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Alyssa is a hero for her work on Panfrost, which gave us open-source 3D graphics on ARM Mali GPUs. I am eternally grateful for this; the Samsung Kevin I use is

Alyssa is a hero for her work on Panfrost, which gave us open-source 3D graphics on ARM Mali GPUs. I am eternally grateful for this; the Samsung Kevin I use is the only blobless laptop currently in production, and now it has 3D accelerated graphics thanks to her work! But part of me is sad to see her working on such closed hardware now. Does anybody think Linux on the M1 will ever be able to touch the internal SSD? Apple has been locking that down with proprietary controllers and signed firmware since their Intel days (i.e. T1 chip). Are people really going to drag around their shiny new macbooks with an external USB-C dongle hanging off of it because that's required in order to run Linux? I worry that the endgame here is Linux becoming Just Another MacOS App. Apple is quite happy for Linux to be a MacOS app running in their VM. Elite developers will buy Macbooks and run Linux in a VM because "we'll have Linux on the bare metal soon, it's just temporary" and that will just keep getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back...

58028641 5y ago
Hector Martin believes it will be possible. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1383964656058781703 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1383964656058781703
- marcan_42 5y ago
  I don't "believe" it will be possible; I am absolutely, 100% positively certain it is possible.
mjg59 5y ago
Apple don't block access to their NVMe controllers at all. They do appear to have a, well, interesting approach to spec compliance, but Linux is now entirely capable of handling the SSD on all x86 Apple hardware. In the M1 case the NVMe controller isn't exposed via PCI so the existing driver won't work, but there's already in-kernel abstraction between the actual NVMe code and the PCI interface, so adding an alternative shouldn't be a problem. The M1 systems depend on some number of blobs, but the amount of non-free code required to boot one looks like it'll end up being less than a typical x86 system requires.
- floatboth 5y ago
  Heh, corellium did it by making a fake PCIe controller: https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/e501cce95dfcc65adb8c213f15efa9944899e940 https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/e501cce95dfcc65... https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/08f0fcce76579a58333016ec804b6f2d27e42296 https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/08f0fcce76579a5...
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    Which is never going to fly upstream :) I have a branch adding proper NVMe platform device support based on some work by Armd. It's currently blocked on some driver deps (clock/power) and I'm working on a hypervisor for reverse engineering for now, but once those do go in (other people are working on them) it should be simple to bring up properly.
kzrdude 5y ago
(Starry-eyed idealism.) Her work on this closed hardware might define it for the future - practicalities matter. If Linux de-facto runs and even better, if it's in wise use, that makes the hardware more open and it might help bend this new platform towards openness. Getting in this early might be a benefit there too.
marcan_42 5y ago
Please, please, please drop the internal SSD myth. That isn't true, and has never been true, ever. That is a complete bullshit story made up by a YouTuber who saw that the SSD didn't show up under Linux back when the T2 Macs were released (because it didn't have a compatible driver) and decided that must mean Apple were "blocking Linux". All internal Mac SSDs work fine under Linux these days and have for years. I have a local branch with preparatory work to bring up the M1 SSDs already (requires some driver refactoring to do it properly).

58028641 5y ago

Hector Martin believes it will be possible. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1383964656058781703 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1383964656058781703

marcan_42 5y ago
I don't "believe" it will be possible; I am absolutely, 100% positively certain it is possible.

mjg59 5y ago

Apple don't block access to their NVMe controllers at all. They do appear to have a, well, interesting approach to spec compliance, but Linux is now entirely capable of handling the SSD on all x86 Apple hardware. In the M1 case the NVMe controller isn't exposed via PCI so the existing driver won't work, but there's already in-kernel abstraction between the actual NVMe code and the PCI interface, so adding an alternative shouldn't be a problem. The M1 systems depend on some number of blobs, but the amount of non-free code required to boot one looks like it'll end up being less than a typical x86 system requires.

floatboth 5y ago
Heh, corellium did it by making a fake PCIe controller: https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/e501cce95dfcc65adb8c213f15efa9944899e940 https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/e501cce95dfcc65... https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/08f0fcce76579a58333016ec804b6f2d27e42296 https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/08f0fcce76579a5...
- marcan_42 5y ago
  Which is never going to fly upstream :) I have a branch adding proper NVMe platform device support based on some work by Armd. It's currently blocked on some driver deps (clock/power) and I'm working on a hypervisor for reverse engineering for now, but once those do go in (other people are working on them) it should be simple to bring up properly.

kzrdude 5y ago

(Starry-eyed idealism.) Her work on this closed hardware might define it for the future - practicalities matter. If Linux de-facto runs and even better, if it's in wise use, that makes the hardware more open and it might help bend this new platform towards openness. Getting in this early might be a benefit there too.

marcan_42 5y ago

Please, please, please drop the internal SSD myth. That isn't true, and has never been true, ever. That is a complete bullshit story made up by a YouTuber who saw that the SSD didn't show up under Linux back when the T2 Macs were released (because it didn't have a compatible driver) and decided that must mean Apple were "blocking Linux". All internal Mac SSDs work fine under Linux these days and have for years. I have a local branch with preparatory work to bring up the M1 SSDs already (requires some driver refactoring to do it properly).