked down than [...] Intel", so I'm not fully sure about the technical details, but in the end you should be able to boot your own code.
      - my123 6y ago
        The lowest security level, permissive, allows to mess with the Secure Boot policy at will. When you use kmutil to add a custom boot entry, enrolling the hash of your executable to the Secure Boot policy is handled automatically as part of the tool.
sweden 6y ago
Keep in mind that something as fundamental as the GPU driver wouldn't be available even they managed to get Linux up and running. And the M1 GPU is Apple's full custom GPU. Even if someone tried to reverse engineer a driver, it would take decades.
- internet2000 6y ago
  He seems relatively optimistic about getting a GPU driver going: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126014910701568 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126014910701568 I don't think it'd take decades. Nouveau was pretty ok after like 5 years, wasn't it?
  - sweden 6y ago
    It has been longer than that and 3D support is still a bit shaky. And this is based on known hardware.
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    And Nouveau has to work with dozens of Nvidia cards, not just one, and full of legacy nonsense. I'm fairly optimistic it won't take 5 years. (Especially not to the point of having a composited desktop; long tail game compatibility is less of a critical thing since, well, there are next to no games for ARM Linux...)
    - sweden 6y ago
      If you are just planning to hack something to show some basic and buggy 2D rendering, 5 years might be realistic.
      - marcan_42 6y ago
        "Just 2D" isn't really a thing, given modern GPU usage is all based on fully programmable 3D pipelines anyway. What I mean is the endless frustrating job of debugging closed source game corner cases (and often outright game bugs) is less critical here, since those games won't exist for ARM anyway. If it gets to the point where X11 and Wayland, desktop environments, common widget toolkits, browsers, media players, etc work smoothly and stably and perform well, then a lot of people will be very happy already. The long tail will always be there to chip at, and that will take years (not like vendor drivers are bug-free on any OS either!), but it's not a blocking factor to a usable desktop Linux experience. Lower-hanging fruit first.
heavyset_go 6y ago
If I thought there was a good chance of having the work upstreamed so that a mainline Linux kernel would eventually work on these computers, maybe. In my experience, there are not many ARM SoCs that have mainline support, even some of the Raspberry Pi boards don't, and they're some of the most popular ARM SoCs used for Linux. A lot of these projects get to the stage where a forked kernel will run on the SoC, but then support and attention peters out when it comes upgrading the fork or getting the work into mainline Linux because a new and better ARM SoC will be released, and then that requires the same amount of work on a new Linux fork. Since each ARM SoC released is a unique hardware configuration, a lot of this work will be for naught when Apple releases new SoCs that require the same amount of work, or even more work, to get Linux running on them.
- sly010 6y ago
  Wouldn't device tree solve (or at least mitigate) this problem somewhat? e.g. most broadcom chips have the same I2C hardware block, just mapped to a different memory address.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  This would absolutely all be done with upstreamability in mind, and upstreamed as soon as is practical. All that horrible forked kernel stuff is the realm of companies with closed development teams who don't care and just want a product out the door. The PS4 Linux stuff I did was not upstreamed for lack of time/interest, but I absolutely considered it being decent enough to upstream when writing it. PS3 Linux running under GameOS mode patches were indeed upstreamed (though there was a bit of a lawsuit along the way so all of my code ended up attributed to a friend instead since I was keeping a lower profile at the time...).
  - lmm 6y ago
    > All that horrible forked kernel stuff is the realm of companies with closed development teams who don't care and just want a product out the door. Or people who gave upstreaming an honest try but got fed up. It's not the easiest project to contribute to.
sweden 6y ago
Btw, I hate twitter for this. Why isn't someone as technical as Marcan posting this on a blog? The world went mad.
- kilbuz 6y ago
  Eyeball count matters a lot.
johnmaguire2013 6y ago
Do we expect that this port will be complete before another chipmaker is able to achieve similar performance?
- internet2000 6y ago
  If mobile is any indication, expect the performance gap to widen as time goes on.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Isn't Qualcomm kind of the same distance behind with the most recent hardware? I don't get the impression that the gap is widening, with the new high perf ARM cores it seems to be shrinking, even.
    - OldHand2018 6y ago
      The M1 represents Apple’s best effort running on the world’s most advanced manufacturing process. It’s a pretty safe bet that up until now the Qualcomm team hasn’t been given the freedom or the resources to make their best effort on a general-purpose desktop-class chip. Now that Apple has shown what is possible, you might think that the gloves are coming off. Especially if Microsoft and/or Samsung* indicate that they would buy such a chip at the price it would have to be sold at. * Microsoft and Samsung currently sell ARM-based laptops, with the Microsoft version being a slight modification of the Qualcomm chip in the Samsung.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MR4D 6y ago
I think if Linux really wants to run well on consumer hardware - in other words, not servers - then we’ll have to build the hardware. No idea how that happens from a business perspective, but Raspberry Pi seems to be a great model. Perhaps a Pi Pro could be designed that meets some of those needs. The Zero is almost too mobile for a laptop to be usable, but who knows, maybe someone will come up with a unique design around it. But if we don’t control the hardware, the. It’s always going to be a second or third class citizen on mobile (laptops or tablets).
- bronson 6y ago
  The Raspberry Pi is not a good example if you want control of the hardware. Closed GPU and microcode, no chance of finding actual hardware documentation (beyond coarse schematics), and no way to buy components. Broadcom is not aligned with your goals.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
someperson 6y ago
By the way, there's a crowdfunding project to improve Linux touchpad support titled "Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?". I don't know how successful that project was, but it might provide some ideas around crowdfunding improved hardware support.
ampdepolymerase 6y ago
Most of the solutions in this thread are simply not viable. Stuff like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi are several magnitudes away from Apple's M1 SoC. No amount of hackerish imitation will bridge that gap, the laws of physics are not kind to consumer product hardware hackers. It is very obvious that most of the people commenting here has never held a soldering iron, nor taken a single computer architecture class. The only true way to match Apple on both performance and efficiency is to fund custom silicon. Cerebras needed 100 million to get started. Apple has already laid the architectural groundwork, a chip with similar performance numbers can probably be commissioned with ~50 million. Another 10-20 million for the emulator/hypervisor crowd to get x86 virtualization up and running. This could probably be done by existing players so the cost can be discounted. A crowd investing approach is most likely the best bet, with the initial rounds being led by a VC experienced in hardware. This is the Sputnik moment for open source. Should ACPI (and its associated lassiez-faire mindset) become obsolete as a standard, then general purpose computing on consumer devices would become history. All the comments about how Apple's Macs are not worth it are entirely missing the point. There is nothing comparable to Apple's M1 right now. Your Purism/Lambda labs/Starlabs/System76/Pine64 usual Clevo shell machine with Linux pre-installed would never be able to compete with a M1 powered system. This isn't about 16:10/3:2 display ratios, machined aluminium, or HN's favorite complaint: "build quality". Even a well-funded premium laptop company like Razer would not be able produce something to compete with the MBP if they don't have a similarly efficient chip. Forget about the bigger players like Lenovo and Dell. Intel and AMD dropped the ball big time, and if the open source community doesn't step up, then the future will be locked-down ARM systems. RISC-V will not be competitive for another half a decade and there is no guarantee that it won't be locked down if the community does not push back against the embedded hardware culture (where VHDL/Verilog libraries are referred to as "intellectual property") which pervades ARM's heritage.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  > This is the Sputnik moment for open source Does it need to be? x86 had every opportunity to become a locked-down, exclusive standard too, and it grew the way it did, into a cross-vendor standard, for a reason. Why will a similar trajectory not apply to the M1?
freehunter 6y ago
Question as long as we're on the subject... software companies can decompile competitor's software and figure out how they did something. Can Qualcomm or another chip maker "decompile" the M1 and figure out how Apple made it? Apple seems so far ahead of the other ARM chipmakers, can the other guys catch up by studying the M1 chip? Or is it too small/involved/etc to learn much from?
- skunkworker 6y ago
  If Qualcomm and other ARM chip designers haven't been able to keep up to pace while the last 8 years of iPhone CPUs have been near the top of their game, I don't see that changing anytime soon, unless they hire the right people to be in charge and even still, chips like Apple's A series are hand laid out and very, very time consuming to create. They have the ability to use a scanning electron microscope to look at the design, but even if you can start to reproduce their design (very time consuming) you're taking away resources from designing other processors. I asked a friend who used to work in chip design at IBM and was blown away by the design of the M1. according to my friend, the design is extremely custom and most likely hand laid out for their specific optimizations. Also they were stumped by how apple could be getting consistent timings between cores when the design isn't totally symmetric for a particular cluster.
rkeene2 6y ago
Linux has never worked well on Apple hardware. At one of my previous jobs I had the choice between a very high end "MacBook Pro" (1TB SSD, 16GiB RAM, etc) and a lower-end PC. Since my job was developing a Linux distribution from scratch, I was going to be running Linux on whatever I got. I (naively) assumed that since I saw a lot of MacBook Pro's at open source conferences and other places where open source software is written, and the MacBook Pro was x86-based that Linux would just work -- but it was a disaster.
- m463 6y ago
  I've actually had no problems - older macbook pro (2012?) only issue was the retina console fonts were really tiny. I used ubuntu and arch.
vzaliva 6y ago
Asking "Per month" for non-specified period of time is not a well posed question. Do you suppose to pay per lenght of developement period? Or you expect users to pay for the resr of their life for priveledge of using such port?
wtf77 6y ago
Can someone explain me the purpose of writing such this long thread....on Twitter?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- renewiltord 6y ago
  The audience is on Twitter.
throwaway201103 6y ago
I'd throw some money at an OpenBSD port, but that's even less likely to happen IMO.
pengaru 6y ago
Most of what makes the M1 interesting is TSMC's 5nm process, why wouldn't we expect similar results from future x86 CPUs on 5nm or smaller. At least AMD is supporting upstream Linux development for GPU support, if you care about Free software and control over your computers, throw your money at companies better aligned with those goals. Don't reward Apple for being assholes. <=5nm AMD Zen SoCs will be fantastic as well
- nicoburns 6y ago
  The other thing that makes it interesting is getting performance comparable to the fastest Intel/AMD processors as 3Ghz. I expect that AMD will catch up with Apple on performance when they switch to 5nm, but Apple's low clock speed means they're likely to retain the power usage advantage.
- hu3 6y ago
  Is there an ETA for 5nm AMD SoCs?
  - pengaru 6y ago
    Not AFAIK, but it's not like 7nm AMD SoCs are intolerable dogs. Most M1 vs. PC comparisons are being made against Intel's ancient process, for obvious Apple-favoring reasons.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      It’s mostly compared to Intel since there’s no official AMD support on MacOS whatsoever. You very well could compare hackintosh AMD to Apple’s M1, but it wouldn’t be comparing Apples to Apples. There are indeed AMD Windows comparisons, however[0]. 0: https://youtu.be/4MkrEMjPk24?t=10m39s https://youtu.be/4MkrEMjPk24?t=10m39s
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Although Apple booked TSMC’s entire production line (for an unknown length of time)[0], this official graph looks like it indicates 5nm before 2022 (so 2021)[1]. 0: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... 1: https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=12m56s https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=12m56s
devwastaken 6y ago
Apple won't support it, therefore support and maintenance will be working around apples proprietary hardware and special drivers. Linux is not meant to live in that environment, I'd argue bettering support for other OEM's is a more fruitfull goal.
- m00x 6y ago
  If anyone has been following nvidia/linux story, this nails it on the head. Apple has never played well with FOSS and aren't going to start now. Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs, and the linux port will always be a shitty experience that takes up several weeks to get working properly, and then it'll be slower than expected. Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today it's a garbage experience that takes up hours/days of debugging to get right, and then it's still way worse than the mac/windows experience.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    The new XPS 15 I am writing this on works fine on Ubuntu. So did the Thinkpad I used before it and the XPS 13 before that. I spent 0 time debugging. I am not sure how the Windows experience would compare, but I am fairly happy, with maybe the exception of battery life, which from what I gather kinda sucks on the XPS.
  - robin_reala 6y ago
    Apple have a FOSS kernel, one of the three remaining web renderers, CUPS, and a bunch more smaller things. They’re not the most religious of FOSS companies, but it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t play well in the places that they play. If you take FOSS to mean only GPL, then yes, I get your point.
    - mondoshawan 6y ago
      XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.
dilyevsky 6y ago
Twitter seems like a poor choice for this (anything really?). Is there a gofundme or something?
- jhfdbkofdcho 6y ago
  He should do a Patreon. Other people have done this sort of thing with this model over there. Seems sustainable.
  - amedvednikov 6y ago
    Github Sponsors is better. No fees/VAT.
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    Yeah forgot about this, not sure how well it would work for a project without a regular set of deliverables but probably better than gfm
- comex 6y ago
  The Twitter link is just a poll to survey interest. If you read further in the thread, he suggested the actual fundraising would be on Patreon.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
I used to run Ubuntu on an Intel macbook back around 2009 or so. In general stuff worked ok but little things like the touchpad was goofy and only basic functionality. webcam had all kinds of problems. Suspend/resume didn't really work. Battery life was terrible. Screen brightness buttons didn't work. So I'm sure it's cool and people will like it but no, I'm not paying $5 month for a crappy computer experience. Good luck though!
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  That sounds exactly like every Linux-on-desktop experience I've made with any hardware.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you've tried. If you run Linux on a fairly generic computer (like an Intel NUC) then everything will work out of the box. The more you deviate from the average the more likely things will break.
Ecco 6y ago
I understand why the developer would like to get a recurring form of revenue, but as a consumer buying a subscription makes no sense at all! The goods obtained (Linux on MabBookAirX,Y) are very much non-recurring by nature...
- zethraeus 6y ago
  This is the newly-normal software subscription package or a stipend to bootstrap a project. Both feel pretty normal! Even if it is the former, updates & improvements take work. And they seem likely to be necessary here.
  - someperson 6y ago
    The deliverables of any software project is obviously incremental in nature (EG, Initial boot with software graphics, 2D graphics, power saving features, 3D graphics etc), so the funding model makes sense
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
buryat 6y ago
Cant a $2 trillion dollar company fund this by itself??
- LASR 6y ago
  They can. But not clear to me if they will.
- myrandomcomment 6y ago
  Yes, but they make macOS not Linux. The amount of HW sales generated by Apple putting people on writing code to support Linux on their HW will be less then the Apple sales teams collective bar tab.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    > Yes, but they make macOS not Linux. And why is that? Instead of maintaining an entire PC OS themselves they could build macOS XI as a desktop environment on Linux and benefit from the vast ecosystem. But they don't, because...? Presumably because they value total control.
    - myrandomcomment 6y ago
      Because why? What would the motivation be? They are a company that goal is to make money for their shareholders. They purchased NeXT which was built on MACH+FreeBSD which was released in Sept. 1989 (work started in 1985), 3 years before Linux 1.0 was released. MACH+FreeBSD was a stable working platform for Apple when they acquired NeXT in 1997. There was zero reason for them to move working code to Linux 2.x (2.0 shipped in 1996). Heck I had a NeXt setup and a Slackware setup at that time and NeXT was better hands down. Today the kernel they used is tightly coupled to their HW and they have control over it for HW features like the T2. Why would a $2T company put themself at the mercy of a kernel maintainer to take their patches? The vast Linux ecosystem is of no use to Apple in most cases.
tobinfricke 6y ago
Does OS X still run on top of Darwin? If so, seems like a GNU/Darwin environment might be a better bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Since macOS runs on top of Mach, maybe we could port GNU/Hurd to it. /me exits the room.
squarefoot 6y ago
No, I wouldn't, not even if I could print billions in a snap. I'd rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields. No thanks, I'll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, no strings attached, which is neither the case with Apple as it is not with Google or Microsoft. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-apple-uses-its-app-store-copy-best-ideas/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...
- freehunter 6y ago
  >owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they would be open to allowing Windows to run on M1 if Microsoft developed a compatible version of Windows? I just want to make sure we're talking about the same company, because you seem to think we're talking about a company who runs in the face of competition, where the Apple I know confronts it head-on and goes out of their way to be compatible with the competitors.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    And they did all of that in response to community solutions that weren’t as solid as their first party support. They went out of their way to support and extend the viability of their users clear desire for dual booting, at that time of a much more formidable competitor than MS is today.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ineedasername 6y ago
Uptrenda 6y ago
I'd rather crowd fund a 100% open mobile chip. We've got 'open phones' already. But they're all still using qualcomm blobs. I think that is a huge vuln in our communications system. It's like if one company controlled the entire internet... Every piece of data being passed in and out of the same chip right down to the way radio channels are chosen, ciphers used, transports checked, and control messages processed... all hidden. Using so much insecure crap. How many people use phones for sensitive info? this stuff is swiss-cheese, nightmare material
renewiltord 6y ago
Interesting, $6300/mo currently committed. That's not insignificant.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  Pretty easy to "pledge" by clicking on a twitter poll. maybe 5% of that will actually turn into real money
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    True, true.
sien 6y ago
It doesn't have to be Apple. Apple is the company that is most interested in complete lock in. The Pinewood Pro, an ARM based Linux laptop, is currently pretty poor but it costs $US 200. For $US 400-600 perhaps someone could make a good Linux based ARM laptop. Amazon's Graviton 2 processors are meant to be pretty good. Perhaps they could do it. Or someone else. Ars has a review or the Pinebook Pro : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/pinebook-pro-review-a-200-foss-to-the-hilt-magnesium-chassis-laptop/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/pinebook-pro-review-...
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I don't quite believe the people who might want to run Linux on the M1 would consider Linux-on-"currently-pretty-poor" to be as similar as you make it out to be.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Pinebook is possible (as are most of the SBCs we have) because there is an almost endless supply of processors and SoCs designed for cellphones and tablets. If a company decides to make a part that's really focused on performance (and tuned to the OS) the same way the M1 is, and that matches the needs of a laptop, then it'd be possible. But, unless the part is incredibly well tuned for this scenario, it'll fail the same way as the Windows on ARM laptops have - same price as an x86 at meh performance.
smspf 6y ago
No. Because (in no particular order): - it shouldn't be the community's (or a crowd-funded dev's) responsibility to provide software support for hardware produced by one of the largest companies out there (bonus: with zero hardware specs); - Apple could make all this futile with a push of a button (SecureBoot can be disabled for now, but what guarantees are there this won't change?); - other arm64 machines will be available soon enough, most if not all of them with publicly available specs; - I do not own an M1 machine, nor do I plan on buying one; From a technical perspective, it's doable. Looks like it has UEFI and can run Windows. But we know nothing about possible silicon errata and required driver changes (or at least I don't). Anyway, I'm sure others would like to see this happening and would actually pay - hopefully the Twitter poll will reveal whether this is actually worth it. Disclaimer: I ported things to arm64 for a couple of years as a contractor.
- 1337_d00dZ 6y ago
  It isn't UEFI-based, it uses iBoot. Proprietary up and down.
  - smspf 6y ago
    My bad, I didn't do proper research when writing that comment. Thank you for the correction. And that's too bad, UEFI would have been easier to deal with imo.
- freehunter 6y ago
  >it shouldn't be the community's (or a crowd-funded dev's) responsibility to provide software support for hardware produced by one of the largest companies out there You must be thinking of a different Open Source community than I am, because the Open Source community I know thrives off of providing community support for software on major vendor's hardware.
  - smspf 6y ago
    I submitted arm64 patches to OSS ranging from the kernel to the most obscure userspace applications. All my contributions required some support or at least confirmation from the hardware vendor that my assumptions were correct - e.g. I submitted a patch for a GICv3 errata on a specific chipset; I had to confirm with the vendor that my findings were correct - sure, the patch "worked", but was it doing the right thing or just hiding the real issue? (e.g. why did writing zeros to some magic register fixed the problem we observed? was it a hardware issue or a software issue in the kernel? without feedback from the vendor, such things are a lot harder to isolate and fix properly). I agree about OSS thriving on major vendor hardware, it's just that Apple is special in this case and intentionally makes it hard for the OSS community to provide support for their hardware.
thekyle 6y ago
I think if you want a laptop to run Linux then you should just buy a laptop that comes with Linux. There are some pretty good options out there today (Dell XPS Dev Edition, ThinkPad, System 76, etc.) that you can buy from the manufacturer with Linux. Trying to take a laptop designed for macOS and turn it into a Linux laptop is going to be a painful and frustrating experience. It's like buying a Tesla and trying to put the Toyota navigation operating system on it. If you like Toyota's system then just buy a Toyota.
- someperson 6y ago
  The only reason those Linux laptops exist is because thousands of engineers (mostly volunteers but also commercial vendors like RedHat) improved Linux hardware support to the point commerical system integrators like Dell and System76 could select components well-supported by Linux to make the Linux laptops. Hypothetically if one-day the performance gap between Apple's chips and the rest of the industry cannot be ignored (contrary to Apple's marketing, it's not there yet) then having Linux well-supported will allow third-party vendors to provide on-going Linux support (because the daunting heavy lifting has been completed by marcan).
  - spear 6y ago
    A very important chunk of those developers who improved Linux hardware support work at Intel, and it shows -- the safest choice for Linux-compatible hardware is Intel (GPU, Ethernet, WiFi, ...). It's very doubtful that Apple is going to do the same.
offtop5 6y ago
No. Between VMs and other cheaper hardware this feels very silly to put it lightly
gaul 6y ago
I maintain mbpfan and have contributed to a few other Linux on Mac tools. Linux on Mac is not worth the effort. I ran Ubuntu on a 2011 MacBook Air and now run Fedora on a 2014 MacBook Air. There were several papercuts even with these relatively open models where it took a while to get suspend, trackpad, fan, webcam, wifi, etc. working properly. You will need to use binary drivers for the latter two features and some strange EFI bootloader. It seems that newer MacBook compatibility is worse: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux I use Debian on ThinkPad at work and plan to buy this or a Dell XPS for my next laptop.
- jseliger 6y ago
  I'd suspect, though, that most Linux people who considered running it on Apple hardware just shrugged and picked very similar PC hardware instead. Apple's m1 computers have no PC analogue and may not for some time. I've not used one but it appears they really are different, and better, than anything else in their class.
  - krageon 6y ago
    > Apple's m1 computers have no PC analogue And they don't need to. There's hardware available that works just as well, the buzzy marketing space around M1 is just that: marketing. Nobody needs this.
    - nspattak 6y ago
      As much as I do not really care about apple machines (and I neither own neither plan to own in the near future) it seems that the M1 laptops have a significant advantage in power consumption over amd64 laptops. And as a linux user, this is only gets worst with linux. I agree however that from a performance perspective the M1 seems to be competitive but not much faster than existing amd64 products.
      - krageon 6y ago
        I have had 24h+ battery life on a 64bit x86_64 machine - clearly good battery life is possible already. Edit: Yes, this was with the lid open and me doing things. Not videogames, just some light coding.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I wonder—how certain are we that Apple would be unwilling to assist with a project like this? They've said that Windows support is "up to Microsoft"[1], and they explicitly demonstrated Linux VM support at WWDC. Apple's primary mission is to sell hardware, and they know that Linux is important for certain consumers. I wouldn't expect Apple to write or finance any code, but I could certainly see them providing documentation, and making an engineer available to answer questions, if the request came from a suitably professional source. 1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-windows-for-m1-macs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind...
- woahAcademia 6y ago
  Something I'm just not understanding here. Why the obsession of single thread time in 2020? Give it 2 years and a competitor will beat it, Apple will be behind yet again and the price will be higher than ever. And again, this is only for single thread. My computer is already blazing fast and intense programs will use multi threads.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I don't know what computer you have, but it probably produces more heat and has a shorter battery life than the new M1 Macs. That's Apple's real accomplishment—they made an ARM chip that is (very) competitive with modern x86 processors, but which has the power efficiency typical of ARM. Will a competitor beat them in two years? It's possible, but I expect Apple to keep their lead for a while. CPU-wise, the iPhone has been well ahead of competitors for several years (even as other specs like memory lag behind), and no one else appears to be making serious inroads in this space.
    - woahAcademia 6y ago
      Yeah heat and battery life are non issues. The iPhone is a good example because supposedly it's the fastest, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's the animations, maybe it's the annoying Apple popups to sign in and update. Whatever the case, it doesn't make for a great device. (My experience is from 2018)
dev_tty01 6y ago
No, because it is already a unix OS. I imagine this is unpopular in HN, but what matters to me is just running on a good solid unix. I don't really care if it is a unix or Linux. What I want is shell scripting, pipes, forks, make, python, awk, grep, find, du, df, etc... Most anything that doesn't come pre-installed can be built from source. This wasn't true in the early days of OS X, but now the only things I find that don't work (that I care about) are tools that depend directly on devfs or other very Linux specific system APIs. Unix command line driven tools are a big part of my work and the native OS unix does everything I need it do. It seems a lot of people became committed to Linux coming from Windows with no unix system under the hood. I suspect if Windows had been unix based like Mac OS, Linux would not have become quite so popular. I'm sure avid Linux users will disagree, but for me the unix model command line interaction is what matters. Go easy, I'm not trying to make an argument for one unix over another. Just arguing that the need for a capable unix is already met by the native OS.
- thayne 6y ago
  Whenever I use the CLI on a mac, I am frustrated by the absense of all the GNU extensions that aren't there when I use the core utilities, and that the version of bash is ancient. I mean I still prefer it over windows, but it is not the same experience as linux.
  - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
    I’m not well-versed enough to know how well it measures up, but Mac switched to ZSH as default shell about a year ago.
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      I think zsh might well be more powerful than bash but it's extremely opinionated about how it does stuff (unless you want to go down a configuration rabbit hole) - for me, coming off 20+ years of bash muscle memory, it was unusable and I switched back.
  - IntelMiner 6y ago
sys_64738 6y ago
Usually the SoC vendor provides the drivers to the Linux kernel tree as they have access to the hardware register specs of the various constituents of said SoC. With these M1 chips, you're gonna take a long time to get to that level of understanding. I think Apple would likely need to provide Linux driver support to get this to a complete model. I'm sure the chip can be reverse engineered as they got Linux running on the T2 chip when it was jail broken.
fuzxi 6y ago
No. This would solve only one of my issues with using a Mac, which is that I want to use a Linux distribution. It doesn't affect the other issue, which is that Apple hardware, while very nice, is heavily overpriced and extraordinarily expensive to upgrade.
quickthrower2 6y ago
Hmm, donate to the homeless, or Apple?
skunkworker 6y ago
One thing that's stumped me on the Apple M1 chip design is how they are getting consistent timing on their different kinds of cores, with the layout being so asymmetric. Like the 8 core GPU, the Icestorm cores, the neural engine cores. Or is the fact that the physical distance is so close with the newer process that a small timing delay doesn't matter any more. If the firestorm cores are laid out correctly, those make sense to be symmetrical. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
You know, Apple runs a lot of servers too. Those servers run Linux. Why wouldn't Apple want to run Linux on their own chips? The power savings would be enormous. Apple could port Linux without much trouble. It's just Linux drivers -- they are very capable of the work. Something like a less beautiful Mac Mini M1 would probably suit their server needs decently. I wish they would sell the chips and boards as XServe again though, and perhaps offer some cloud computing too. I don't see it happening though -- they are going all in on the consumer market.
lisper 6y ago
I would much rather fund the development of a decent UI/UX and associated application suite that runs on Linux.
_ph_ 6y ago
I am absolutely willing to contribute to such an effort, even if I am happy to run Linux inside a VM on my mac. The M1 is the breakthrough CPU ARM needs to get truely established on the desktop and consequently gain more momentum on the server. As Linus said, developers need to develop on the architecture they want to deploy on. Having Linux natively run on the M1 would bring more Linux devs to the platform. Linus himself would be one of them. Also it means that if Apple deprecates older machines, there is a second life, even if one preferred MacOS in the first life of the machine. Especially, as Linux for most tasks can be run well on older hardware, just look how much is done with the PIs. Yes, this seems to be an uphill battle, but that is the reason funding is needed. And while there are many obstacles, there is a chance that it can be done and I am willing to take it with some of the funding. Apple supports Bootcamp on their Intel hardware. They don't seem to be fundamentally opposed to people running an other OS on their hardware. The best way to get any support from Apple for this, be it some documentation or some binary drivers, would to show clear interest and an existing community. P.S.: Any larger motion on running Linux on the M1 also would help pushing other vendors towards offering ARM-based systems for running Linux, as it shows a fundamental interest in such a platform.
BuzzwordBingo 6y ago
This guys tweets smell like an onlyfans come on.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
No. I appreciate the effort and the skill this would take, but since the bulk of the work would be reverse-engineering the custom GPU to get a driver working, I’m not super-interested in a solution that in an ideal world (assuming this takes months and not years), still won’t be as performant as a native driver (and performance is the whole reason to do this, so getting substandard performance confuses me — maybe focus on more open ARM-based machines and chipsets). There is also the ongoing work. Apple currently releases a new iOS AX chipset every year. It’s reasonable to expect something similar for the M series. That means additional work to reverse-engineer. I’m not trying to be negative, but the amount of money required for that kind of ongoing work really doesn’t seem ideal for crowdfunding. Someone downthread made a point that most of the good Linux hardware support in recent years has come from Intel. That’s a great point. For the work this would need to be really viable and not just a fun toy, this needs to be backed by a corporation or by Apple itself. If this were explicitly stated to be a toy/proof of concept goal, I might chuck $50 as a one time thing at it. Because why not. But for an ongoing thing with real support, I’m sorry, I don’t think this is feasible to undertake. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’ll add that expectations are a lot higher when you start out charging. And here’s the real thing: As happy as I am that people want to explore this and as open as I will be to experimenting with this stuff when people inevitably reverse-engineer the M1 enough to get X11 running (because that will happen without any crowdfunding campaign — we’ve had people successfully get Android and other versions of Linux running/booting on older iOS devices), the real future of Linux on M1 and macOS will continue to be through virtualization. QEMU and other hypervisors (including the native HyperKit) are how most Mac users interact with Linux anyway — and QEMU is quite performant. I get the appeal of doing something because you can. I get the appeal of wanting to use really nice hardware for other purposes. I don’t necessarily understand the appeal of running a Linux distro on bare-metal in a hacky way when running it virtualized is likely going to offer better performance than a reverse-engineer job funded by the potentially small Venn diagram of people who both care enough about Linux on the desktop to fund this sort of project AND who don’t have a problem buying hardware from a company that really gives zero fucks about FOSS ideals and is literally the antithesis of open hardware. (For the record, I’m not in that union because I personally don’t care about Linux on the desktop on modern Apple hardware (I do actively support people building PPC Linux distros for obsolete hardware).) Especially when macOS IS Unix and will be able to run most of the same userland packages as Linux once they are ported to ARM, albeit with a much prettier windowing system and much better commercial software support. If you’re someone who really loves KDE or GNOME or Xfce or whatever DE, well, you do you bro — happy for you. But you’re likely going to be way happier on a machine that doesn’t cost $1500 and isn’t designed in ways that actively discourage you from replacing that DE or make booting to another kernel more difficult.
k_bx 6y ago
I’d wait for Nvidia to produce a similar CPU for Windows and expect it to be open enough, meanwhile using amd64 on desktop
imtringued 6y ago
Come on Marcan, work on ARM's GPUs instead.
beshrkayali 6y ago
Yes. Because it'd be good to provide an alternative. Yes it's locked platform, but performance/price wise it'll be interesting to see what happens, and it's unlikely that we'll have an open alternative to it soon. People replying "no" seem to be doing so for ideological reasons with no regard to practicality. Obviously it'd be better if it was an open platform, but it isn't, and that's fine. Whatever you think of Apple, you have a very simple option of not using their products. I don't use a Mac for that reason. But with the performance and price of new M1 machines, I can definitely see a usecase, probably not as a daily driver, but I'd still need it to run linux natively. Anyway, people who will take on such an effort (with the appropriate funding) aren't necessarily going to be working on something else if this doesn't materialize. I don't think that asking this kind of question on twitter/hackernews is representative. Start with something and open up some way to fund it, then either continue or stop if it makes sense.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Having this project funded also would send a signal to Apple, that there is at least a group of people willing to put some of their money onto having Linux on their hardware and that there is interest, if they would give some support to the Linux project.
dusted 6y ago
Certainly not, I'd be willing to fund a Linux port to an open architecture. Apple is not bringing anything positive to the table, why in the world should we give them software for free to increase their proprietary hardware sales ?
nix23 6y ago
Why asking the community and not the Linux Foundation?
huhhuh 6y ago
marcan's patreon is up: https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
kazinator 6y ago
I would not fund this, because I would be suckered out of money by someone who not only fails to deliver, but who is surpassed by others who follow a conventional bazaar model. Successful Linux on Apple Silicon start as something almost completely useless that only hackers want to use (gets you a Bash prompt with GCC kind of thing), not that anyone wants to use. This is perfectly fine. Imagine if, in 1990-ish, Torvalds had announced, "I'm taking donations for making a Unix clone for 80386 PC's that everyone will want to use in production".
pers0n 6y ago
No. It would be an ongoing effort, there are plenty of platforms for Linux already and we have more flavors than needed as well

403 points by huhhuh 6y ago

dylan604 6y ago

I'm assuming this is for the kernel itself. After that, does the distro matter?

wmf 6y ago
Not really; all the distros use the same low-level components. There would be work on a per-distro basis to use the right #defines and patches though.
Geminidog 6y ago
A distro specifically targetting the apple form factor would be great. Even with linux as it is now there's still a huge number compatibility issues and jankiness at a per distro basis. A distro targetting just apple would greatly simplify what needs to be done and overall lead to a better user experience.

osy 6y ago

If there’s anyone in the community I’d trust to do this, it would be marcan, who, among countless other things, got Linux working with GPU acceleration on the PS4. https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016

shmerl 6y ago

Not sure. As long as Apple are hostile to running anything else on their hardware, reverse engineering it (for all the drivers and etc.) might be simply a waste of time and resources which could be better applied to something useful and actually friendly to openness. Especially since such reverse engineering will require constant chasing after changes to stay relevant.

evolve2k 6y ago
False. Respectfully it seems you didn’t read much of the thread. From the thread Apple have actively left the door open so other (currently non existent) OS could be booted, but as the author said, they’ve left it open but have not provided documentation. From the thread: “Linus himself has said he'd love to see Linux running on M1 macs, but doesn't think it'll happen. Not because they're locked down, but because Apple won't help us with documentation. But they at least did this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126018068955136/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551... The fact that Apple allows this in their secureboot policy is critical. Linux ports to game consoles / iPhones / etc are all fun and games, but you're always at the mercy of exploits, and the resulting cat and mouse game. That means all effort is wasted unless exploits keep up, and regular users would never want to do this and severely limit their access to official upgrades and such. But this isn't an issue with M1 macs.” Continues to discussions of limitations..
- shmerl 6y ago
  See the comment by Linus Torvalds about it. Leaving the door open is a poor excuse, because they can close it at any time putting all your invested effort down the drain. I'd say - don't waste your time.
  - internet2000 6y ago
    People have been saying that since the first implementation of System Integrity Protection/Gatekeeper 5 years ago. It's been long enough to the point I think your comments counts as FUD... yes they can do it, but there hasn't been any indication they would.
    - shmerl 6y ago
      I wouldn't trust Apple with anything. Lock-in is their bread and butter. Just because they didn't lock something down for some time means nothing given they are very aggressive with lock-in in other areas. You don't need FUD to know their infamous reputation.
lxgr 6y ago
> As long as Apple are hostile to running anything else on their hardware Are they? Apple isn't only iOS. Macs have always had unlockable bootloaders.

cute_boi 6y ago

No. I am not going to spend time on anything to that company tax every developer, takes 100$ yearly, virtue signals that they focus on privacy but phones home every time when binary is executed. I am sorry but I don't like to build home inside walls.

kmeisthax 6y ago

Wait, did Apple actually add an option for unsigned boot on M1? I remember their WWDC overview saying they were only going to have either iPhone-style latest-version-only or any-version options, and them later saying they'd only be supporting virtualization. If they have an owner override for the secure boot on M1, then that's absolutely fantastic, and I suppose puts more support around Apple's assertions that Microsoft needs to license Windows on ARM for M1 before we can have Boot Camp back.

Cu3PO42 6y ago
Yes, you can turn off all of the secure boot features. Booting other OSs is most likely coming.
- sethhochberg 6y ago
  Well, from what I understand its less "turn off secure boot features" and more "create/add a signature for your custom code to secure boot". https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/status/1326315741080150016?prefetchtimestamp=1605311534821 https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/status/13263157410... I can't find a primary source for the comment in the tweet, but it seems widely regarded as true at this point, so fingers crossed it pans out that way.
  - Cu3PO42 6y ago
    Hm, interesting. I can't seem to find my source anylonger either. The wording "kernel" does suggest to me that this is about a check a bootloader performs. If you were to boot another OS, you'd probably have a different boot loader as well. This tweet https://twitter.com/never_released/status/1332436771020435457 https://twitter.com/never_released/status/133243677102043545... from the same author suggests M1 is "not any more locked down than [...] Intel", so I'm not fully sure about the technical details, but in the end you should be able to boot your own code.
    - my123 6y ago
      The lowest security level, permissive, allows to mess with the Secure Boot policy at will. When you use kmutil to add a custom boot entry, enrolling the hash of your executable to the Secure Boot policy is handled automatically as part of the tool.

sweden 6y ago

Keep in mind that something as fundamental as the GPU driver wouldn't be available even they managed to get Linux up and running. And the M1 GPU is Apple's full custom GPU. Even if someone tried to reverse engineer a driver, it would take decades.

internet2000 6y ago
He seems relatively optimistic about getting a GPU driver going: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126014910701568 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126014910701568 I don't think it'd take decades. Nouveau was pretty ok after like 5 years, wasn't it?
- sweden 6y ago
  It has been longer than that and 3D support is still a bit shaky. And this is based on known hardware.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  And Nouveau has to work with dozens of Nvidia cards, not just one, and full of legacy nonsense. I'm fairly optimistic it won't take 5 years. (Especially not to the point of having a composited desktop; long tail game compatibility is less of a critical thing since, well, there are next to no games for ARM Linux...)
  - sweden 6y ago
    If you are just planning to hack something to show some basic and buggy 2D rendering, 5 years might be realistic.
    - marcan_42 6y ago
      "Just 2D" isn't really a thing, given modern GPU usage is all based on fully programmable 3D pipelines anyway. What I mean is the endless frustrating job of debugging closed source game corner cases (and often outright game bugs) is less critical here, since those games won't exist for ARM anyway. If it gets to the point where X11 and Wayland, desktop environments, common widget toolkits, browsers, media players, etc work smoothly and stably and perform well, then a lot of people will be very happy already. The long tail will always be there to chip at, and that will take years (not like vendor drivers are bug-free on any OS either!), but it's not a blocking factor to a usable desktop Linux experience. Lower-hanging fruit first.

heavyset_go 6y ago

If I thought there was a good chance of having the work upstreamed so that a mainline Linux kernel would eventually work on these computers, maybe. In my experience, there are not many ARM SoCs that have mainline support, even some of the Raspberry Pi boards don't, and they're some of the most popular ARM SoCs used for Linux. A lot of these projects get to the stage where a forked kernel will run on the SoC, but then support and attention peters out when it comes upgrading the fork or getting the work into mainline Linux because a new and better ARM SoC will be released, and then that requires the same amount of work on a new Linux fork. Since each ARM SoC released is a unique hardware configuration, a lot of this work will be for naught when Apple releases new SoCs that require the same amount of work, or even more work, to get Linux running on them.

sly010 6y ago
Wouldn't device tree solve (or at least mitigate) this problem somewhat? e.g. most broadcom chips have the same I2C hardware block, just mapped to a different memory address.
marcan_42 6y ago
This would absolutely all be done with upstreamability in mind, and upstreamed as soon as is practical. All that horrible forked kernel stuff is the realm of companies with closed development teams who don't care and just want a product out the door. The PS4 Linux stuff I did was not upstreamed for lack of time/interest, but I absolutely considered it being decent enough to upstream when writing it. PS3 Linux running under GameOS mode patches were indeed upstreamed (though there was a bit of a lawsuit along the way so all of my code ended up attributed to a friend instead since I was keeping a lower profile at the time...).
- lmm 6y ago
  > All that horrible forked kernel stuff is the realm of companies with closed development teams who don't care and just want a product out the door. Or people who gave upstreaming an honest try but got fed up. It's not the easiest project to contribute to.

sweden 6y ago

Btw, I hate twitter for this. Why isn't someone as technical as Marcan posting this on a blog? The world went mad.

kilbuz 6y ago
Eyeball count matters a lot.

johnmaguire2013 6y ago

Do we expect that this port will be complete before another chipmaker is able to achieve similar performance?

internet2000 6y ago
If mobile is any indication, expect the performance gap to widen as time goes on.
- oblio 6y ago
  Isn't Qualcomm kind of the same distance behind with the most recent hardware? I don't get the impression that the gap is widening, with the new high perf ARM cores it seems to be shrinking, even.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    The M1 represents Apple’s best effort running on the world’s most advanced manufacturing process. It’s a pretty safe bet that up until now the Qualcomm team hasn’t been given the freedom or the resources to make their best effort on a general-purpose desktop-class chip. Now that Apple has shown what is possible, you might think that the gloves are coming off. Especially if Microsoft and/or Samsung* indicate that they would buy such a chip at the price it would have to be sold at. * Microsoft and Samsung currently sell ARM-based laptops, with the Microsoft version being a slight modification of the Qualcomm chip in the Samsung.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

MR4D 6y ago

I think if Linux really wants to run well on consumer hardware - in other words, not servers - then we’ll have to build the hardware. No idea how that happens from a business perspective, but Raspberry Pi seems to be a great model. Perhaps a Pi Pro could be designed that meets some of those needs. The Zero is almost too mobile for a laptop to be usable, but who knows, maybe someone will come up with a unique design around it. But if we don’t control the hardware, the. It’s always going to be a second or third class citizen on mobile (laptops or tablets).

bronson 6y ago
The Raspberry Pi is not a good example if you want control of the hardware. Closed GPU and microcode, no chance of finding actual hardware documentation (beyond coarse schematics), and no way to buy components. Broadcom is not aligned with your goals.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

someperson 6y ago

By the way, there's a crowdfunding project to improve Linux touchpad support titled "Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?". I don't know how successful that project was, but it might provide some ideas around crowdfunding improved hardware support.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago

Most of the solutions in this thread are simply not viable. Stuff like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi are several magnitudes away from Apple's M1 SoC. No amount of hackerish imitation will bridge that gap, the laws of physics are not kind to consumer product hardware hackers. It is very obvious that most of the people commenting here has never held a soldering iron, nor taken a single computer architecture class. The only true way to match Apple on both performance and efficiency is to fund custom silicon. Cerebras needed 100 million to get started. Apple has already laid the architectural groundwork, a chip with similar performance numbers can probably be commissioned with ~50 million. Another 10-20 million for the emulator/hypervisor crowd to get x86 virtualization up and running. This could probably be done by existing players so the cost can be discounted. A crowd investing approach is most likely the best bet, with the initial rounds being led by a VC experienced in hardware. This is the Sputnik moment for open source. Should ACPI (and its associated lassiez-faire mindset) become obsolete as a standard, then general purpose computing on consumer devices would become history. All the comments about how Apple's Macs are not worth it are entirely missing the point. There is nothing comparable to Apple's M1 right now. Your Purism/Lambda labs/Starlabs/System76/Pine64 usual Clevo shell machine with Linux pre-installed would never be able to compete with a M1 powered system. This isn't about 16:10/3:2 display ratios, machined aluminium, or HN's favorite complaint: "build quality". Even a well-funded premium laptop company like Razer would not be able produce something to compete with the MBP if they don't have a similarly efficient chip. Forget about the bigger players like Lenovo and Dell. Intel and AMD dropped the ball big time, and if the open source community doesn't step up, then the future will be locked-down ARM systems. RISC-V will not be competitive for another half a decade and there is no guarantee that it won't be locked down if the community does not push back against the embedded hardware culture (where VHDL/Verilog libraries are referred to as "intellectual property") which pervades ARM's heritage.

ironmagma 6y ago
> This is the Sputnik moment for open source Does it need to be? x86 had every opportunity to become a locked-down, exclusive standard too, and it grew the way it did, into a cross-vendor standard, for a reason. Why will a similar trajectory not apply to the M1?

freehunter 6y ago

Question as long as we're on the subject... software companies can decompile competitor's software and figure out how they did something. Can Qualcomm or another chip maker "decompile" the M1 and figure out how Apple made it? Apple seems so far ahead of the other ARM chipmakers, can the other guys catch up by studying the M1 chip? Or is it too small/involved/etc to learn much from?

skunkworker 6y ago
If Qualcomm and other ARM chip designers haven't been able to keep up to pace while the last 8 years of iPhone CPUs have been near the top of their game, I don't see that changing anytime soon, unless they hire the right people to be in charge and even still, chips like Apple's A series are hand laid out and very, very time consuming to create. They have the ability to use a scanning electron microscope to look at the design, but even if you can start to reproduce their design (very time consuming) you're taking away resources from designing other processors. I asked a friend who used to work in chip design at IBM and was blown away by the design of the M1. according to my friend, the design is extremely custom and most likely hand laid out for their specific optimizations. Also they were stumped by how apple could be getting consistent timings between cores when the design isn't totally symmetric for a particular cluster.

rkeene2 6y ago

Linux has never worked well on Apple hardware. At one of my previous jobs I had the choice between a very high end "MacBook Pro" (1TB SSD, 16GiB RAM, etc) and a lower-end PC. Since my job was developing a Linux distribution from scratch, I was going to be running Linux on whatever I got. I (naively) assumed that since I saw a lot of MacBook Pro's at open source conferences and other places where open source software is written, and the MacBook Pro was x86-based that Linux would just work -- but it was a disaster.

m463 6y ago
I've actually had no problems - older macbook pro (2012?) only issue was the retina console fonts were really tiny. I used ubuntu and arch.

vzaliva 6y ago

Asking "Per month" for non-specified period of time is not a well posed question. Do you suppose to pay per lenght of developement period? Or you expect users to pay for the resr of their life for priveledge of using such port?

wtf77 6y ago

Can someone explain me the purpose of writing such this long thread....on Twitter?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
renewiltord 6y ago
The audience is on Twitter.

throwaway201103 6y ago

I'd throw some money at an OpenBSD port, but that's even less likely to happen IMO.

pengaru 6y ago

Most of what makes the M1 interesting is TSMC's 5nm process, why wouldn't we expect similar results from future x86 CPUs on 5nm or smaller. At least AMD is supporting upstream Linux development for GPU support, if you care about Free software and control over your computers, throw your money at companies better aligned with those goals. Don't reward Apple for being assholes. <=5nm AMD Zen SoCs will be fantastic as well

nicoburns 6y ago
The other thing that makes it interesting is getting performance comparable to the fastest Intel/AMD processors as 3Ghz. I expect that AMD will catch up with Apple on performance when they switch to 5nm, but Apple's low clock speed means they're likely to retain the power usage advantage.
hu3 6y ago
Is there an ETA for 5nm AMD SoCs?
- pengaru 6y ago
  Not AFAIK, but it's not like 7nm AMD SoCs are intolerable dogs. Most M1 vs. PC comparisons are being made against Intel's ancient process, for obvious Apple-favoring reasons.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    It’s mostly compared to Intel since there’s no official AMD support on MacOS whatsoever. You very well could compare hackintosh AMD to Apple’s M1, but it wouldn’t be comparing Apples to Apples. There are indeed AMD Windows comparisons, however[0]. 0: https://youtu.be/4MkrEMjPk24?t=10m39s https://youtu.be/4MkrEMjPk24?t=10m39s
- judge2020 6y ago
  Although Apple booked TSMC’s entire production line (for an unknown length of time)[0], this official graph looks like it indicates 5nm before 2022 (so 2021)[1]. 0: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... 1: https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=12m56s https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=12m56s

devwastaken 6y ago

Apple won't support it, therefore support and maintenance will be working around apples proprietary hardware and special drivers. Linux is not meant to live in that environment, I'd argue bettering support for other OEM's is a more fruitfull goal.

m00x 6y ago
If anyone has been following nvidia/linux story, this nails it on the head. Apple has never played well with FOSS and aren't going to start now. Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs, and the linux port will always be a shitty experience that takes up several weeks to get working properly, and then it'll be slower than expected. Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today it's a garbage experience that takes up hours/days of debugging to get right, and then it's still way worse than the mac/windows experience.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  The new XPS 15 I am writing this on works fine on Ubuntu. So did the Thinkpad I used before it and the XPS 13 before that. I spent 0 time debugging. I am not sure how the Windows experience would compare, but I am fairly happy, with maybe the exception of battery life, which from what I gather kinda sucks on the XPS.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  Apple have a FOSS kernel, one of the three remaining web renderers, CUPS, and a bunch more smaller things. They’re not the most religious of FOSS companies, but it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t play well in the places that they play. If you take FOSS to mean only GPL, then yes, I get your point.
  - mondoshawan 6y ago
    XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.

dilyevsky 6y ago

Twitter seems like a poor choice for this (anything really?). Is there a gofundme or something?

jhfdbkofdcho 6y ago
He should do a Patreon. Other people have done this sort of thing with this model over there. Seems sustainable.
- amedvednikov 6y ago
  Github Sponsors is better. No fees/VAT.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  Yeah forgot about this, not sure how well it would work for a project without a regular set of deliverables but probably better than gfm
comex 6y ago
The Twitter link is just a poll to survey interest. If you read further in the thread, he suggested the actual fundraising would be on Patreon.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

I used to run Ubuntu on an Intel macbook back around 2009 or so. In general stuff worked ok but little things like the touchpad was goofy and only basic functionality. webcam had all kinds of problems. Suspend/resume didn't really work. Battery life was terrible. Screen brightness buttons didn't work. So I'm sure it's cool and people will like it but no, I'm not paying $5 month for a crappy computer experience. Good luck though!

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
That sounds exactly like every Linux-on-desktop experience I've made with any hardware.
- thekyle 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you've tried. If you run Linux on a fairly generic computer (like an Intel NUC) then everything will work out of the box. The more you deviate from the average the more likely things will break.

Ecco 6y ago

I understand why the developer would like to get a recurring form of revenue, but as a consumer buying a subscription makes no sense at all! The goods obtained (Linux on MabBookAirX,Y) are very much non-recurring by nature...

zethraeus 6y ago
This is the newly-normal software subscription package or a stipend to bootstrap a project. Both feel pretty normal! Even if it is the former, updates & improvements take work. And they seem likely to be necessary here.
- someperson 6y ago
  The deliverables of any software project is obviously incremental in nature (EG, Initial boot with software graphics, 2D graphics, power saving features, 3D graphics etc), so the funding model makes sense

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

buryat 6y ago

Cant a $2 trillion dollar company fund this by itself??

LASR 6y ago
They can. But not clear to me if they will.
myrandomcomment 6y ago
Yes, but they make macOS not Linux. The amount of HW sales generated by Apple putting people on writing code to support Linux on their HW will be less then the Apple sales teams collective bar tab.
- dingaling 6y ago
  > Yes, but they make macOS not Linux. And why is that? Instead of maintaining an entire PC OS themselves they could build macOS XI as a desktop environment on Linux and benefit from the vast ecosystem. But they don't, because...? Presumably because they value total control.
  - myrandomcomment 6y ago
    Because why? What would the motivation be? They are a company that goal is to make money for their shareholders. They purchased NeXT which was built on MACH+FreeBSD which was released in Sept. 1989 (work started in 1985), 3 years before Linux 1.0 was released. MACH+FreeBSD was a stable working platform for Apple when they acquired NeXT in 1997. There was zero reason for them to move working code to Linux 2.x (2.0 shipped in 1996). Heck I had a NeXt setup and a Slackware setup at that time and NeXT was better hands down. Today the kernel they used is tightly coupled to their HW and they have control over it for HW features like the T2. Why would a $2T company put themself at the mercy of a kernel maintainer to take their patches? The vast Linux ecosystem is of no use to Apple in most cases.

tobinfricke 6y ago

Does OS X still run on top of Darwin? If so, seems like a GNU/Darwin environment might be a better bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

rbanffy 6y ago
Since macOS runs on top of Mach, maybe we could port GNU/Hurd to it. /me exits the room.

squarefoot 6y ago

No, I wouldn't, not even if I could print billions in a snap. I'd rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields. No thanks, I'll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, no strings attached, which is neither the case with Apple as it is not with Google or Microsoft. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-apple-uses-its-app-store-copy-best-ideas/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...

freehunter 6y ago
>owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they would be open to allowing Windows to run on M1 if Microsoft developed a compatible version of Windows? I just want to make sure we're talking about the same company, because you seem to think we're talking about a company who runs in the face of competition, where the Apple I know confronts it head-on and goes out of their way to be compatible with the competitors.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  And they did all of that in response to community solutions that weren’t as solid as their first party support. They went out of their way to support and extend the viability of their users clear desire for dual booting, at that time of a much more formidable competitor than MS is today.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ineedasername 6y ago

Uptrenda 6y ago

I'd rather crowd fund a 100% open mobile chip. We've got 'open phones' already. But they're all still using qualcomm blobs. I think that is a huge vuln in our communications system. It's like if one company controlled the entire internet... Every piece of data being passed in and out of the same chip right down to the way radio channels are chosen, ciphers used, transports checked, and control messages processed... all hidden. Using so much insecure crap. How many people use phones for sensitive info? this stuff is swiss-cheese, nightmare material

renewiltord 6y ago

Interesting, $6300/mo currently committed. That's not insignificant.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
Pretty easy to "pledge" by clicking on a twitter poll. maybe 5% of that will actually turn into real money
- renewiltord 6y ago
  True, true.

sien 6y ago

It doesn't have to be Apple. Apple is the company that is most interested in complete lock in. The Pinewood Pro, an ARM based Linux laptop, is currently pretty poor but it costs $US 200. For $US 400-600 perhaps someone could make a good Linux based ARM laptop. Amazon's Graviton 2 processors are meant to be pretty good. Perhaps they could do it. Or someone else. Ars has a review or the Pinebook Pro : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/pinebook-pro-review-a-200-foss-to-the-hilt-magnesium-chassis-laptop/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/pinebook-pro-review-...

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I don't quite believe the people who might want to run Linux on the M1 would consider Linux-on-"currently-pretty-poor" to be as similar as you make it out to be.
rbanffy 6y ago
Pinebook is possible (as are most of the SBCs we have) because there is an almost endless supply of processors and SoCs designed for cellphones and tablets. If a company decides to make a part that's really focused on performance (and tuned to the OS) the same way the M1 is, and that matches the needs of a laptop, then it'd be possible. But, unless the part is incredibly well tuned for this scenario, it'll fail the same way as the Windows on ARM laptops have - same price as an x86 at meh performance.

smspf 6y ago

No. Because (in no particular order): - it shouldn't be the community's (or a crowd-funded dev's) responsibility to provide software support for hardware produced by one of the largest companies out there (bonus: with zero hardware specs); - Apple could make all this futile with a push of a button (SecureBoot can be disabled for now, but what guarantees are there this won't change?); - other arm64 machines will be available soon enough, most if not all of them with publicly available specs; - I do not own an M1 machine, nor do I plan on buying one; From a technical perspective, it's doable. Looks like it has UEFI and can run Windows. But we know nothing about possible silicon errata and required driver changes (or at least I don't). Anyway, I'm sure others would like to see this happening and would actually pay - hopefully the Twitter poll will reveal whether this is actually worth it. Disclaimer: I ported things to arm64 for a couple of years as a contractor.

1337_d00dZ 6y ago
It isn't UEFI-based, it uses iBoot. Proprietary up and down.
- smspf 6y ago
  My bad, I didn't do proper research when writing that comment. Thank you for the correction. And that's too bad, UEFI would have been easier to deal with imo.
freehunter 6y ago
>it shouldn't be the community's (or a crowd-funded dev's) responsibility to provide software support for hardware produced by one of the largest companies out there You must be thinking of a different Open Source community than I am, because the Open Source community I know thrives off of providing community support for software on major vendor's hardware.
- smspf 6y ago
  I submitted arm64 patches to OSS ranging from the kernel to the most obscure userspace applications. All my contributions required some support or at least confirmation from the hardware vendor that my assumptions were correct - e.g. I submitted a patch for a GICv3 errata on a specific chipset; I had to confirm with the vendor that my findings were correct - sure, the patch "worked", but was it doing the right thing or just hiding the real issue? (e.g. why did writing zeros to some magic register fixed the problem we observed? was it a hardware issue or a software issue in the kernel? without feedback from the vendor, such things are a lot harder to isolate and fix properly). I agree about OSS thriving on major vendor hardware, it's just that Apple is special in this case and intentionally makes it hard for the OSS community to provide support for their hardware.

thekyle 6y ago

I think if you want a laptop to run Linux then you should just buy a laptop that comes with Linux. There are some pretty good options out there today (Dell XPS Dev Edition, ThinkPad, System 76, etc.) that you can buy from the manufacturer with Linux. Trying to take a laptop designed for macOS and turn it into a Linux laptop is going to be a painful and frustrating experience. It's like buying a Tesla and trying to put the Toyota navigation operating system on it. If you like Toyota's system then just buy a Toyota.

someperson 6y ago
The only reason those Linux laptops exist is because thousands of engineers (mostly volunteers but also commercial vendors like RedHat) improved Linux hardware support to the point commerical system integrators like Dell and System76 could select components well-supported by Linux to make the Linux laptops. Hypothetically if one-day the performance gap between Apple's chips and the rest of the industry cannot be ignored (contrary to Apple's marketing, it's not there yet) then having Linux well-supported will allow third-party vendors to provide on-going Linux support (because the daunting heavy lifting has been completed by marcan).
- spear 6y ago
  A very important chunk of those developers who improved Linux hardware support work at Intel, and it shows -- the safest choice for Linux-compatible hardware is Intel (GPU, Ethernet, WiFi, ...). It's very doubtful that Apple is going to do the same.

offtop5 6y ago

No. Between VMs and other cheaper hardware this feels very silly to put it lightly

gaul 6y ago

I maintain mbpfan and have contributed to a few other Linux on Mac tools. Linux on Mac is not worth the effort. I ran Ubuntu on a 2011 MacBook Air and now run Fedora on a 2014 MacBook Air. There were several papercuts even with these relatively open models where it took a while to get suspend, trackpad, fan, webcam, wifi, etc. working properly. You will need to use binary drivers for the latter two features and some strange EFI bootloader. It seems that newer MacBook compatibility is worse: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux I use Debian on ThinkPad at work and plan to buy this or a Dell XPS for my next laptop.

jseliger 6y ago
I'd suspect, though, that most Linux people who considered running it on Apple hardware just shrugged and picked very similar PC hardware instead. Apple's m1 computers have no PC analogue and may not for some time. I've not used one but it appears they really are different, and better, than anything else in their class.
- krageon 6y ago
  > Apple's m1 computers have no PC analogue And they don't need to. There's hardware available that works just as well, the buzzy marketing space around M1 is just that: marketing. Nobody needs this.
  - nspattak 6y ago
    As much as I do not really care about apple machines (and I neither own neither plan to own in the near future) it seems that the M1 laptops have a significant advantage in power consumption over amd64 laptops. And as a linux user, this is only gets worst with linux. I agree however that from a performance perspective the M1 seems to be competitive but not much faster than existing amd64 products.
    - krageon 6y ago
      I have had 24h+ battery life on a 64bit x86_64 machine - clearly good battery life is possible already. Edit: Yes, this was with the lid open and me doing things. Not videogames, just some light coding.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I wonder—how certain are we that Apple would be unwilling to assist with a project like this? They've said that Windows support is "up to Microsoft"[1], and they explicitly demonstrated Linux VM support at WWDC. Apple's primary mission is to sell hardware, and they know that Linux is important for certain consumers. I wouldn't expect Apple to write or finance any code, but I could certainly see them providing documentation, and making an engineer available to answer questions, if the request came from a suitably professional source. 1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-windows-for-m1-macs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind...

woahAcademia 6y ago
Something I'm just not understanding here. Why the obsession of single thread time in 2020? Give it 2 years and a competitor will beat it, Apple will be behind yet again and the price will be higher than ever. And again, this is only for single thread. My computer is already blazing fast and intense programs will use multi threads.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I don't know what computer you have, but it probably produces more heat and has a shorter battery life than the new M1 Macs. That's Apple's real accomplishment—they made an ARM chip that is (very) competitive with modern x86 processors, but which has the power efficiency typical of ARM. Will a competitor beat them in two years? It's possible, but I expect Apple to keep their lead for a while. CPU-wise, the iPhone has been well ahead of competitors for several years (even as other specs like memory lag behind), and no one else appears to be making serious inroads in this space.
  - woahAcademia 6y ago
    Yeah heat and battery life are non issues. The iPhone is a good example because supposedly it's the fastest, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's the animations, maybe it's the annoying Apple popups to sign in and update. Whatever the case, it doesn't make for a great device. (My experience is from 2018)

dev_tty01 6y ago

No, because it is already a unix OS. I imagine this is unpopular in HN, but what matters to me is just running on a good solid unix. I don't really care if it is a unix or Linux. What I want is shell scripting, pipes, forks, make, python, awk, grep, find, du, df, etc... Most anything that doesn't come pre-installed can be built from source. This wasn't true in the early days of OS X, but now the only things I find that don't work (that I care about) are tools that depend directly on devfs or other very Linux specific system APIs. Unix command line driven tools are a big part of my work and the native OS unix does everything I need it do. It seems a lot of people became committed to Linux coming from Windows with no unix system under the hood. I suspect if Windows had been unix based like Mac OS, Linux would not have become quite so popular. I'm sure avid Linux users will disagree, but for me the unix model command line interaction is what matters. Go easy, I'm not trying to make an argument for one unix over another. Just arguing that the need for a capable unix is already met by the native OS.

thayne 6y ago
Whenever I use the CLI on a mac, I am frustrated by the absense of all the GNU extensions that aren't there when I use the core utilities, and that the version of bash is ancient. I mean I still prefer it over windows, but it is not the same experience as linux.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  I’m not well-versed enough to know how well it measures up, but Mac switched to ZSH as default shell about a year ago.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    I think zsh might well be more powerful than bash but it's extremely opinionated about how it does stuff (unless you want to go down a configuration rabbit hole) - for me, coming off 20+ years of bash muscle memory, it was unusable and I switched back.
- IntelMiner 6y ago

sys_64738 6y ago

Usually the SoC vendor provides the drivers to the Linux kernel tree as they have access to the hardware register specs of the various constituents of said SoC. With these M1 chips, you're gonna take a long time to get to that level of understanding. I think Apple would likely need to provide Linux driver support to get this to a complete model. I'm sure the chip can be reverse engineered as they got Linux running on the T2 chip when it was jail broken.

fuzxi 6y ago

No. This would solve only one of my issues with using a Mac, which is that I want to use a Linux distribution. It doesn't affect the other issue, which is that Apple hardware, while very nice, is heavily overpriced and extraordinarily expensive to upgrade.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Hmm, donate to the homeless, or Apple?

skunkworker 6y ago

One thing that's stumped me on the Apple M1 chip design is how they are getting consistent timing on their different kinds of cores, with the layout being so asymmetric. Like the 8 core GPU, the Icestorm cores, the neural engine cores. Or is the fact that the physical distance is so close with the newer process that a small timing delay doesn't matter any more. If the firestorm cores are laid out correctly, those make sense to be symmetrical. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

You know, Apple runs a lot of servers too. Those servers run Linux. Why wouldn't Apple want to run Linux on their own chips? The power savings would be enormous. Apple could port Linux without much trouble. It's just Linux drivers -- they are very capable of the work. Something like a less beautiful Mac Mini M1 would probably suit their server needs decently. I wish they would sell the chips and boards as XServe again though, and perhaps offer some cloud computing too. I don't see it happening though -- they are going all in on the consumer market.

lisper 6y ago

I would much rather fund the development of a decent UI/UX and associated application suite that runs on Linux.

_ph_ 6y ago

I am absolutely willing to contribute to such an effort, even if I am happy to run Linux inside a VM on my mac. The M1 is the breakthrough CPU ARM needs to get truely established on the desktop and consequently gain more momentum on the server. As Linus said, developers need to develop on the architecture they want to deploy on. Having Linux natively run on the M1 would bring more Linux devs to the platform. Linus himself would be one of them. Also it means that if Apple deprecates older machines, there is a second life, even if one preferred MacOS in the first life of the machine. Especially, as Linux for most tasks can be run well on older hardware, just look how much is done with the PIs. Yes, this seems to be an uphill battle, but that is the reason funding is needed. And while there are many obstacles, there is a chance that it can be done and I am willing to take it with some of the funding. Apple supports Bootcamp on their Intel hardware. They don't seem to be fundamentally opposed to people running an other OS on their hardware. The best way to get any support from Apple for this, be it some documentation or some binary drivers, would to show clear interest and an existing community. P.S.: Any larger motion on running Linux on the M1 also would help pushing other vendors towards offering ARM-based systems for running Linux, as it shows a fundamental interest in such a platform.

BuzzwordBingo 6y ago

This guys tweets smell like an onlyfans come on.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

No. I appreciate the effort and the skill this would take, but since the bulk of the work would be reverse-engineering the custom GPU to get a driver working, I’m not super-interested in a solution that in an ideal world (assuming this takes months and not years), still won’t be as performant as a native driver (and performance is the whole reason to do this, so getting substandard performance confuses me — maybe focus on more open ARM-based machines and chipsets). There is also the ongoing work. Apple currently releases a new iOS AX chipset every year. It’s reasonable to expect something similar for the M series. That means additional work to reverse-engineer. I’m not trying to be negative, but the amount of money required for that kind of ongoing work really doesn’t seem ideal for crowdfunding. Someone downthread made a point that most of the good Linux hardware support in recent years has come from Intel. That’s a great point. For the work this would need to be really viable and not just a fun toy, this needs to be backed by a corporation or by Apple itself. If this were explicitly stated to be a toy/proof of concept goal, I might chuck $50 as a one time thing at it. Because why not. But for an ongoing thing with real support, I’m sorry, I don’t think this is feasible to undertake. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’ll add that expectations are a lot higher when you start out charging. And here’s the real thing: As happy as I am that people want to explore this and as open as I will be to experimenting with this stuff when people inevitably reverse-engineer the M1 enough to get X11 running (because that will happen without any crowdfunding campaign — we’ve had people successfully get Android and other versions of Linux running/booting on older iOS devices), the real future of Linux on M1 and macOS will continue to be through virtualization. QEMU and other hypervisors (including the native HyperKit) are how most Mac users interact with Linux anyway — and QEMU is quite performant. I get the appeal of doing something because you can. I get the appeal of wanting to use really nice hardware for other purposes. I don’t necessarily understand the appeal of running a Linux distro on bare-metal in a hacky way when running it virtualized is likely going to offer better performance than a reverse-engineer job funded by the potentially small Venn diagram of people who both care enough about Linux on the desktop to fund this sort of project AND who don’t have a problem buying hardware from a company that really gives zero fucks about FOSS ideals and is literally the antithesis of open hardware. (For the record, I’m not in that union because I personally don’t care about Linux on the desktop on modern Apple hardware (I do actively support people building PPC Linux distros for obsolete hardware).) Especially when macOS IS Unix and will be able to run most of the same userland packages as Linux once they are ported to ARM, albeit with a much prettier windowing system and much better commercial software support. If you’re someone who really loves KDE or GNOME or Xfce or whatever DE, well, you do you bro — happy for you. But you’re likely going to be way happier on a machine that doesn’t cost $1500 and isn’t designed in ways that actively discourage you from replacing that DE or make booting to another kernel more difficult.

k_bx 6y ago

I’d wait for Nvidia to produce a similar CPU for Windows and expect it to be open enough, meanwhile using amd64 on desktop

imtringued 6y ago

Come on Marcan, work on ARM's GPUs instead.

beshrkayali 6y ago

Yes. Because it'd be good to provide an alternative. Yes it's locked platform, but performance/price wise it'll be interesting to see what happens, and it's unlikely that we'll have an open alternative to it soon. People replying "no" seem to be doing so for ideological reasons with no regard to practicality. Obviously it'd be better if it was an open platform, but it isn't, and that's fine. Whatever you think of Apple, you have a very simple option of not using their products. I don't use a Mac for that reason. But with the performance and price of new M1 machines, I can definitely see a usecase, probably not as a daily driver, but I'd still need it to run linux natively. Anyway, people who will take on such an effort (with the appropriate funding) aren't necessarily going to be working on something else if this doesn't materialize. I don't think that asking this kind of question on twitter/hackernews is representative. Start with something and open up some way to fund it, then either continue or stop if it makes sense.

_ph_ 6y ago
Having this project funded also would send a signal to Apple, that there is at least a group of people willing to put some of their money onto having Linux on their hardware and that there is interest, if they would give some support to the Linux project.

dusted 6y ago

Certainly not, I'd be willing to fund a Linux port to an open architecture. Apple is not bringing anything positive to the table, why in the world should we give them software for free to increase their proprietary hardware sales ?

nix23 6y ago

Why asking the community and not the Linux Foundation?

huhhuh 6y ago

marcan's patreon is up: https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan

kazinator 6y ago

I would not fund this, because I would be suckered out of money by someone who not only fails to deliver, but who is surpassed by others who follow a conventional bazaar model. Successful Linux on Apple Silicon start as something almost completely useless that only hackers want to use (gets you a Bash prompt with GCC kind of thing), not that anyone wants to use. This is perfectly fine. Imagine if, in 1990-ish, Torvalds had announced, "I'm taking donations for making a Unix clone for 80386 PC's that everyone will want to use in production".

pers0n 6y ago

No. It would be an ongoing effort, there are plenty of platforms for Linux already and we have more flavors than needed as well