4 ms·

Not sure about OP but the hardest part about getting linux on a macbook is getting wifi to work because there are no FOSS drivers.

zodiakzz 5y ago
Genuinely curious, is it harder than getting Linux working with the proprietary Apple variant of ARM? Or are you talking pre-M1?
- ben-schaaf 5y ago
  The M1 still uses a broadcom wifi chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358, so presumably because it's a newer chip it'll be more difficult.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
notaplumber 5y ago
Sure there are, it's called brcmfmac. If the AsahiLinux team hasn't already got it working, certainly Corellium did a few months ago in their much hyped public demo image. https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211 https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211 OpenBSD has also added support to their bwfm(4) driver already for 6.9. Wireless is absolutely not the hardest problem for the M1 Mac, or running on any Mac, for that matter.
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  Broadcom Wi-Fi languished for something around a decade under the "b43" driver before Broadcom showed up with their brcmfmac driver, it caused significant anger within the kernel community that they decided to write a new driver instead of just augmenting the existing one
  - usr1106 5y ago
    They have various product families and more than 2 drivers. I need the bcmwl driver (dkms) for some 4-5 year old HP laptop and it has severe problems with some APs and slight problems with others. Overall it's just bad. Debugging it showed that it's only a thin Linux wrapper around some huge binary blob they use. So not really FOSS, but of course that's what we are used to with firmware. This was't really firmware, they use the blob on the CPU IIRC. (It's been years I debugged this, since then Broadcom is just something that raises a red flag to me.)
swiley 5y ago
Usually it's missing firmware rather than drivers.

zodiakzz 5y ago

Genuinely curious, is it harder than getting Linux working with the proprietary Apple variant of ARM? Or are you talking pre-M1?

ben-schaaf 5y ago
The M1 still uses a broadcom wifi chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358, so presumably because it's a newer chip it'll be more difficult.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

notaplumber 5y ago

Sure there are, it's called brcmfmac. If the AsahiLinux team hasn't already got it working, certainly Corellium did a few months ago in their much hyped public demo image. https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211 https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211 OpenBSD has also added support to their bwfm(4) driver already for 6.9. Wireless is absolutely not the hardest problem for the M1 Mac, or running on any Mac, for that matter.

IntelMiner 5y ago
Broadcom Wi-Fi languished for something around a decade under the "b43" driver before Broadcom showed up with their brcmfmac driver, it caused significant anger within the kernel community that they decided to write a new driver instead of just augmenting the existing one
- usr1106 5y ago
  They have various product families and more than 2 drivers. I need the bcmwl driver (dkms) for some 4-5 year old HP laptop and it has severe problems with some APs and slight problems with others. Overall it's just bad. Debugging it showed that it's only a thin Linux wrapper around some huge binary blob they use. So not really FOSS, but of course that's what we are used to with firmware. This was't really firmware, they use the blob on the CPU IIRC. (It's been years I debugged this, since then Broadcom is just something that raises a red flag to me.)

swiley 5y ago

Usually it's missing firmware rather than drivers.