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And yet here I am, with Linux on an Intel laptop that can't play video without tearing. Our M1 DCP driver already does that properly. Support from chip manufac

And yet here I am, with Linux on an Intel laptop that can't play video without tearing. Our M1 DCP driver already does that properly. Support from chip manufacturers doesn't mean you're actually going to end up with a better user experience.

CarelessExpert 5y ago
> And yet here I am, with Linux on an Intel laptop that can't play video without tearing. Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine. > Support from chip manufacturers doesn't mean you're actually going to end up with a better user experience. Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going. I love the drive you guys have, and I wish you the best of luck. But Apple could pull the rug out from under you any time they want in a future hardware rev (either deliberately or accidentally), and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up. Edit: Updated pronouns since apparently the OP is one of the project maintainers.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  cough You may as well say “you” instead of “these guys” btw, perhaps a careless mistake but you were speaking to the lead developer of the Asahi effort and I would hazard a guess his views on the Linux kernel and vendor support are a tad more nuanced than “ridiculous”
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    LOL, just because they're running the project, doesn't mean their opinions are sacrosanct or unquestionable. The statement they made is ridiculous, and I stand by my decision to label it as such. If you want to explain to me how I'm wrong instead of simply appealing to authority, you're obviously free to do so.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      You made an absolutist statement that support from a manufacturer will always result in a better user experience than community support only. That sounds entirely ridiculous and unsupportable to me. And please don't trot out the "appealing to authority" bit. That absolutely doesn't apply here; when it comes to an opinion about some hardware/software project, I would 100% take the word of the lead developer on that project over a rando on HN who has for some inexplicable reason decided to pick a fight about something they appear to not have any domain knowledge about.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- marcan_42 5y ago
  > Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine. Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE. > Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going. Nvidia created an actively hostile firmware situation. We already have the firmware story worked out. Plus having to support a bazillion GPU generations with incompatible interfaces burns people out. We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design. > and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up. And we will keep on reverse engineering, and we'll keep up :-)
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    > Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE. Tiger Lake (whose microarchitecture I just learned is Willow Cove) running Gnome via Wayland (damn HiDPI...), single external display via USB C dock plus an onboard. More fully, previously I was running a Lenovo X1C5 with Intel integrated graphics. Again, no issues there. In that case I ran Xorg with TearFree enabled. I'm currently running a Framework sporting an i7-1165G7 with the aforementioned setup. It was genuinely a little shocking, having spent my earlier days manually hacking modelines in X, to see this hardware come up flawlessly on first boot with Ubuntu 21.04... amazing what a reasonably open hardware ecosystem will enable. jab jab ;) > We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design. Absolutely a fair point! I concede that the reverse engineering story with Apple may very well be less painful than it is with other vendors. Honestly, I hope for your sanity that it is! :D
    - kelnos 5y ago
      I think it's a little bizarre that you seem to think that just because you have no issues with video tearing on a few different Linux-based setups you've used, no one else possibly could on their (likely pretty different) setup.
_xy8h 5y ago
- easton 5y ago
  And Microsoft could ask the OEMs to push a UEFI update that enforces secure boot with only the Windows keys. I don’t think they will though.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    > And Microsoft could ask the OEMs to push a UEFI update that enforces secure boot with only the Windows keys. I don’t think they will though. Well, let's be fair: They could try, but again, that'd require those OEMs to cooperate. And you'd still end up with folks like System76 and Framework that'd go their own way because nothing can stop a vendor from creating an open x86-based design. They just wouldn't be able to ship Windows pre-installed. Apple, by contrast, could just do it by fiat because they own the entire ecosystem, and no one could do a damn thing about it. That's the difference between an open, interoperable ecosystem and a closed one. I genuinely don't understand the debate, here. Are you seriously trying to claim that the Apple hardware platform and the x86 ecosystem are equally open/closed?
- theodric 5y ago
  You're right, we should just give up and devote our time to other things.
  - _xy8h 5y ago
    What I'm saying is that I feel it's a better use of man hours of open source advocates to code for hardware from companies that support OSS and not one that is viciously hostile to its users.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      I'd much rather reverse engineer proprietary hardware; I get to have fun doing that and I get to play the upstreaming game better than any of those companies that "support open source" that you love so much (have you seen the mess AMD made? They have hundreds of megabytes of autogenerated headers in the Linux tree now!), while working with a team of motivated and experienced developers and working to make everyone's life as pleasant as possible, minimizing churn, red tape, and inefficiency. Seriously, there's no way I'd be half as happy working at Intel on Linux drivers as I am working on the M1. And it's not like they support external developers either - most of the chip documentation for Intel/AMD stuff is not public. You can't actually build working graphics drivers from their public docs, not even remotely close. Heck, I had to reverse engineer AMD's GPU microcode to get the variant in the PS4 to work. Totally undocumented stuff.

CarelessExpert 5y ago

> And yet here I am, with Linux on an Intel laptop that can't play video without tearing. Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine. > Support from chip manufacturers doesn't mean you're actually going to end up with a better user experience. Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going. I love the drive you guys have, and I wish you the best of luck. But Apple could pull the rug out from under you any time they want in a future hardware rev (either deliberately or accidentally), and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up. Edit: Updated pronouns since apparently the OP is one of the project maintainers.

cyberpunk 5y ago
cough You may as well say “you” instead of “these guys” btw, perhaps a careless mistake but you were speaking to the lead developer of the Asahi effort and I would hazard a guess his views on the Linux kernel and vendor support are a tad more nuanced than “ridiculous”
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  LOL, just because they're running the project, doesn't mean their opinions are sacrosanct or unquestionable. The statement they made is ridiculous, and I stand by my decision to label it as such. If you want to explain to me how I'm wrong instead of simply appealing to authority, you're obviously free to do so.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    You made an absolutist statement that support from a manufacturer will always result in a better user experience than community support only. That sounds entirely ridiculous and unsupportable to me. And please don't trot out the "appealing to authority" bit. That absolutely doesn't apply here; when it comes to an opinion about some hardware/software project, I would 100% take the word of the lead developer on that project over a rando on HN who has for some inexplicable reason decided to pick a fight about something they appear to not have any domain knowledge about.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
marcan_42 5y ago
> Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine. Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE. > Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going. Nvidia created an actively hostile firmware situation. We already have the firmware story worked out. Plus having to support a bazillion GPU generations with incompatible interfaces burns people out. We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design. > and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up. And we will keep on reverse engineering, and we'll keep up :-)
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE. Tiger Lake (whose microarchitecture I just learned is Willow Cove) running Gnome via Wayland (damn HiDPI...), single external display via USB C dock plus an onboard. More fully, previously I was running a Lenovo X1C5 with Intel integrated graphics. Again, no issues there. In that case I ran Xorg with TearFree enabled. I'm currently running a Framework sporting an i7-1165G7 with the aforementioned setup. It was genuinely a little shocking, having spent my earlier days manually hacking modelines in X, to see this hardware come up flawlessly on first boot with Ubuntu 21.04... amazing what a reasonably open hardware ecosystem will enable. jab jab ;) > We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design. Absolutely a fair point! I concede that the reverse engineering story with Apple may very well be less painful than it is with other vendors. Honestly, I hope for your sanity that it is! :D
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I think it's a little bizarre that you seem to think that just because you have no issues with video tearing on a few different Linux-based setups you've used, no one else possibly could on their (likely pretty different) setup.

_xy8h 5y ago

easton 5y ago
And Microsoft could ask the OEMs to push a UEFI update that enforces secure boot with only the Windows keys. I don’t think they will though.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > And Microsoft could ask the OEMs to push a UEFI update that enforces secure boot with only the Windows keys. I don’t think they will though. Well, let's be fair: They could try, but again, that'd require those OEMs to cooperate. And you'd still end up with folks like System76 and Framework that'd go their own way because nothing can stop a vendor from creating an open x86-based design. They just wouldn't be able to ship Windows pre-installed. Apple, by contrast, could just do it by fiat because they own the entire ecosystem, and no one could do a damn thing about it. That's the difference between an open, interoperable ecosystem and a closed one. I genuinely don't understand the debate, here. Are you seriously trying to claim that the Apple hardware platform and the x86 ecosystem are equally open/closed?
theodric 5y ago
You're right, we should just give up and devote our time to other things.
- _xy8h 5y ago
  What I'm saying is that I feel it's a better use of man hours of open source advocates to code for hardware from companies that support OSS and not one that is viciously hostile to its users.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    I'd much rather reverse engineer proprietary hardware; I get to have fun doing that and I get to play the upstreaming game better than any of those companies that "support open source" that you love so much (have you seen the mess AMD made? They have hundreds of megabytes of autogenerated headers in the Linux tree now!), while working with a team of motivated and experienced developers and working to make everyone's life as pleasant as possible, minimizing churn, red tape, and inefficiency. Seriously, there's no way I'd be half as happy working at Intel on Linux drivers as I am working on the M1. And it's not like they support external developers either - most of the chip documentation for Intel/AMD stuff is not public. You can't actually build working graphics drivers from their public docs, not even remotely close. Heck, I had to reverse engineer AMD's GPU microcode to get the variant in the PS4 to work. Totally undocumented stuff.