27 ms·

Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project

654 points by jackhalford 6y ago

mhh__ 6y ago
What are the odds Apple shit on this?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Why? If they'd intended to shut this down, they would have a locked down boot loader like on iOS. Instead they deliberately built a boot loader which supported things like this.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    The engineers who did that probably don't make the decision on things like this. When have Apple been open about anything recently?
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      This took time and resources to make happen. This isn't some switch a rogue engineer pulled while management wasn't looking. Not only did it take time and effort to implement, they've also documented it. > When have Apple been open about anything recently? Darwin, WebKit, Swift, LLVM, This effort. Apple keeps iOS fairly tight the Mac, not so much.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        Apple aren't upstreaming their backends to LLVM, for example
        ogre_codes 6y ago
        What happened to "When have they been open about anything?" Wonderful moving goal post here.
  - ciwolsey 6y ago
    Get people on board first. Lock it down once it's too late and everyone is invested.
    - machello13 6y ago
      So your opinion of Apple is just that they're pure evil, or what?
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      That hasn't been their MO, historically. On macOS everything that's locked down by default can be unlocked (at least that I've encountered) regarding running software or other OSes on the hardware. They've made it "secure" by default, but not locked down, it's a simple switch to open it up. If, say, the iPad or iPhone had gone this route (started off as open as Android and then became locked down) you might have a point. But they didn't, they started off restricted and have only (gradually, and to a limited degree) been opened up.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > Get people on board first. Lock it down once it's too late and everyone is invested. Examples? Been using the Mac for 15 years and haven't observed this myself. iOS was more or less locked down from go, but they never did some kind of bait-and-switch.
  - fanatic2pope 6y ago
    It wouldn't be unprecedented. Sony released the Playstation 3 with the ability to run Linux and removed it later using a firmware update. https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-history/ https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-histo...
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      The action isn’t unprecedented. But that’s a separate company. What has Apple done to make people expect this behavior when they’ve not done it before?
  - m463 6y ago
    That can be changed in a software update. Is this likely? probably not, however I can imagine scenarios (lets say a worm gets out) where it might "make sense"
nickelcitymario 6y ago
> In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. Well, this is exciting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would take on this challenge, but it's exciting all the same.
- flatiron 6y ago
  judging by other open source reverse engineerd GPU drivers its a massive undertaking. i also looked at a shot of the chip and see lots of neural networking functionality, i wonder what sort of special drivers stuff like that needs. i just feel like the hardware is so specialized without apples help it would take a lot for it to be a killer linux laptop.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Reverse engineering of the Neural Engine is already under way: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/tree/master/ane https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/tree/master/ane
    - skavi 6y ago
      wow, and by George Hotz of PS3/comma.ai fame too.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You can't just not use that functionality. But getting the GPU to work is essentially required.
TimTheTinker 6y ago
Looks like his donation/sponsorship page is down :-( I’m super excited someone is taking this on. Hopefully Apple contributes drivers as well — they only stand to gain from the success of this project.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Wouldn't the sponsorship page be this: https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
  - my123 6y ago
    https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan is a better option. (much lower fees present there)
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I think the Patreon is the best place to donate https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  There's also a GH Sponsors page: https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan
codetrotter 6y ago
I was wondering if this was the project of the guy that talked about doing this a while back, which I read about here on HN and indeed it is. Announcement post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-launch-45852093 https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-launch-45852093
- spurgu 6y ago
  I came here thinking this was a separate attempt and was going to share that Marcan has already started working on it and that there could be some collaboration.
Badfood 6y ago
I'll buy our whole company these macs in a heartbeat if this becomes good enough
- deadmutex 6y ago
  Why not support a hardware vendor that actually cares about linux?
  - Klonoar 6y ago
    People value industrial design, for one.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Being able to have someone on call for support is pretty valuable too, no?
    - deadmutex 6y ago
      Is the Mac laptop ID significantly different than other laptops, e.g. PixelBook Go? I have a MBA, and was super surprised at how think it was compared to my Pixelbook. I would say that Apple laptop ID nothing special, and is lacking things like a touchscreen, etc. I would say that M1 has good performance ON MAC SOFTWARE, which has been tuned for it (and vice versa). It is unknown if linux will perform as well on it.
      - Klonoar 6y ago
        The PixelBook is closer, sure - though still not as great when it comes to, say, the trackpad. Apple also still has a near-monopoly on amazing screens. These might seem inconsequential when you scan them on a list, but the entire package really adds up. Anyway, with that all said, the thread in question is about vendors who explicitly support Linux, which is a very different story. If I had to pick anything in that realm that I'm excited about, it's... maybe Purism's upcoming Librem 14, mostly due to them trying to do something custom. Relies on them actually shipping it, tho. I remain surprised that System76 hasn't done more towards a non-rebranded laptop shell. I really like their desktop offerings, but I've no need for a desktop in my life.
libria 6y ago
Very interesting overall. > Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? > Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. This looks like the major bullet point. The wiki is currently empty, but while it's WIP, it would be nice to see some of the major milestones or breakdown of the goal mentioned above. Best of luck to Hector and the contributors!
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? Basically nothing can be known to be indefinite. But Apple has signaled that they'd be open for ARM Boot Camp if Microsoft was to sell non-OEM Windows for ARM licenses. So it seems like Apple might consider multi-booting a feature.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  >How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? Considering the level of GUI work that outright supports this feature in recovery mode on an M1, I'm inclined to think it's not an oversight.
- Bluerise 6y ago
  First of all the feature wasn't available in the initial Big Sur release and it only got available during the Betas for the first minor patch. Second of all, some Apple developer stated on Twitter that (during M1 unveil) he's finally able to show all the boot policy work they worked on the past year(s) to allow users to boot foreign OSes and without opening up holes for attackers. Basically it boils down to: they could have just used iBoot without changing it at all to keep it as a brick like the iPhone/iPad/Watch, but instead they invested plenty of resources to allow it. With all that work done to allow it, I'm sure there'll be plenty of people inside of Apple who'd protest if someone changes their mind and decides all this has to go away.
jasoneckert 6y ago
On the About page: "...requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform" It "is" a well-documented platform. I'm hoping that Apple makes it available to the open source community to make Linux on M1 happen sooner than later.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  How is it documented if there is so software developers manual for the ISA, optimisation manual for the uarch, and no documentation at all on how the subsystems like the neural accelerator works let alone how to access it. I assume you mean that Apple have it internally, but I wouldn't assume it's any good. I would also love to see someone (I haven't got and can't afford one) try and fuzz it for undocumented instructions.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    There's no software developer's manual for the ISA? Arm don't release any documentation on their ISA?
    - hrydgard 6y ago
      The GPU ISA (yes, GPUs have ISAs) is undocumented.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        Even Nvidia document theirs now, and the firmware details are on GitHub to some extent for the Nouveau guys.
        monocasa 6y ago
        > Even Nvidia document theirs now If you're talking about ptx, that's not the hardware ISA, but instead an IR for their shader compiler.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Just a reminder, the Patreon is not fully funded. If people really want to see this happen, dropping a couple dollars a month to help support the project is the best way. https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
- my123 6y ago
  With https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan also present as an option.
  - boogies 6y ago
    Which IIUC should give him a larger fraction of your donation (all but payment processor fees for now, minus 10% after the beta ends), or you could pledge at https://liberapay.com/on/github/marcan/ https://liberapay.com/on/github/marcan/ and let him choose to take whatever fraction he wants (also excluding processor fees, forever ±).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- newacct583 6y ago
  No, Apple actually supporting it (in the same way that Intel, AMD, ARM/Linaro et. al. staff resources to support their hardware on Linux) is the best way. But paying productive engineers via crowdfunding isn't an awful workaround.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    We can't change what Apple does. Gnashing your teeth about that isn't going to help. What we can do is support this Patreon.
    - ungamed 6y ago
      Or do not buy the hardware..
djhworld 6y ago
Really hope they pull this off. The initial target of the M1 Mini is probably the smart choice, I'd imagine all the power management stuff in the laptops might be a big task to reverse engineer
- marcan_42 6y ago
  It's also the simplest hardware (no keyboard/trackpad/internal screen/camera to worry about), and no-PM Linux will be useful already on the Mini (no so much on laptops).
reikonomusha 6y ago
For projects like these, I don’t know why Apple doesn’t just step in and help. What have they got to lose?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I agree. At the very least, they should be a corporate sponsor for Marcan's Patreon. Ideally they should just hire him and provide him with internal resources to work on it. Even if Apple doesn't benefit from Linux running on bare metal, many of these efforts will benefit Linux running inside a VM as well.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I don't think hardly anything here will help Linux running in a VM FWIW. The unknowns are mainly the Apple specific IP blocks which aren't exposed to VMs.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      Depends if you care about having graphics or audio in your Linux VM. Currently I think Linux VMs are just console only. Also, there is a lot of accelerated hardware which the CPU has which would be nice to get access to inside a VM.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        I still would be extremely surprised if the GPU is designed to be virtualized that way. If the host OS is using those IP blocks, you can't just give them to the guest.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Or they could donate anonymously, supporting its development without their official logo.
  - INTPenis 6y ago
    It's also bonus points towards sustainability to ensure their devices have a life after obsolescence. Honestly Apple could use some of those points considering how many little plastic parts they force people to buy.
depablo 6y ago
Awesome project. Also, nice logo. Given the seemingly unbeatable performance of Apple Silicon (judging by reviews), this would remove one of the bigger pain points of having a Mac. Some projects just don't run on macOS - either due to a community lack, or due to political reasons (e.g. CUDA). I wonder why Apple does not seek to support projects like this. Will be interesting to see how hard it is to bring this to a useable state. Thanks for the effort and looking forward to hearing more about the project!
- marcan_42 6y ago
  Credit for the logo and website goes to soundflora* ! She's at https://soundflora.tokyo/ https://soundflora.tokyo/ and she also makes some really awesome music. I was going to say I don't think you'll see CUDA any time soon on M1 machines but... apparently Nvidia does have a beta AArch64 driver these days. TIL. I wouldn't hold my breath on that working well given that it's, well, the Nvidia blob... but it might (once we get Thunderbolt working, with an eGPU). I avoid Nvidia GPUs these days, so if an eGPU demo does happen, it'll more likely be an RX 5700XT running the open source amdgpu drivers, which I do happen to have lying around :-)
actuator 6y ago
It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story. Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there. We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I think the situation is simple: People don't care whether their laptop is ARM, x86 or z80. They want to know: 1. will it run my apps? 2. does it have good overall performance (in a broad sense, not just compute)? 3. is it a competitive value? We've known about the potential strengths of ARM for decades, but nobody has been able to implement it in a way that checks all three boxes until now. MS was putting out devices that checked 0/3 boxes
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  Maybe it is not Qualcomm that is to blame, but it is Apple to be praised. But I guess I am talking glass half full / half empty here, so nevermind :D
  - actuator 6y ago
    Yeah, Apple definitely deserves a lot of praise on these chips. They are not even incremental improvements but drastic ones which will probably change the landscape completely. Like AWS was working on their own ARM chips, they now have a benchmark to go against if they even can. In DCs a lot of spend is on just power consumption. If these chips can really drive compute in servers at a much lower power consumption, it is just not monetarily good for the company but good for the planet too.
  - esclerofilo 6y ago
    I think they are to blame. Qualcomm is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) manufacturer of ARM chips, yet they still simply use reference designs. Besides, for the next flagship (Snapdragon 888) they switched to Samsung 5nm (inferior to TSMC 5nm) and they're not even using the ARM-recommended 8MB L3 cache, but staying with 4MB. It seems benchmarks for tha SoC aren't bad, but it really shows that they aren't really trying to catch up to Apple. (My source is https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-snapdragon-888-deep-dive https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-snapdragon-888...)
corytheboyd 6y ago
I hope this and projects like it spearhead a movement of ARM laptops outside of the Apple-sphere. I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. Seems right up their alley. Also worth noting that I understand that System76 and Apple are not comparable companies. One is a humble operation installing a custom Linux build on rebranded hardware, and the other is a vertically integrated powerhouse building it’s own hardware.
- fsflover 6y ago
  > I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. They are not the first already: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Ah yeah pine64! But how does it compare to the M1 performance? I should have explicitly stated that these ideal computers would match or outperform Apple’s hardware, since that is very much the case with current intel based MacBooks
    - spurdoman77 6y ago
      Pinebook does the typical "as cheap and low-end as possible" linux stuff. I would love to see ARM linux hardware manufacturer who would aim to create a high-end fanless powerhorse like mac mini.
      - corytheboyd 6y ago
        You and me both. I believe it will happen eventually, it seems inevitable now
      - esclerofilo 6y ago
        Minor correction: The mac mini isn't fanless
JosephRedfern 6y ago
> As long as no code is taken from macOS in order to build the Linux support, the end result is completely legal to distribute and for end users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS. Please see our Copyright & Reverse Engineering Policy for more information. This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour? Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific, driver-y bits excluded? [0] https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html
- saagarjha 6y ago
  All the driver stuff is shipped as closed-source kexts, and interesting proprietary hardware features like GXF are missing too from the public sources for the most part.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  Worth noting that that OSS release does not include M1 support (and Apple does not open source most of their drivers, just the kernel core), although it does include (partially redacted, not buildable, because Apple) support for other mobile chips using the same CPU cores. Perhaps the next OSS dump will finally have the M1 bits. But we're definitely on our own for all of the fun stuff beyond "Linux boots with a serial tty". At least some really basic parts are useful as a hardware reference, e.g. things related to the interrupt controller, UARTs, and CPU quirks/errata workarounds. That said, their license is incompatible with the GPL, so we cannot take any code directly. I documented this explicitly in our copyright policy: https://asahilinux.org/copyright/ https://asahilinux.org/copyright/
turbinerneiter 6y ago
A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a platform whos creator is unwilling to provide support. I think it's part of the Linux ethos to run on everything, but I also think this kind of effort is ... not wasted, but I feel like it could be spent more efficiently. Still looking forward to hear about the first successful boots and the epic reverse engineering feats. Just wish this kind of stuff wouldn't be needed anymore and companies would just release their specs already.
- pkulak 6y ago
  Mac hardware is just so damn good though. And everywhere. I absolutely agree with what you're saying... but man, Linux working well on an M1 Mac would be my ideal machine.
  - rightisleft 6y ago
    is it? my 2016 macbook was the worst apple product i've ever owned...
    - midrus 6y ago
      Worst apple product is still far ahead of most non-apple alternatives. At least laptops wise.
      - Wohlf 6y ago
        I really don't find them any better than the competing products in the same price range these days, but you do you.
        samatman 6y ago
        Resale value is the closest thing to an objective measure we're going to get. The butterfly keyboard era Macs took a nosedive in this metric, because they were bad computers. I have what turns out to be the last Intel 16" MacBook Pro which Apple will ever build. I suspect the Intel part of it will make its resale value kind of grim, but the keyboard, speakers, monitor, build quality: all great. MacBooks traditionally resell at a significant premium, because they're good computers with a long useful life. I expect this will be true for the M-series as well, although it's too soon to know.
eitland 6y ago
I must say I am tempted to buy a Mac mini and if this project succeeds it might be the thing that triggers it. That or Apple making CMD - tab customizable so I can fix it on my desktop ;-)
CyberRabbi 6y ago
Commendable effort but as someone who has spent significant time dealing with closed hardware, I believe that it is more efficient and beneficial long term to build a platform that supports linux. I support this project anyway because non-linear outcomes occur often enough in the marketplace of reality. Who can really know what will evolve from this work?
balozi 6y ago
This is one of those things that sound interesting but only from a technical point. Why would anyone take on this level of risk? In a few years they will be complaining on HN about being kicked off Apple silicon.
- pkulak 6y ago
  Then just pop Mac OS back on it and sell it for 80% of it's new value. Really almost no risk at all, as far as I'm concerned.
  - balozi 6y ago
    However noble, the risk I see is for untold man-hours and resources that will be expended on an ill-fated adventure. This project requires tons of positive tech-community spirit, which apple isn't exactly known for.
    - pkulak 6y ago
      Fair enough. But I'd counter saying that you shouldn't try something like this unless the adventure itself appeals to you.
miguelr2201 6y ago
Interesting project and wish them best of luck. On the claim: >However, no modern device is “fully open” - no usable computer exists today that has completely open software and hardware (as much as some companies want to market themselves as such) Doesn't RaptorCS[1] offer a fully open modern device? Or is there a closed part I'm not aware of? [1] https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/
- marcan_42 6y ago
  Is their silicon design open? Their internal boot ROM? Their microcode? :-) What I'm trying to say there is, there is always a line. There is always some secret sauce. Even if you have fully open HDL, you won't have documentation for the proprietary fab processes required to implement it in a way that performs. Even if the fab process were somehow fully open, you may not have public documentation on how to manufacture some of the required chemicals and raw materials available. And so on and so forth. The rabbit hole always goes deeper, and the lines between parts aren't entirely bright, and so making some kind of blanket statement that one is "fully open" is usually a marketing tactic and not actually truthful. That said, yes, Raptor stuff is pretty much as open as it gets, today, in the high-end space. They are pretty much the only modern platform which doesn't use blobs to train RAM on boot, for example. They are not perfect - for example, their motherboard schematics are only available to owners, so I assume they are not redistributable under an open hardware license.
  - miguelr2201 6y ago
    Oh, I see. That is definitely a lot deeper in the stack that I was thinking of. Thanks for the comment.
1-6 6y ago
Asahi, Super Dry! Sorry, had to say this.
blinkingled 6y ago
This is good of course but it's an uphill battle - just reverse engineering the Apple GPU and making a decent driver for it in itself is going to be a huge problem. Look at nouveau - we still don't have any way to reclock NVidia GPUs. Getting good experience and good battery life with reverse engineered hardware is impossible. Then there's going to be new gen hardware and firmware updates for existing ones to keep up with.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  Thankfully, Apple loads most firmware for us in the bootloader, so we don't have the blob problem that Nouveau does. This includes parts related to power management. Nouveau has an uphill battle because Nvidia is actively hostile, and because they have to support dozens of chips. We are starting with one. I do not expect for us to end up in a Nouveau situation with poor performance/PM over time. It will take time, of course, but I fully expect we will make it happen.
  - blinkingled 6y ago
    Very happy to hear you're optimistic - more power to you! I might even sign up if I end up buying one of the m1 Macs :) Is the WiFi chip in the M1 Macs a solved problem or did that need to be written from scratch as well? Just curious.
- SXX 6y ago
  On top of what Marcan posted: keep in mind that back when Nouveau development started Linux open source graphics stack was young and had no mature drivers to look at. Only in last 4 years graphics stack feature and performance parity thanks to Intel, AMD and Valve. Today LLVM is well-developed for GPU drivers and there is tons of other ready-to-use code for OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. E.g RADV was initially created by two developers only and now it is better than AMD official Vulkan implementation. On top of this modern GPUs are now less complex to develop drivers because they'e decoupled from display controllers and hardware no longer have fixed pipelines.
fareesh 6y ago
Do the cons of open sourcing device drivers really outweigh the pros? Good / popular hardware will end up benefitting from all kinds of contributions from interested folks. Plus the recruitment pool and onboarding of new talent expands by a reasonable amount, in theory. Is it really the case that somewhere in the drivers there is some secret sauce that is so ingenious that if the competition got wind of it, it would give them free access to a lot of hard work and research, and enable them to catch up? I guess I've never really dealt with super secret proprietary magic beans before so I can't relate.
rickdg 6y ago
Given the level of technological proficiency of people interested in this project, why Patreon tough? A platform that carries all the fees back to the person you're trying to support and puts their own cut on top for basically hosting a few iframes? Is this really the best way to provide some monthly income? I
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I also have GitHub Sponsors! https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan I want people to pick whatever platform they are comfortable with, and Patreon is very popular, so I offer both. But yes, in principle GitHub sponsors should have lower overhead (I'll have to wait until I get income from both to see exactly how it works out after the intermediaries involved).
jd3 6y ago
This is really cool! Does anyone know why a similar project doesn't exist currently using the open source distribution of Apple's Darwin operating system? It has always seemed strange to me that their open source BSD OS does not have an official distribution channel with a built in package manager like macports, pkg-src, gentoo prefix, etc. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin existed for awhile, but seem to have both been abandoned now. X11 (including thousands of open source and graphical x11 programs), plan9port, and other open source software projects already compile and run fine on macOS, so this has always seemed like something that _should_ be possible but has never gained traction due to what I guess is lack of documentation and Apple's lackluster open source website.
- boogies 6y ago
  The world’s largest corporation is happy to accept gratis open source labor, but they’re rather actively antagonistic to Free/Libre software (eg. trying to eradicate strong copyleft from macOS, not only shipping ancient bash, etc. but prohibiting third parties from shipping it through the App Store without mandatory DRM). The lackluster support for open source distributions is virtually certainly intentional. The other BSDs are the closest you’ll get.
- wmf 6y ago
  Darwin isn't a good OS.
  - jd3 6y ago
    Fair point! I guess what I'm getting at is the fact that, even though Darwin isn't great, we know that it's building and running on all production M1 macs, can run X11, etc. which generally seems like what this project is attempting to do. I'm not a systems software engineer[0], so I'm not positive where the new drivers live for the M1 (are they in Darwin? proprietary/exclusive to macOS?), but if those drivers are available for use already (either legally through Darwin or through copying files from macOS into Darwin or something), it seems like it might make sense to look into making a Darwin distribution rather than reserve engineering the new M1 hardware in order to add some drivers and userland programs to what is essentially another Arch Linux distribution (from what I've read about Asahi thus far). I think the Asahi project definitely makes sense if the primary goal is to run Linux on M1 macs for its robust server/enterprise capabilities, but if the goal is to just have a dual-bootable open source desktop operating system, I feel like Darwin might actually be the easier choice here. [0]: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.pdf
gorkish 6y ago
Apple needs to give a little here. I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside of Apple's labs. > In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. After the street cred of getting a marginally usable OS up and running evaporates, why continue to take the effort of great engineers and waste it developing an ecosystem that doesn't care? It makes no sense to me.
- monocasa 6y ago
  > This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. I think marcan has proven he has the chops for pieces like that. The ps4 linux port had him reverse engineering the ISA for the custom risc cores that are some of the deepest firmware of a pretty modern AMD GPU. Like even the open source drivers just treat this stuff as blobs and moves on with their life, but he had to port a fix over and showed off more publicly than anyone else had. This Apple stuff is for sure more work, but it all seems within his wheelhouse. Hence the patreon I think, attacking the size of the problem with some funding to make it more viable than a side project.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Also, it sounds like he just loves doing this. Everyone is treating him like a martyr but he’s doing what he’s good at and we’re all benefiting.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Apple sells hardware and now services. Software seems to be a cost center. So I doubt a third party OS like Linux will ever be a priority for them in their consumer products.
  - 6y ago
hurt_and_afraid 6y ago
On one hand I'm very excited about the enormous amount of innovation involved in Apple Silicon, and excited about how this will direct the future of the computer manufacturing industry. On the other hand, I'm still wary of buying anything from one of the world's most anti-consumer companies. I'm not the least-bit confident that Apple won't later rescind the ability to boot other Operating Systems. This kind of benevolence is entirely uncharacteristic of a company so fond of walled-gardens.
readams 6y ago
Solution: don't buy locked down Apple hardware. Yes, the chips look nice but it's just really unfortunate that they're from Apple and so come with all the Apple baggage. Just wait a couple years for competing chips that won't have the baggage.
- WantonQuantum 6y ago
  For what problem is this the solution?
  - wmf 6y ago
    Running Linux on your hardware?
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    The problem is a weakened or lack of reliable Linux support. This is an unofficial hack for an Apple platform notorious for having little open documentation or good interoperability with anything non-Apple. It's always going to be an uphill battle to reliably support Linux because Apple themselves don't seem to care (at the moment at least). Investing in Linux integration for a more supportive hardware vendor instead should yield better Linux outcomes without Apple's baggage.
mikece 6y ago
> Asahi means “rising sun” in Japanese, and it is also the name of an apple cultivar. 旭りんご (asahi ringo) is what we know as the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name. If for no other reason than how cool and fitting this name is I hope it succeeds.
ilaksh 6y ago
Wondering about GPU and ML hardware acceleration with this? Like TensorFlow or PyTorch, or OpenGL/Vulkan using the ML/graphics chips?
swsieber 6y ago
Could I take this opportunity to ask the HN community what they use on linux for photo editing (and what they like a out it)? ... if anybody like that exists ;)
somehnguy 6y ago
Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointless. In some cases all companies would have to do is not actively hide or obfuscate things. In others it may take more effort but still just a drop in the huge bucket compared to developing a system in the first place. I love Apple's hardware, I even (mostly) love the OS. If they too believe that it is solid - why prevent people from running what they want? The majority will come back anyway - I've run Linux for years and still ended up on MacOS for simplicity. I'll still buy Macs and run MacOS because it works for me, it's not like letting me run Linux will cost them money or something. The vast majority of people don't know what Linux even is, there is no threat there. Please note that this comment is not directed at people who choose to spend their time on projects like this. You're awesome, I just wish you didn't have to put so much effort in.
- p_l 6y ago
  It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors. Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw interface. Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks, special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp. Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it properly, it will be quirked. This goes all the way to simple things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces you'd brick the laptop. Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable open platform, especially open source boards, because making an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically built for the device is that people complained about lack of upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mgalgs 6y ago
Everyone keeps saying this is "a lot" of wasted resources... AFAICT it's just one guy right now, and even if it were a small team that still sounds like a bargain. I would expect it to take at least a small team within Apple to get Linux running on their new hardware. I worked on SoC chip bring-up at Qualcomm for a few years and it's literally hundreds of engineers working for weeks to get Linux running, and that's with not only technical documentation but direct access to the hardware engineers who designed the stuff. That was 5 years ago but I assume not much has changed. If this one guy (or a small group) ports Linux to the new MacBooks on a "Patreon salary" I'd say we got a smoking good deal. I'm rooting for them and happily donating.
iseanstevens 6y ago
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure if Apple did provide documentation, people would complain that it's incomplete, or would complain when it changes. I'd love a world where all tech documentation is open, but there are competitors etc etc. Apple is a remarkably focused company with a lot of experiments that never see the light of day. They don't sell their chips or motherboards to anyone else. Qualcomm/Broadcom etc exist to make their chips for other companies to use and still getting real documentation from them is often not possible unless you are a giant OEM, commit to millions in orders and sign lots of NDAs. Apple's not only created a pretty great integrated CPU/GPU and nearly seamlessly transitioned CPU platforms (AGAIN!) but they are at the very beginning of this roadmap. I'd LOVE them to empower/support Linux on Apple Silicon (as they seem to be saying they will for Microsoft) but I expect a generation of two of chips before things solidify/stabilize enough for them to open up the platform. And, it's not like this is something within their business model or is going to give much value back to them. Lots of people say Apple "Needs" to do whatever... Clearly they don't as they seem to be surviving OK doing things how they want.
- anothernewdude 6y ago
  Apple needs to stop treating its customers with contempt. Regardless of how okay its customers seem to be with it.
totorovirus 6y ago
Another japanese named OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
sandGorgon 6y ago
i would pay a LOT of money to have linux work on M1. This is incredible
- bartvk 6y ago
  Well then, join the Patreon. Or am I misreading your comment somehow? https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan I'm not going to use it myself, but I still joined, just to get the updates.
geogra4 6y ago
Does Apple still maintain open Darwin? Can you run it on an m1?

654 points by jackhalford 6y ago

mhh__ 6y ago

What are the odds Apple shit on this?

ogre_codes 6y ago
Why? If they'd intended to shut this down, they would have a locked down boot loader like on iOS. Instead they deliberately built a boot loader which supported things like this.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The engineers who did that probably don't make the decision on things like this. When have Apple been open about anything recently?
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    This took time and resources to make happen. This isn't some switch a rogue engineer pulled while management wasn't looking. Not only did it take time and effort to implement, they've also documented it. > When have Apple been open about anything recently? Darwin, WebKit, Swift, LLVM, This effort. Apple keeps iOS fairly tight the Mac, not so much.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Apple aren't upstreaming their backends to LLVM, for example
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        What happened to "When have they been open about anything?" Wonderful moving goal post here.
- ciwolsey 6y ago
  Get people on board first. Lock it down once it's too late and everyone is invested.
  - machello13 6y ago
    So your opinion of Apple is just that they're pure evil, or what?
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    That hasn't been their MO, historically. On macOS everything that's locked down by default can be unlocked (at least that I've encountered) regarding running software or other OSes on the hardware. They've made it "secure" by default, but not locked down, it's a simple switch to open it up. If, say, the iPad or iPhone had gone this route (started off as open as Android and then became locked down) you might have a point. But they didn't, they started off restricted and have only (gradually, and to a limited degree) been opened up.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > Get people on board first. Lock it down once it's too late and everyone is invested. Examples? Been using the Mac for 15 years and haven't observed this myself. iOS was more or less locked down from go, but they never did some kind of bait-and-switch.
- fanatic2pope 6y ago
  It wouldn't be unprecedented. Sony released the Playstation 3 with the ability to run Linux and removed it later using a firmware update. https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-history/ https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-histo...
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    The action isn’t unprecedented. But that’s a separate company. What has Apple done to make people expect this behavior when they’ve not done it before?
- m463 6y ago
  That can be changed in a software update. Is this likely? probably not, however I can imagine scenarios (lets say a worm gets out) where it might "make sense"

nickelcitymario 6y ago

> In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. Well, this is exciting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would take on this challenge, but it's exciting all the same.

flatiron 6y ago
judging by other open source reverse engineerd GPU drivers its a massive undertaking. i also looked at a shot of the chip and see lots of neural networking functionality, i wonder what sort of special drivers stuff like that needs. i just feel like the hardware is so specialized without apples help it would take a lot for it to be a killer linux laptop.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Reverse engineering of the Neural Engine is already under way: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/tree/master/ane https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/tree/master/ane
  - skavi 6y ago
    wow, and by George Hotz of PS3/comma.ai fame too.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You can't just not use that functionality. But getting the GPU to work is essentially required.

TimTheTinker 6y ago

Looks like his donation/sponsorship page is down :-( I’m super excited someone is taking this on. Hopefully Apple contributes drivers as well — they only stand to gain from the success of this project.

Hamuko 6y ago
Wouldn't the sponsorship page be this: https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
- my123 6y ago
  https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan is a better option. (much lower fees present there)
ogre_codes 6y ago
I think the Patreon is the best place to donate https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
hundchenkatze 6y ago
There's also a GH Sponsors page: https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan

codetrotter 6y ago

I was wondering if this was the project of the guy that talked about doing this a while back, which I read about here on HN and indeed it is. Announcement post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-launch-45852093 https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-launch-45852093

spurgu 6y ago
I came here thinking this was a separate attempt and was going to share that Marcan has already started working on it and that there could be some collaboration.

Badfood 6y ago

I'll buy our whole company these macs in a heartbeat if this becomes good enough

deadmutex 6y ago
Why not support a hardware vendor that actually cares about linux?
- Klonoar 6y ago
  People value industrial design, for one.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Being able to have someone on call for support is pretty valuable too, no?
  - deadmutex 6y ago
    Is the Mac laptop ID significantly different than other laptops, e.g. PixelBook Go? I have a MBA, and was super surprised at how think it was compared to my Pixelbook. I would say that Apple laptop ID nothing special, and is lacking things like a touchscreen, etc. I would say that M1 has good performance ON MAC SOFTWARE, which has been tuned for it (and vice versa). It is unknown if linux will perform as well on it.
    - Klonoar 6y ago
      The PixelBook is closer, sure - though still not as great when it comes to, say, the trackpad. Apple also still has a near-monopoly on amazing screens. These might seem inconsequential when you scan them on a list, but the entire package really adds up. Anyway, with that all said, the thread in question is about vendors who explicitly support Linux, which is a very different story. If I had to pick anything in that realm that I'm excited about, it's... maybe Purism's upcoming Librem 14, mostly due to them trying to do something custom. Relies on them actually shipping it, tho. I remain surprised that System76 hasn't done more towards a non-rebranded laptop shell. I really like their desktop offerings, but I've no need for a desktop in my life.

libria 6y ago

Very interesting overall. > Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? > Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. This looks like the major bullet point. The wiki is currently empty, but while it's WIP, it would be nice to see some of the major milestones or breakdown of the goal mentioned above. Best of luck to Hector and the contributors!

Hamuko 6y ago
>Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? Basically nothing can be known to be indefinite. But Apple has signaled that they'd be open for ARM Boot Camp if Microsoft was to sell non-OEM Windows for ARM licenses. So it seems like Apple might consider multi-booting a feature.
Klonoar 6y ago
>How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight? Considering the level of GUI work that outright supports this feature in recovery mode on an M1, I'm inclined to think it's not an oversight.
Bluerise 6y ago
First of all the feature wasn't available in the initial Big Sur release and it only got available during the Betas for the first minor patch. Second of all, some Apple developer stated on Twitter that (during M1 unveil) he's finally able to show all the boot policy work they worked on the past year(s) to allow users to boot foreign OSes and without opening up holes for attackers. Basically it boils down to: they could have just used iBoot without changing it at all to keep it as a brick like the iPhone/iPad/Watch, but instead they invested plenty of resources to allow it. With all that work done to allow it, I'm sure there'll be plenty of people inside of Apple who'd protest if someone changes their mind and decides all this has to go away.

jasoneckert 6y ago

On the About page: "...requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform" It "is" a well-documented platform. I'm hoping that Apple makes it available to the open source community to make Linux on M1 happen sooner than later.

mhh__ 6y ago
How is it documented if there is so software developers manual for the ISA, optimisation manual for the uarch, and no documentation at all on how the subsystems like the neural accelerator works let alone how to access it. I assume you mean that Apple have it internally, but I wouldn't assume it's any good. I would also love to see someone (I haven't got and can't afford one) try and fuzz it for undocumented instructions.
- klelatti 6y ago
  There's no software developer's manual for the ISA? Arm don't release any documentation on their ISA?
  - hrydgard 6y ago
    The GPU ISA (yes, GPUs have ISAs) is undocumented.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Even Nvidia document theirs now, and the firmware details are on GitHub to some extent for the Nouveau guys.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        > Even Nvidia document theirs now If you're talking about ptx, that's not the hardware ISA, but instead an IR for their shader compiler.

ogre_codes 6y ago

Just a reminder, the Patreon is not fully funded. If people really want to see this happen, dropping a couple dollars a month to help support the project is the best way. https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan

my123 6y ago
With https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan also present as an option.
- boogies 6y ago
  Which IIUC should give him a larger fraction of your donation (all but payment processor fees for now, minus 10% after the beta ends), or you could pledge at https://liberapay.com/on/github/marcan/ https://liberapay.com/on/github/marcan/ and let him choose to take whatever fraction he wants (also excluding processor fees, forever ±).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
newacct583 6y ago
No, Apple actually supporting it (in the same way that Intel, AMD, ARM/Linaro et. al. staff resources to support their hardware on Linux) is the best way. But paying productive engineers via crowdfunding isn't an awful workaround.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  We can't change what Apple does. Gnashing your teeth about that isn't going to help. What we can do is support this Patreon.
  - ungamed 6y ago
    Or do not buy the hardware..

djhworld 6y ago

Really hope they pull this off. The initial target of the M1 Mini is probably the smart choice, I'd imagine all the power management stuff in the laptops might be a big task to reverse engineer

marcan_42 6y ago
It's also the simplest hardware (no keyboard/trackpad/internal screen/camera to worry about), and no-PM Linux will be useful already on the Mini (no so much on laptops).

reikonomusha 6y ago

For projects like these, I don’t know why Apple doesn’t just step in and help. What have they got to lose?

ogre_codes 6y ago
I agree. At the very least, they should be a corporate sponsor for Marcan's Patreon. Ideally they should just hire him and provide him with internal resources to work on it. Even if Apple doesn't benefit from Linux running on bare metal, many of these efforts will benefit Linux running inside a VM as well.
- monocasa 6y ago
  I don't think hardly anything here will help Linux running in a VM FWIW. The unknowns are mainly the Apple specific IP blocks which aren't exposed to VMs.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Depends if you care about having graphics or audio in your Linux VM. Currently I think Linux VMs are just console only. Also, there is a lot of accelerated hardware which the CPU has which would be nice to get access to inside a VM.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      I still would be extremely surprised if the GPU is designed to be virtualized that way. If the host OS is using those IP blocks, you can't just give them to the guest.
- ksec 6y ago
  Or they could donate anonymously, supporting its development without their official logo.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  It's also bonus points towards sustainability to ensure their devices have a life after obsolescence. Honestly Apple could use some of those points considering how many little plastic parts they force people to buy.

depablo 6y ago

Awesome project. Also, nice logo. Given the seemingly unbeatable performance of Apple Silicon (judging by reviews), this would remove one of the bigger pain points of having a Mac. Some projects just don't run on macOS - either due to a community lack, or due to political reasons (e.g. CUDA). I wonder why Apple does not seek to support projects like this. Will be interesting to see how hard it is to bring this to a useable state. Thanks for the effort and looking forward to hearing more about the project!

marcan_42 6y ago
Credit for the logo and website goes to soundflora* ! She's at https://soundflora.tokyo/ https://soundflora.tokyo/ and she also makes some really awesome music. I was going to say I don't think you'll see CUDA any time soon on M1 machines but... apparently Nvidia does have a beta AArch64 driver these days. TIL. I wouldn't hold my breath on that working well given that it's, well, the Nvidia blob... but it might (once we get Thunderbolt working, with an eGPU). I avoid Nvidia GPUs these days, so if an eGPU demo does happen, it'll more likely be an RX 5700XT running the open source amdgpu drivers, which I do happen to have lying around :-)

actuator 6y ago

It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story. Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there. We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.

kube-system 6y ago
I think the situation is simple: People don't care whether their laptop is ARM, x86 or z80. They want to know: 1. will it run my apps? 2. does it have good overall performance (in a broad sense, not just compute)? 3. is it a competitive value? We've known about the potential strengths of ARM for decades, but nobody has been able to implement it in a way that checks all three boxes until now. MS was putting out devices that checked 0/3 boxes
WanderPanda 6y ago
Maybe it is not Qualcomm that is to blame, but it is Apple to be praised. But I guess I am talking glass half full / half empty here, so nevermind :D
- actuator 6y ago
  Yeah, Apple definitely deserves a lot of praise on these chips. They are not even incremental improvements but drastic ones which will probably change the landscape completely. Like AWS was working on their own ARM chips, they now have a benchmark to go against if they even can. In DCs a lot of spend is on just power consumption. If these chips can really drive compute in servers at a much lower power consumption, it is just not monetarily good for the company but good for the planet too.
- esclerofilo 6y ago
  I think they are to blame. Qualcomm is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) manufacturer of ARM chips, yet they still simply use reference designs. Besides, for the next flagship (Snapdragon 888) they switched to Samsung 5nm (inferior to TSMC 5nm) and they're not even using the ARM-recommended 8MB L3 cache, but staying with 4MB. It seems benchmarks for tha SoC aren't bad, but it really shows that they aren't really trying to catch up to Apple. (My source is https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-snapdragon-888-deep-dive https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-snapdragon-888...)

corytheboyd 6y ago

I hope this and projects like it spearhead a movement of ARM laptops outside of the Apple-sphere. I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. Seems right up their alley. Also worth noting that I understand that System76 and Apple are not comparable companies. One is a humble operation installing a custom Linux build on rebranded hardware, and the other is a vertically integrated powerhouse building it’s own hardware.

fsflover 6y ago
> I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. They are not the first already: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Ah yeah pine64! But how does it compare to the M1 performance? I should have explicitly stated that these ideal computers would match or outperform Apple’s hardware, since that is very much the case with current intel based MacBooks
  - spurdoman77 6y ago
    Pinebook does the typical "as cheap and low-end as possible" linux stuff. I would love to see ARM linux hardware manufacturer who would aim to create a high-end fanless powerhorse like mac mini.
    - corytheboyd 6y ago
      You and me both. I believe it will happen eventually, it seems inevitable now
    - esclerofilo 6y ago
      Minor correction: The mac mini isn't fanless

JosephRedfern 6y ago

> As long as no code is taken from macOS in order to build the Linux support, the end result is completely legal to distribute and for end users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS. Please see our Copyright & Reverse Engineering Policy for more information. This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour? Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific, driver-y bits excluded? [0] https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html

saagarjha 6y ago
All the driver stuff is shipped as closed-source kexts, and interesting proprietary hardware features like GXF are missing too from the public sources for the most part.
marcan_42 6y ago
Worth noting that that OSS release does not include M1 support (and Apple does not open source most of their drivers, just the kernel core), although it does include (partially redacted, not buildable, because Apple) support for other mobile chips using the same CPU cores. Perhaps the next OSS dump will finally have the M1 bits. But we're definitely on our own for all of the fun stuff beyond "Linux boots with a serial tty". At least some really basic parts are useful as a hardware reference, e.g. things related to the interrupt controller, UARTs, and CPU quirks/errata workarounds. That said, their license is incompatible with the GPL, so we cannot take any code directly. I documented this explicitly in our copyright policy: https://asahilinux.org/copyright/ https://asahilinux.org/copyright/

turbinerneiter 6y ago

A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a platform whos creator is unwilling to provide support. I think it's part of the Linux ethos to run on everything, but I also think this kind of effort is ... not wasted, but I feel like it could be spent more efficiently. Still looking forward to hear about the first successful boots and the epic reverse engineering feats. Just wish this kind of stuff wouldn't be needed anymore and companies would just release their specs already.

pkulak 6y ago
Mac hardware is just so damn good though. And everywhere. I absolutely agree with what you're saying... but man, Linux working well on an M1 Mac would be my ideal machine.
- rightisleft 6y ago
  is it? my 2016 macbook was the worst apple product i've ever owned...
  - midrus 6y ago
    Worst apple product is still far ahead of most non-apple alternatives. At least laptops wise.
    - Wohlf 6y ago
      I really don't find them any better than the competing products in the same price range these days, but you do you.
      - samatman 6y ago
        Resale value is the closest thing to an objective measure we're going to get. The butterfly keyboard era Macs took a nosedive in this metric, because they were bad computers. I have what turns out to be the last Intel 16" MacBook Pro which Apple will ever build. I suspect the Intel part of it will make its resale value kind of grim, but the keyboard, speakers, monitor, build quality: all great. MacBooks traditionally resell at a significant premium, because they're good computers with a long useful life. I expect this will be true for the M-series as well, although it's too soon to know.

eitland 6y ago

I must say I am tempted to buy a Mac mini and if this project succeeds it might be the thing that triggers it. That or Apple making CMD - tab customizable so I can fix it on my desktop ;-)

CyberRabbi 6y ago

Commendable effort but as someone who has spent significant time dealing with closed hardware, I believe that it is more efficient and beneficial long term to build a platform that supports linux. I support this project anyway because non-linear outcomes occur often enough in the marketplace of reality. Who can really know what will evolve from this work?

balozi 6y ago

This is one of those things that sound interesting but only from a technical point. Why would anyone take on this level of risk? In a few years they will be complaining on HN about being kicked off Apple silicon.

pkulak 6y ago
Then just pop Mac OS back on it and sell it for 80% of it's new value. Really almost no risk at all, as far as I'm concerned.
- balozi 6y ago
  However noble, the risk I see is for untold man-hours and resources that will be expended on an ill-fated adventure. This project requires tons of positive tech-community spirit, which apple isn't exactly known for.
  - pkulak 6y ago
    Fair enough. But I'd counter saying that you shouldn't try something like this unless the adventure itself appeals to you.

miguelr2201 6y ago

Interesting project and wish them best of luck. On the claim: >However, no modern device is “fully open” - no usable computer exists today that has completely open software and hardware (as much as some companies want to market themselves as such) Doesn't RaptorCS[1] offer a fully open modern device? Or is there a closed part I'm not aware of? [1] https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/

marcan_42 6y ago
Is their silicon design open? Their internal boot ROM? Their microcode? :-) What I'm trying to say there is, there is always a line. There is always some secret sauce. Even if you have fully open HDL, you won't have documentation for the proprietary fab processes required to implement it in a way that performs. Even if the fab process were somehow fully open, you may not have public documentation on how to manufacture some of the required chemicals and raw materials available. And so on and so forth. The rabbit hole always goes deeper, and the lines between parts aren't entirely bright, and so making some kind of blanket statement that one is "fully open" is usually a marketing tactic and not actually truthful. That said, yes, Raptor stuff is pretty much as open as it gets, today, in the high-end space. They are pretty much the only modern platform which doesn't use blobs to train RAM on boot, for example. They are not perfect - for example, their motherboard schematics are only available to owners, so I assume they are not redistributable under an open hardware license.
- miguelr2201 6y ago
  Oh, I see. That is definitely a lot deeper in the stack that I was thinking of. Thanks for the comment.

1-6 6y ago

Asahi, Super Dry! Sorry, had to say this.

blinkingled 6y ago

This is good of course but it's an uphill battle - just reverse engineering the Apple GPU and making a decent driver for it in itself is going to be a huge problem. Look at nouveau - we still don't have any way to reclock NVidia GPUs. Getting good experience and good battery life with reverse engineered hardware is impossible. Then there's going to be new gen hardware and firmware updates for existing ones to keep up with.

marcan_42 6y ago
Thankfully, Apple loads most firmware for us in the bootloader, so we don't have the blob problem that Nouveau does. This includes parts related to power management. Nouveau has an uphill battle because Nvidia is actively hostile, and because they have to support dozens of chips. We are starting with one. I do not expect for us to end up in a Nouveau situation with poor performance/PM over time. It will take time, of course, but I fully expect we will make it happen.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Very happy to hear you're optimistic - more power to you! I might even sign up if I end up buying one of the m1 Macs :) Is the WiFi chip in the M1 Macs a solved problem or did that need to be written from scratch as well? Just curious.
SXX 6y ago
On top of what Marcan posted: keep in mind that back when Nouveau development started Linux open source graphics stack was young and had no mature drivers to look at. Only in last 4 years graphics stack feature and performance parity thanks to Intel, AMD and Valve. Today LLVM is well-developed for GPU drivers and there is tons of other ready-to-use code for OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. E.g RADV was initially created by two developers only and now it is better than AMD official Vulkan implementation. On top of this modern GPUs are now less complex to develop drivers because they'e decoupled from display controllers and hardware no longer have fixed pipelines.

fareesh 6y ago

Do the cons of open sourcing device drivers really outweigh the pros? Good / popular hardware will end up benefitting from all kinds of contributions from interested folks. Plus the recruitment pool and onboarding of new talent expands by a reasonable amount, in theory. Is it really the case that somewhere in the drivers there is some secret sauce that is so ingenious that if the competition got wind of it, it would give them free access to a lot of hard work and research, and enable them to catch up? I guess I've never really dealt with super secret proprietary magic beans before so I can't relate.

rickdg 6y ago

Given the level of technological proficiency of people interested in this project, why Patreon tough? A platform that carries all the fees back to the person you're trying to support and puts their own cut on top for basically hosting a few iframes? Is this really the best way to provide some monthly income? I

marcan_42 6y ago
I also have GitHub Sponsors! https://github.com/sponsors/marcan https://github.com/sponsors/marcan I want people to pick whatever platform they are comfortable with, and Patreon is very popular, so I offer both. But yes, in principle GitHub sponsors should have lower overhead (I'll have to wait until I get income from both to see exactly how it works out after the intermediaries involved).

jd3 6y ago

This is really cool! Does anyone know why a similar project doesn't exist currently using the open source distribution of Apple's Darwin operating system? It has always seemed strange to me that their open source BSD OS does not have an official distribution channel with a built in package manager like macports, pkg-src, gentoo prefix, etc. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin existed for awhile, but seem to have both been abandoned now. X11 (including thousands of open source and graphical x11 programs), plan9port, and other open source software projects already compile and run fine on macOS, so this has always seemed like something that _should_ be possible but has never gained traction due to what I guess is lack of documentation and Apple's lackluster open source website.

boogies 6y ago
The world’s largest corporation is happy to accept gratis open source labor, but they’re rather actively antagonistic to Free/Libre software (eg. trying to eradicate strong copyleft from macOS, not only shipping ancient bash, etc. but prohibiting third parties from shipping it through the App Store without mandatory DRM). The lackluster support for open source distributions is virtually certainly intentional. The other BSDs are the closest you’ll get.
wmf 6y ago
Darwin isn't a good OS.
- jd3 6y ago
  Fair point! I guess what I'm getting at is the fact that, even though Darwin isn't great, we know that it's building and running on all production M1 macs, can run X11, etc. which generally seems like what this project is attempting to do. I'm not a systems software engineer[0], so I'm not positive where the new drivers live for the M1 (are they in Darwin? proprietary/exclusive to macOS?), but if those drivers are available for use already (either legally through Darwin or through copying files from macOS into Darwin or something), it seems like it might make sense to look into making a Darwin distribution rather than reserve engineering the new M1 hardware in order to add some drivers and userland programs to what is essentially another Arch Linux distribution (from what I've read about Asahi thus far). I think the Asahi project definitely makes sense if the primary goal is to run Linux on M1 macs for its robust server/enterprise capabilities, but if the goal is to just have a dual-bootable open source desktop operating system, I feel like Darwin might actually be the easier choice here. [0]: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.pdf

gorkish 6y ago

Apple needs to give a little here. I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside of Apple's labs. > In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it. This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. After the street cred of getting a marginally usable OS up and running evaporates, why continue to take the effort of great engineers and waste it developing an ecosystem that doesn't care? It makes no sense to me.

monocasa 6y ago
> This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. I think marcan has proven he has the chops for pieces like that. The ps4 linux port had him reverse engineering the ISA for the custom risc cores that are some of the deepest firmware of a pretty modern AMD GPU. Like even the open source drivers just treat this stuff as blobs and moves on with their life, but he had to port a fix over and showed off more publicly than anyone else had. This Apple stuff is for sure more work, but it all seems within his wheelhouse. Hence the patreon I think, attacking the size of the problem with some funding to make it more viable than a side project.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Also, it sounds like he just loves doing this. Everyone is treating him like a martyr but he’s doing what he’s good at and we’re all benefiting.
paulryanrogers 6y ago
Apple sells hardware and now services. Software seems to be a cost center. So I doubt a third party OS like Linux will ever be a priority for them in their consumer products.
- 6y ago

hurt_and_afraid 6y ago

On one hand I'm very excited about the enormous amount of innovation involved in Apple Silicon, and excited about how this will direct the future of the computer manufacturing industry. On the other hand, I'm still wary of buying anything from one of the world's most anti-consumer companies. I'm not the least-bit confident that Apple won't later rescind the ability to boot other Operating Systems. This kind of benevolence is entirely uncharacteristic of a company so fond of walled-gardens.

readams 6y ago

Solution: don't buy locked down Apple hardware. Yes, the chips look nice but it's just really unfortunate that they're from Apple and so come with all the Apple baggage. Just wait a couple years for competing chips that won't have the baggage.

WantonQuantum 6y ago
For what problem is this the solution?
- wmf 6y ago
  Running Linux on your hardware?
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  The problem is a weakened or lack of reliable Linux support. This is an unofficial hack for an Apple platform notorious for having little open documentation or good interoperability with anything non-Apple. It's always going to be an uphill battle to reliably support Linux because Apple themselves don't seem to care (at the moment at least). Investing in Linux integration for a more supportive hardware vendor instead should yield better Linux outcomes without Apple's baggage.

mikece 6y ago

> Asahi means “rising sun” in Japanese, and it is also the name of an apple cultivar. 旭りんご (asahi ringo) is what we know as the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name. If for no other reason than how cool and fitting this name is I hope it succeeds.

ilaksh 6y ago

Wondering about GPU and ML hardware acceleration with this? Like TensorFlow or PyTorch, or OpenGL/Vulkan using the ML/graphics chips?

swsieber 6y ago

Could I take this opportunity to ask the HN community what they use on linux for photo editing (and what they like a out it)? ... if anybody like that exists ;)

somehnguy 6y ago

Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointless. In some cases all companies would have to do is not actively hide or obfuscate things. In others it may take more effort but still just a drop in the huge bucket compared to developing a system in the first place. I love Apple's hardware, I even (mostly) love the OS. If they too believe that it is solid - why prevent people from running what they want? The majority will come back anyway - I've run Linux for years and still ended up on MacOS for simplicity. I'll still buy Macs and run MacOS because it works for me, it's not like letting me run Linux will cost them money or something. The vast majority of people don't know what Linux even is, there is no threat there. Please note that this comment is not directed at people who choose to spend their time on projects like this. You're awesome, I just wish you didn't have to put so much effort in.

p_l 6y ago
It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors. Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw interface. Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks, special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp. Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it properly, it will be quirked. This goes all the way to simple things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces you'd brick the laptop. Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable open platform, especially open source boards, because making an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically built for the device is that people complained about lack of upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mgalgs 6y ago

Everyone keeps saying this is "a lot" of wasted resources... AFAICT it's just one guy right now, and even if it were a small team that still sounds like a bargain. I would expect it to take at least a small team within Apple to get Linux running on their new hardware. I worked on SoC chip bring-up at Qualcomm for a few years and it's literally hundreds of engineers working for weeks to get Linux running, and that's with not only technical documentation but direct access to the hardware engineers who designed the stuff. That was 5 years ago but I assume not much has changed. If this one guy (or a small group) ports Linux to the new MacBooks on a "Patreon salary" I'd say we got a smoking good deal. I'm rooting for them and happily donating.

iseanstevens 6y ago

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure if Apple did provide documentation, people would complain that it's incomplete, or would complain when it changes. I'd love a world where all tech documentation is open, but there are competitors etc etc. Apple is a remarkably focused company with a lot of experiments that never see the light of day. They don't sell their chips or motherboards to anyone else. Qualcomm/Broadcom etc exist to make their chips for other companies to use and still getting real documentation from them is often not possible unless you are a giant OEM, commit to millions in orders and sign lots of NDAs. Apple's not only created a pretty great integrated CPU/GPU and nearly seamlessly transitioned CPU platforms (AGAIN!) but they are at the very beginning of this roadmap. I'd LOVE them to empower/support Linux on Apple Silicon (as they seem to be saying they will for Microsoft) but I expect a generation of two of chips before things solidify/stabilize enough for them to open up the platform. And, it's not like this is something within their business model or is going to give much value back to them. Lots of people say Apple "Needs" to do whatever... Clearly they don't as they seem to be surviving OK doing things how they want.

anothernewdude 6y ago
Apple needs to stop treating its customers with contempt. Regardless of how okay its customers seem to be with it.

totorovirus 6y ago

Another japanese named OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)

sandGorgon 6y ago

i would pay a LOT of money to have linux work on M1. This is incredible

bartvk 6y ago
Well then, join the Patreon. Or am I misreading your comment somehow? https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan I'm not going to use it myself, but I still joined, just to get the updates.

geogra4 6y ago

Does Apple still maintain open Darwin? Can you run it on an m1?