7 ms·

Everyone is like how having Asahi makes Apple more profit, so it makes sense in a business sense, e.g... but am I the only person thinking that this is probably

Everyone is like how having Asahi makes Apple more profit, so it makes sense in a business sense, e.g... but am I the only person thinking that this is probably just one or two core kernel engineers just feeling good someday and decided to provide this to Asahi? I don't think the high-level people would really know that these changes even existed...

bestouff 5y ago
This may have security implications, I highly doubt they would be authorized to make such a change without consulting anyone.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  The shift to moving the Mach-O parsing from iBoot to kmutil has positive security implications. Adding a raw input option on top of that has zero additional security implications. It's a strict subset of the attack surface.
  - uranusjr 5y ago
    I believe parent is not talking about the security implications of the contributions themselves, but the security implications of the act of making contributions as an Apple employee. And it’s a reasonable assumption; from my (not many) interactions with Apple employees in OSS world, they are generally very careful about doing this sort of things, and I would be very very surprised if not at least a few managers know about this beforehand.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      No Apple employees made any OSS contributions here. They just added a tiny feature to an existing Apple tool that happens to make our lives easier.
      - uranusjr 5y ago
        Yes, sorry, the wording I used was misleading. What I meant by “contribution” is in a broad sense “something that helps”, not actual OSS code contributions.
elteto 5y ago
There is no way that two random kernel engineers pushed a feature that allows booting unsigned kernels on Apple hardware (I'm assuming that's what raw image is?). I don't know how _high_ up it goes but I am very certain it was not some low-level skunkworks thing.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  > I'm assuming that's what raw image is? You're assuming wrong. Booting unsigned kernels on Apple hardware has been possible since January. This just makes it slightly less annoying since you don't need to build a Mach-O binary to do it, and more future-proof since it decouples it from Apple's binary format which they can change the requirements for at any time (as they did this time). It means I don't have to go off and reverse engineer what the new requirements are, I can just stop using Mach-Os and know the raw option will never break (assuming it continues to exist), since there is nothing to break with a raw file. Apple's machines are designed as an end-to-end ecosystem that suits their needs, and that they can change at any time - open, but without stability guarantees. This feature is effectively an acknowledgement that people using these machines outside of their ecosystem exist, and might want some stability guarantees.
  - elteto 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction. Glad to see these steps being taken by Apple.
m12k 5y ago
Yep, there seems to be this tendency to evaluate all the actions of all the people inside a company as a single coherent whole, expecting there to be single coherent thread running through it all. It's almost like people think of the company as a single person - a kind of anthropomorphization maybe. Companies may strive for alignment, but they're not the Borg, and they certainly don't have the capacity to micromanage every single decision for every single employee.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  It's interesting how American/Canadian English uses the singular for groups of people, while British English uses the plural: "Apple helps Asahi Linux" (American). "Apple help Asahi Linux" (British), as if there's a "people" after Apple.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    That seems odd to me (as an American) because Apple is not plural, and often times when it is a group of people by identity you do use the plural for them (eg Americans help Asahi Linux). Would British folks say “England help Asahi Linux” as well?
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Yes, I believe that would be correct. Apple is plural in the sense that it is made up of multiple people acting in unison. Same as "My family are visiting over Christmas." However, the word Americans is not a group of people in the same sense that USA, England, Apple, or family is. Its kind of like the distinction between people and persons. Edit: the term for words like family is "collective noun". More at https://blog.harwardcommunications.com/2017/02/07/the-family-is-or-the-family-are/ https://blog.harwardcommunications.com/2017/02/07/the-family...
    - handelaar 5y ago
      No, they would not. Don't mistake erroneous colloquial speech for what's "correct" in written English. This is wrong, and so is the original example.
dev_tty01 5y ago
I agree that this is mostly a small number of engineers (with approval) being helpful. This has almost no bearing on Apple profit. The number of people who want to run Linux on an Apple Mac is very small compared to their other markets. The only tangible benefit to the company is that this may add a bit of goodwill and slightly reduce the volume of the vocal detractors. As others have pointed out, it may also help if they are moving to add back bootcamp support for Windows (on ARM). Apple has added better support for virtualization at the OS level in recent years and that handles the needs of most devs.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  > I agree that this is mostly a small number of engineers (with approval) being helpful. The M1 Macs have their security settings applied per partition instead of per computer. If you set the bootloader to "permissive security policy", you can boot from a Linux partition without effecting the security of the system when you boot from the MacOS partition. This is a big change over the way things have previously worked on iOS (where there is no option to unlock the bootloader) or the Mac. It probably wasn't a quick hack that a couple of guys stuck in when nobody was looking.
  - gsnedders 5y ago
    Note there's also macOS-related reasons to use the different modes: Reduced security mode is needed to boot into outdated macOS installs (specifically, I believe this is "outdated, insecure, at install-time"), along with loading kernel extensions (which aren't supported in full security mode on Apple Silicon). Permissive security mode is needed to boot into macOS with a custom XNU kernel. But yes, this is a significant change to iOS devices, but not to older macOS devices.
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      > But yes, this is a significant change to iOS devices, but not to older macOS devices. Previously the Macs had their security settings applied per computer, not per partition.
  - 5y ago
sixothree 5y ago
It's not like they're huge contributors to anything open source. I have to agree. This is probably an engineer or two. They may even have personal reasons for wanting it to work.
merbanan 5y ago
Well I think this falls right into the anti-competitive argument. With the option of booting unsigned code the platform is available for anyone. Microsoft did sign boot loaders so linux can boot, there would have been some kind of fallout if they had not. So the booting of unsigned Mach-O sunds like a minimal action to not let it become a public issue for Apple. The addition of raw mode sounds like a stable abi for booting linux. The Asahi developers have found "stuff" with the hardware. Just that feedback will be of great value to the continued development of the Apple SoCs. So my guess is that the raw mode is a gift with the expectation to be able to see how the Linux folks solves other issues.
- tw04 5y ago
  Why would it become a public issue for Apple? You're going to have a REAL tough time getting the government to intervene because you can't run linux on a macbook. You have literally thousands of alternatives. And outside of government intervention, the response from the general public will be: who cares? None of them want to or care to run Linux on a macbook. Heck even within the HN community I'm willing to bet the number of folks who run linux as a daily driver desktop on a macbook is a rounding error.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Mac’s have a 16% market share. I don’t think Apple is concerned about antitrust in this part of their business.
darthrupert 5y ago
They're not that different people from the rest of us, so why wouldn't some of them want to run Linux themselves on those machines? MacOS isn't that great.
tombert 5y ago
I didn't work on the OS team, but when I worked at Apple, if I had snuck in an altruistic change without direct order/approval, I would be in trouble. I suspect there's a good chance that the higher-ups are aware of this.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
> I don't think the high-level people would really know that these changes even existed... if anyone on the outside knows, then Federighi (sp?) and insiders know and approved publishing with visibility?
bpye 5y ago
I agree, this seems likely to be a couple folks at Apple trying to be helpful rather than a real policy. If Apple were serious about helping open source efforts they could, for example, release the documentation for their different peripherals and ISA extensions.
manojlds 5y ago
Apple Engineers don't even come on a podcast to discuss stuff without thinking and asking internally if it's ok.

bestouff 5y ago

This may have security implications, I highly doubt they would be authorized to make such a change without consulting anyone.

marcan_42 5y ago
The shift to moving the Mach-O parsing from iBoot to kmutil has positive security implications. Adding a raw input option on top of that has zero additional security implications. It's a strict subset of the attack surface.
- uranusjr 5y ago
  I believe parent is not talking about the security implications of the contributions themselves, but the security implications of the act of making contributions as an Apple employee. And it’s a reasonable assumption; from my (not many) interactions with Apple employees in OSS world, they are generally very careful about doing this sort of things, and I would be very very surprised if not at least a few managers know about this beforehand.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    No Apple employees made any OSS contributions here. They just added a tiny feature to an existing Apple tool that happens to make our lives easier.
    - uranusjr 5y ago
      Yes, sorry, the wording I used was misleading. What I meant by “contribution” is in a broad sense “something that helps”, not actual OSS code contributions.

elteto 5y ago

There is no way that two random kernel engineers pushed a feature that allows booting unsigned kernels on Apple hardware (I'm assuming that's what raw image is?). I don't know how _high_ up it goes but I am very certain it was not some low-level skunkworks thing.

marcan_42 5y ago
> I'm assuming that's what raw image is? You're assuming wrong. Booting unsigned kernels on Apple hardware has been possible since January. This just makes it slightly less annoying since you don't need to build a Mach-O binary to do it, and more future-proof since it decouples it from Apple's binary format which they can change the requirements for at any time (as they did this time). It means I don't have to go off and reverse engineer what the new requirements are, I can just stop using Mach-Os and know the raw option will never break (assuming it continues to exist), since there is nothing to break with a raw file. Apple's machines are designed as an end-to-end ecosystem that suits their needs, and that they can change at any time - open, but without stability guarantees. This feature is effectively an acknowledgement that people using these machines outside of their ecosystem exist, and might want some stability guarantees.
- elteto 5y ago
  Thanks for the correction. Glad to see these steps being taken by Apple.

m12k 5y ago

Yep, there seems to be this tendency to evaluate all the actions of all the people inside a company as a single coherent whole, expecting there to be single coherent thread running through it all. It's almost like people think of the company as a single person - a kind of anthropomorphization maybe. Companies may strive for alignment, but they're not the Borg, and they certainly don't have the capacity to micromanage every single decision for every single employee.

frosted-flakes 5y ago
It's interesting how American/Canadian English uses the singular for groups of people, while British English uses the plural: "Apple helps Asahi Linux" (American). "Apple help Asahi Linux" (British), as if there's a "people" after Apple.
- azinman2 5y ago
  That seems odd to me (as an American) because Apple is not plural, and often times when it is a group of people by identity you do use the plural for them (eg Americans help Asahi Linux). Would British folks say “England help Asahi Linux” as well?
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Yes, I believe that would be correct. Apple is plural in the sense that it is made up of multiple people acting in unison. Same as "My family are visiting over Christmas." However, the word Americans is not a group of people in the same sense that USA, England, Apple, or family is. Its kind of like the distinction between people and persons. Edit: the term for words like family is "collective noun". More at https://blog.harwardcommunications.com/2017/02/07/the-family-is-or-the-family-are/ https://blog.harwardcommunications.com/2017/02/07/the-family...
  - handelaar 5y ago
    No, they would not. Don't mistake erroneous colloquial speech for what's "correct" in written English. This is wrong, and so is the original example.

dev_tty01 5y ago

I agree that this is mostly a small number of engineers (with approval) being helpful. This has almost no bearing on Apple profit. The number of people who want to run Linux on an Apple Mac is very small compared to their other markets. The only tangible benefit to the company is that this may add a bit of goodwill and slightly reduce the volume of the vocal detractors. As others have pointed out, it may also help if they are moving to add back bootcamp support for Windows (on ARM). Apple has added better support for virtualization at the OS level in recent years and that handles the needs of most devs.

GeekyBear 5y ago
> I agree that this is mostly a small number of engineers (with approval) being helpful. The M1 Macs have their security settings applied per partition instead of per computer. If you set the bootloader to "permissive security policy", you can boot from a Linux partition without effecting the security of the system when you boot from the MacOS partition. This is a big change over the way things have previously worked on iOS (where there is no option to unlock the bootloader) or the Mac. It probably wasn't a quick hack that a couple of guys stuck in when nobody was looking.
- gsnedders 5y ago
  Note there's also macOS-related reasons to use the different modes: Reduced security mode is needed to boot into outdated macOS installs (specifically, I believe this is "outdated, insecure, at install-time"), along with loading kernel extensions (which aren't supported in full security mode on Apple Silicon). Permissive security mode is needed to boot into macOS with a custom XNU kernel. But yes, this is a significant change to iOS devices, but not to older macOS devices.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    > But yes, this is a significant change to iOS devices, but not to older macOS devices. Previously the Macs had their security settings applied per computer, not per partition.
- 5y ago

sixothree 5y ago

It's not like they're huge contributors to anything open source. I have to agree. This is probably an engineer or two. They may even have personal reasons for wanting it to work.

merbanan 5y ago

Well I think this falls right into the anti-competitive argument. With the option of booting unsigned code the platform is available for anyone. Microsoft did sign boot loaders so linux can boot, there would have been some kind of fallout if they had not. So the booting of unsigned Mach-O sunds like a minimal action to not let it become a public issue for Apple. The addition of raw mode sounds like a stable abi for booting linux. The Asahi developers have found "stuff" with the hardware. Just that feedback will be of great value to the continued development of the Apple SoCs. So my guess is that the raw mode is a gift with the expectation to be able to see how the Linux folks solves other issues.

tw04 5y ago
Why would it become a public issue for Apple? You're going to have a REAL tough time getting the government to intervene because you can't run linux on a macbook. You have literally thousands of alternatives. And outside of government intervention, the response from the general public will be: who cares? None of them want to or care to run Linux on a macbook. Heck even within the HN community I'm willing to bet the number of folks who run linux as a daily driver desktop on a macbook is a rounding error.
jdavis703 5y ago
Mac’s have a 16% market share. I don’t think Apple is concerned about antitrust in this part of their business.

darthrupert 5y ago

They're not that different people from the rest of us, so why wouldn't some of them want to run Linux themselves on those machines? MacOS isn't that great.

tombert 5y ago

I didn't work on the OS team, but when I worked at Apple, if I had snuck in an altruistic change without direct order/approval, I would be in trouble. I suspect there's a good chance that the higher-ups are aware of this.

jjtheblunt 5y ago

> I don't think the high-level people would really know that these changes even existed... if anyone on the outside knows, then Federighi (sp?) and insiders know and approved publishing with visibility?

bpye 5y ago

I agree, this seems likely to be a couple folks at Apple trying to be helpful rather than a real policy. If Apple were serious about helping open source efforts they could, for example, release the documentation for their different peripherals and ISA extensions.

manojlds 5y ago

Apple Engineers don't even come on a podcast to discuss stuff without thinking and asking internally if it's ok.