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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 produ
by 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 agoIt isn't UEFI-based, it uses iBoot. Proprietary up and down.
- smspf 6y agoMy 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 agoI 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.
- CountSessine 6y agoFor the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with mainstream software available for it), I don't see it happening in the next 5 years. Its a chicken-and-egg problem that Apple is uniquely suited to address with their vertical control over the Mac ecosystem (hardware/dev tools/OS/competitive software). Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service. But this: - 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?); This is huge. We could all contribute to getting Linux ported to M1, and then Apple could shut us down with little or no effort. And ... maybe they won't? They probably won't? But who knows? Why build an ecosystem around a hostile hardware vendor?
- nordsieck 6y ago> Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service. I have heard a theory that ARM Servers have a difficult time because there aren't really many developer machines that run ARM. With Apple changing that, there is a chance that the next round of ARM server chips will have better success.