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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
by 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 agoHow 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 agoThere's no software developer's manual for the ISA? Arm don't release any documentation on their ISA?
- hrydgard 6y agoThe GPU ISA (yes, GPUs have ISAs) is undocumented.
- mhh__ 6y agoEven 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.
- my123 6y agoNVIDIA have this: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-binary-utilities/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-binary-utilities/index.htm... That doesn't operate on PTX but actual hardware binaries. Oddly, they ship disassemblers, but not assemblers.
- mhh__ 6y agoThere are currently undocumented instructions on M1, and Apple aren't a regular Arm partner so I'm kind of classing it as it's own ISA
- klelatti 6y agoI've seen that too! I have a lot of sympathy for what you're saying here but I think classing it as it's own ISA is a bit of a stretch! How much flexibility Apple have with the ISA is an interesting point - I suspect they are pushing the limits of what they can get away with (what's Arm going to do?) Might be different when Nvidia own Arm?
- saagarjha 6y agoApple exposes standard aarch64 to developers.
- saagarjha 6y agoHow so?
- jarym 6y agoI wonder if Apple will embrace Linux as Microsoft have done. If they are still a 'hardware' company at heart then they will.
- ibraheemdev 6y agoI highly doubt it. Microsoft embraced Linux because they knew Windows couldn't compete in the developer OS space. MacOS on the other hand is built on Unix and is already a very popular OS for developers.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoLinux has been taking serious dev mindshare (and market share) from Apple for several years now. And I think Apple knows macOS can't compete with Linux as a development environment against browser, Linux, and cloud-based deployments. Witness how they made a point of demonstrating a Linux VM running on Apple silicon during the M1 introductory keynote, and how they continue to remove dev-oriented tooling, allowing third-party setups like homebrew to fill it in. It seems their goal is increasingly to focus on their end-user platform only, which for dev tooling means only focusing on XCode/etc. and not the Mac's capabilities for other deployment targets. ... which leaves an obvious gap for Linux to fill. In fact, given how large and capable Apple is these days, I think there's a good chance they'll put a bit more effort into helping Linux integration along (especially Linux in VMs on macOS -- that's probably the main plan at the moment). They realize they only stand to gain from such efforts.