11 ms·

What makes you say that?

davidatbu 5y ago
No OP, But its most likely that Apple's software is designed to take full advantage of the hardware, but to do that with Linux software would require (1) a lot of funding, and (2) documentation of the hardware, which as I understand it, Apple is currently not willing to provide. So the folks who work on this have to do a lot of reverse engineering.
oblio 5y ago
They need to reverse engineer the GPU, the ML cores, the security chips. They need to figure out power management and use it as well as MacOS. Apple will just throw some crap random docs at them, best case scenario. They won't discourage it actively but they won't help them either. The time budget for high quality engineers working on this will also be limited as there's no market that I think of, only itch scratching. Which generally takes you to "good enough/mediocre" not to "awesome for the general public".
- cute_boi 5y ago
  I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It will also help to bring some PR stuff to apple. But it seems they are too concerned and doesn't their user to use other os.
  - LASR 5y ago
    > I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It's exactly because they don't want thousands of Devs wasting time at all. Why reimplement something that already works well as a computing platform? There is no good reason why they would want to do this. But it's not like they're blocking everything and locking it down. They just haven't published docs etc - which can carry a significant maintenance cost.
    - ladyanita22 5y ago
      Shitty explanation. If they don't want people to waste time, give them what you already know.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Playing devil's advocate: Apple provides the complete package. If you're homebrewing on top of their PCs, that's your problem and you're actually more of a nuisance to them. They don't actually get any benefit from you and you, being an advanced user, are very likely to have demands that are not representative of the general population and that also risk being difficult to accommodate. What could you possibly do that the All Mighty Apple™ can't do better?
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Playing devil's advocate's devil's advocate: Maybe Apple is trying to cater to advanced users again? In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop their designs and priorities between content creators and content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s, with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was just a small niche. Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits, thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs from workstations to, I don't know what, designer furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design cooling. Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and they are again free to pursue the content creator market and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon), now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals Apple is starting to take the workstation market more seriously again. The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For the remaining power users, what are their options? Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again, finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro" workflows and tooling, and these early signs are encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the Macbook Air. If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows, there's no reason they can't provide similar support for other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1, Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it, Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring again. Hopefully. Maybe. Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1 in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll see if it lasts...
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    I agree, I think Apple would profit from directly supporting Linux on their hardware. Their main profit is in selling the hardware and that they would do, probably to a lot of people who wouldn't buy Apple hardware right now. The Apple Silicon are some damn nice chips.
    - ccouzens 5y ago
      Apple likes to upsell their users on additional Apple products. If you're not running their software, you're not in their ecosystem and they can't upsell you.
      - _ph_ 5y ago
        No doubt about that. But I think most people, who would buy a Mac specifically to run Linux on it, wouldn't see a Mac without Linux as an alternative, they would just get some PC hardware. If they buy a Mac for Linux, they might try out MacOS too and that would be an opportunity for Apple to expand the user base.
    - webmobdev 5y ago
      > Their main profit is in selling the hardware Not anymore - it's now about selling services to get recurring income. E.g. App Store (to extort money from developers), Apple Care, Apple Pay and iCloud (from users) etc. That is why they are locking down the Mac systems too, and making it a closed system like the iPhone / iPad platform. They have been doing this for a while now. The only thing that now differentiates an M1 mac to an iPad or iPhone is that the bootloader is not locked on the M1, and so you can still theoretically install another OS. (Ofcourse, the practical reality is that due to the closed box nature of the M1 Apple Silicons SoC, non-macOS OS can't exploit the full benefit of the hardware and will always offer subpar performance).
      - _ph_ 5y ago
        No, they are not locking down the Mac, Asahi Linux is a good example of that. Also, they are not locking down users of MacOS. As I wrote in a separate post, they do have some incentive to sell hardware for Linux enthusiasts. Those wouldn't have considered a Mac otherwise. And if they have a Mac, they would try also MacOS and all Apple offerings.
- lonelyasacloud 5y ago
  On the plus side though there is a relatively small pool of actual hardware targets that they have to make it work on.
  - oblio 5y ago
    True. But for example Nvidia GPUs have never been reverse engineered fully, more than 20 years after their introduction. Because Nvidia updates their tech, just as Apple will.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      Nvidia actively sabotaged reverse engineering efforts with their firmware shenanigans, and also Nvidia hardware is way, way worse to support than Apple. Apple actually makes very clean SoCs with neat software interfaces and keeps compatibility across SoCs except when they need to break things. Case in point: I brought up our existing M1 efforts on the M1 Pro in 4 days, and that involved changing several drivers because they actually made a big compatibility break in order to support more cores and more RAM (the new versions support over a terabyte and probably dozens of cores, so I doubt they'll change them again for quite a few chip generations).
- vetinari 5y ago
  The good thing seems to be, that Apple doesn't intend to break how they speak to the hardware across generations. It is to simplify _their_ driver development, too.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  If you look at the progress of Asahi Linux, I am very optimistic that Linux on Apple Silicon becomes a reasonable thing quite soon. Most of the basic hardware infrastructure is already supported, GPU support is coming along nicely too (90% of the GL tests already passing). There might be corners of the chip not supported for a long time, but if there were no neural net acceleration, it might be a pitty, but not a showstopper for all other tasks.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  > The time budget for high quality engineers working on this will also be limited as there's no market that I think of, only itch scratching. That's why I started this project backed by a Patreon. I knew this couldn't be accomplished via itch scratching; it has to be a job (not quite full time yet, but a good chunk thereof). FWIW: the userspace GPU driver is now passing 90% or so of the GLES tests running on macOS; only the kernel side is not started yet. The ML cores are a niche use case and broadly not useful for anyone not doing machine learning on Linux (but some people are interested in them and have started taking a look). And power management already works to a significant extent; in the next week or so I'll be submitting v3 of the PMGR driver and v2 of the cpufreq driver for upstreaming, and starting work on SMC (needed for battery/charging info). And the security chip (SEP) has already been poked at; the mailbox interface to it is shared with other chips and has already been upstreamed, and the protocol on top isn't terribly complicated. It's mostly a matter of building a little driver to give userspace access to it, and writing some tooling to use it.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Well, I wish you luck! Unfortunately I'm a late pragmatist so I'm probably half a decade away from using your work :-) https://tbkconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Crossing-the-chasm.png https://tbkconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Crossing-t...

No OP, But its most likely that Apple's software is designed to take full advantage of the hardware, but to do that with Linux software would require (1) a lot of funding, and (2) documentation of the hardware, which as I understand it, Apple is currently not willing to provide. So the folks who work on this have to do a lot of reverse engineering.

oblio 5y ago

They need to reverse engineer the GPU, the ML cores, the security chips. They need to figure out power management and use it as well as MacOS. Apple will just throw some crap random docs at them, best case scenario. They won't discourage it actively but they won't help them either. The time budget for high quality engineers working on this will also be limited as there's no market that I think of, only itch scratching. Which generally takes you to "good enough/mediocre" not to "awesome for the general public".

cute_boi 5y ago
I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It will also help to bring some PR stuff to apple. But it seems they are too concerned and doesn't their user to use other os.
- LASR 5y ago
  > I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It's exactly because they don't want thousands of Devs wasting time at all. Why reimplement something that already works well as a computing platform? There is no good reason why they would want to do this. But it's not like they're blocking everything and locking it down. They just haven't published docs etc - which can carry a significant maintenance cost.
  - ladyanita22 5y ago
    Shitty explanation. If they don't want people to waste time, give them what you already know.
- oblio 5y ago
  Playing devil's advocate: Apple provides the complete package. If you're homebrewing on top of their PCs, that's your problem and you're actually more of a nuisance to them. They don't actually get any benefit from you and you, being an advanced user, are very likely to have demands that are not representative of the general population and that also risk being difficult to accommodate. What could you possibly do that the All Mighty Apple™ can't do better?
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Playing devil's advocate's devil's advocate: Maybe Apple is trying to cater to advanced users again? In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop their designs and priorities between content creators and content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s, with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was just a small niche. Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits, thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs from workstations to, I don't know what, designer furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design cooling. Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and they are again free to pursue the content creator market and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon), now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals Apple is starting to take the workstation market more seriously again. The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For the remaining power users, what are their options? Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again, finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro" workflows and tooling, and these early signs are encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the Macbook Air. If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows, there's no reason they can't provide similar support for other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1, Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it, Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring again. Hopefully. Maybe. Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1 in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll see if it lasts...
- _ph_ 5y ago
  I agree, I think Apple would profit from directly supporting Linux on their hardware. Their main profit is in selling the hardware and that they would do, probably to a lot of people who wouldn't buy Apple hardware right now. The Apple Silicon are some damn nice chips.
  - ccouzens 5y ago
    Apple likes to upsell their users on additional Apple products. If you're not running their software, you're not in their ecosystem and they can't upsell you.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      No doubt about that. But I think most people, who would buy a Mac specifically to run Linux on it, wouldn't see a Mac without Linux as an alternative, they would just get some PC hardware. If they buy a Mac for Linux, they might try out MacOS too and that would be an opportunity for Apple to expand the user base.
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    > Their main profit is in selling the hardware Not anymore - it's now about selling services to get recurring income. E.g. App Store (to extort money from developers), Apple Care, Apple Pay and iCloud (from users) etc. That is why they are locking down the Mac systems too, and making it a closed system like the iPhone / iPad platform. They have been doing this for a while now. The only thing that now differentiates an M1 mac to an iPad or iPhone is that the bootloader is not locked on the M1, and so you can still theoretically install another OS. (Ofcourse, the practical reality is that due to the closed box nature of the M1 Apple Silicons SoC, non-macOS OS can't exploit the full benefit of the hardware and will always offer subpar performance).
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      No, they are not locking down the Mac, Asahi Linux is a good example of that. Also, they are not locking down users of MacOS. As I wrote in a separate post, they do have some incentive to sell hardware for Linux enthusiasts. Those wouldn't have considered a Mac otherwise. And if they have a Mac, they would try also MacOS and all Apple offerings.
lonelyasacloud 5y ago
On the plus side though there is a relatively small pool of actual hardware targets that they have to make it work on.
- oblio 5y ago
  True. But for example Nvidia GPUs have never been reverse engineered fully, more than 20 years after their introduction. Because Nvidia updates their tech, just as Apple will.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    Nvidia actively sabotaged reverse engineering efforts with their firmware shenanigans, and also Nvidia hardware is way, way worse to support than Apple. Apple actually makes very clean SoCs with neat software interfaces and keeps compatibility across SoCs except when they need to break things. Case in point: I brought up our existing M1 efforts on the M1 Pro in 4 days, and that involved changing several drivers because they actually made a big compatibility break in order to support more cores and more RAM (the new versions support over a terabyte and probably dozens of cores, so I doubt they'll change them again for quite a few chip generations).
vetinari 5y ago
The good thing seems to be, that Apple doesn't intend to break how they speak to the hardware across generations. It is to simplify _their_ driver development, too.
_ph_ 5y ago
If you look at the progress of Asahi Linux, I am very optimistic that Linux on Apple Silicon becomes a reasonable thing quite soon. Most of the basic hardware infrastructure is already supported, GPU support is coming along nicely too (90% of the GL tests already passing). There might be corners of the chip not supported for a long time, but if there were no neural net acceleration, it might be a pitty, but not a showstopper for all other tasks.
marcan_42 5y ago
> The time budget for high quality engineers working on this will also be limited as there's no market that I think of, only itch scratching. That's why I started this project backed by a Patreon. I knew this couldn't be accomplished via itch scratching; it has to be a job (not quite full time yet, but a good chunk thereof). FWIW: the userspace GPU driver is now passing 90% or so of the GLES tests running on macOS; only the kernel side is not started yet. The ML cores are a niche use case and broadly not useful for anyone not doing machine learning on Linux (but some people are interested in them and have started taking a look). And power management already works to a significant extent; in the next week or so I'll be submitting v3 of the PMGR driver and v2 of the cpufreq driver for upstreaming, and starting work on SMC (needed for battery/charging info). And the security chip (SEP) has already been poked at; the mailbox interface to it is shared with other chips and has already been upstreamed, and the protocol on top isn't terribly complicated. It's mostly a matter of building a little driver to give userspace access to it, and writing some tooling to use it.
- oblio 5y ago
  Well, I wish you luck! Unfortunately I'm a late pragmatist so I'm probably half a decade away from using your work :-) https://tbkconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Crossing-the-chasm.png https://tbkconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Crossing-t...