6 ms·

Are there working drivers (preferably open source) for all hardware components yet?

rowanG077 5y ago
Not all but a most. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
- smoldesu 5y ago
  On the contrary, it looks like a lot of essentials are still missing: HDMI out, webcam, speakers, Thunderbolt, USB3, backlights, and of course, the GPU. This is "usable", but a long ways away from being a daily driver. I think you can cross the "mostly there" threshold when the GPU is working...
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Baloney. We had computers for decades before we had GPUs. And considering most computers are just used for browsing the web, writing documents, and writing code, most people rarely touch their GPU (YouTube being Media Engine Decoding and not technically the GPU). Even my job - I write web apps, I don't need a GPU. If it can play audio through a headphone jack, and draw a window nicely without aggravating amounts of tearing (though I might work in a full-screen CLI anyway), I don't care, it's Linux! [Edit: I'm not disputing a GPU is nice to have. I am dismissing the overly negative reply above.]
    - ravi-delia 5y ago
      I wouldn't call the comment you replied to overly negative, at least by the text alone. Look at the full unsupported list; there's a lot of work left. Considering the pace the project has moved so far, I suspect we'll see most of it in the coming months, but for now there are big gaps. I mean, if all you want is browsing and a headphone out, why an M1? Any cheap device could do the same. The magic is in the "unnecessary" other things, like speedy rendering or, you know, speakers. It's coming for sure, probably soon, but not quite yet.
      - bestouff 5y ago
        It depends for who. I just need a fast mobile machine with lots of RAM for doing compilations and CPU-intensive work. I don't care about the GPU or sound. An M1 with Asahi looks fantastic to me.
    - zamalek 5y ago
      Baloney. If you want a Linux laptop, there are currently systems with purposeful Linux support. Asahi is an amazing feat, but panders to Apple's bullshit.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Couldn't have said it better myself. I genuinely respect the people who are capable of doing stuff like this, but genuflecting yourself at the altar of propriety is a shameful act, and there's no respect in licking the boots of a company that has kicked OSS in the teeth more times than you can count.
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        You might say they have kicked right to repair in the teeth many times, but OSS? Ha no, this is the company that brought us WebKit (browser engine) which later brought us Blink, and also brought us CUPS (which is what allows Linux to print right now - there's Apple code in your Linux distribution for everyday functionality, gasp!) They've also done a ton of work and basically brought us LLVM which many Linux systems use as part of compiling.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        > brought us WebKit (browser engine) Yes, the browser engine that had to be forked because Apple neglected it for so long. Brilliant example! > and also brought us CUPS Nope. That would be Michael Sweet. Apple later hired the main developer behind the effort, and adopted the standard as their own. Same thing happened with LLVM, so don't go around spreading those particular lies. Got anything else? All of your examples seem to be instances where Apple has neglected Open Source or just threw money at something they were incapable of competing with. > there's Apple code in your Linux distribution for everyday functionality, gasp! Man, wait until you hear who contributed the POSIX APIs, SMP support, multitasking/multiuser functionality and the entire networking stack to MacOS... ;)
        Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        Nitpick, partly because I suspect someone else will bring it up if I don’t, webkit didn’t start at Apple. I do think Apple’s open source contributions are largely undersold, although they’ve probably contributed less than other technology companies their size (e.g. Google).
    - frozenport 5y ago
      GPUs are more power efficient at rendering, which is important for mobile applications. GUIs will essentially emulate the GPU in software and reduce battery life.
    - olliej 5y ago
      The resolution of modern displays is such that you want specialized hardware doing the work. Modern font rendering engines run on GPUs as well now, because the resolution increases faster than single threaded speed. GPUs are also more power efficient at many of these things, because while they use more power while running they get done sufficiently quickly that they end up ahead. That’s before you include the power savings from rapidly dropping the power mode. Note that this isn’t specific to AS, or even arm in general: every laptop wants to get to low power as fast as possible, because constant low-ish power is much worse than brief spikes that you can disable power between.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      A GPU is an absolute must have for a laptop. Seriously. If you software render everything, your battery life will be horrible. The only reason modern laptops have 10h+ battery life is because of GPUs. Sure, without it you can manage, your power efficiency will just massively tank. However, this could be absolutely amazing for the new M1 desktops, or for the M1 Mac Mini. It could make a kick-ass server.
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        And yet we're getting ~8h of battery life on these machines with software rendering. Did I mention the hardware is just that good? :-)
        kergonath 5y ago
        Well, it could be better ;) Seriously though, you’re all doing a very impressive work!
        smoldesu 5y ago
        I'm sure that's fine for terminal usage, but seriously; who out there is going to daily-drive a laptop that has a non-functional GPU? This line of reasoning sounds like you're trying to compensate for the fact that GPU support is a long ways away, and that we may well have an M2 on store shelves before you've even got M1 support to a usable point.
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        "I'm sure that's fine for terminal usage, but seriously; who out there is going to daily-drive a laptop that has a non-functional GPU?" Then how did Integrated Graphics sell so well in the broader marketplace? You'd think with their near-useless GPUs that were weaker than M1's software rendering that nobody could use them. Also, whatever about M2 - Apple has structured their hardware to require minimum driver changes on each release. M2 will probably just be a few patches on the core driver, not a rewrite.
        5y ago
  - bogantech 5y ago
    Most of these things are broken for other machines running Linux anyway so the masochists running Linux on their laptops might not even notice
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      That's some bullshit right there.
    - shmerl 5y ago
      When did you use Linux last, 20 years ago?
    - wyclif 5y ago
      Not to be that guy, but all of the above works on the Arch Linux install on my ThinkPad.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    Hector Martin: >That whole "optimized for macOS" thing is a myth. Heck, we don't even have CPU deep idle support yet and people are reporting 7-10h of battery runtime on Linux. With software rendering running a composited desktop. No GPU. The hardware is just that good. https://nitter.net/marcan42/status/1498923099169132545#m https://nitter.net/marcan42/status/1498923099169132545#m
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      That's not the issue? The issues are: 1. There is now a completely untapped resource on your SOC 2. Your CPU is being utilized unnecessarily for things it shouldn't have to run in the first place 3. It completely rules out any hardware-accelerated applications, which is a lot of desktop use cases
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        > 1. There is now a completely untapped resource on your SOC. If you’ve ever used a desktop PC with an Intel CPU and a dedicated GPU, you’ve also have a completely untapped resource in your machine (unless you were rocking a Xeon or some such). It’s not entirely illogical when you consider the benefits of economies of scale. What matters is whether the experience you can get with the hardware you do use is superior to competing offerings. Have Apple Silicon Macs reached that point for Linux users? Probably not, unless you have very specific requirements and are willing to live on the bleeding edge, but the case is starting to appear for some specific needs. And of course, they are working on drivers for the GPU and other hardware.
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        > It completely rules out any hardware-accelerated applications, which is a lot of desktop use cases What does that even mean? We have a full composited desktop with shadows and transparency and everything. Software rendering doesn't mean no OpenGL. It's just software OpenGL.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    Speakers work in our kernel tree, we're just not shipping it yet because there's infrastructure work to be done because Linux as a whole has no subsystem for enforcing speaker volume safety limits, nor does it have any subsystem for speaker DSP/EQ. Both of those are critical for modern platforms to be safe and sound good. I do not consider not having that up to standard, so I won't enable speakers for end users until we have an answer. It's coming, it's just we have to be the first to develop all this infra because it's 2022 and Linux audio still sucks ;) USB3 and Thunderbolt are being worked on as we speak, and USB3 already works in Sven's kernel branch. The backlight works with the DCP display driver, which is already working but just needs to be productionized so we can ship it in our main kernel branch. Soon. And the GPU userspace work is at 90+% GLES2 spec compliance, and the hardware interface reverse engineering to write a kernel driver (which is the simpler part) has already started. Things are moving quickly.
    - bestouff 5y ago
      Impressive. This will make me choose an M1 to replace my XPS. You should be paid by Apple for this.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        > You should be paid by Apple for this. Apple pays less than $500/year to BSD developers for the millions of lines of code that they poach from them. Giving back to open source developers for doing the things they should have done in the first place isn't really "their thing" so to speak.
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        Source? This is unfounded. Also Apple bought the rights to BSD before FreeBSD existed, back when it was BSD4.3 and FreeBSD would not arrive for over a decade later. Apple also hired a lot of FreeBSD's programmers (including their founder) full-time and some of Apple's technologies such as LLVM have made their way back to FreeBSD.
        5y ago
  - microtonal 5y ago
    Even if laptop support is not there yet, I think a Mac Mini (or Mac Studio, if supported) with Asahi Linux would make a fantastic Linux machine for AArch64 development or build servers. Perhaps ironically, Apple's Mac Mini may be the best the performance per dollar AArch64 Linux machine you can currently get. What a time to live :).
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      Mac Studio isn't supported yet, but I expect bring-up to take a day or two once mine arrives! Some upstream kernel folks are already using Apple Silicon machines for development (to compile x86 kernels even) because they're faster than their x86 boxes, by a good margin :-). My M1 Pro laptop is about as fast at doing kernel builds as my 16-core Threadripper.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    HDMI out and backlights are not essential for most folks. I agree with webcam, speakers and TB/USB3 (and GPU).
olliej 5y ago
Nothing for the GPUs but IIRC Alyssa Rosenzweig (https://twitter.com/alyssarzg https://twitter.com/alyssarzg) had a bunch of stuff going, but I don't recall how much
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fulafel 5y ago
To calibrate your expectations, even for recent x86 Macbooks there weren't working drivers for all the hw components. (see https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/ https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/)

Not all but a most. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

smoldesu 5y ago
On the contrary, it looks like a lot of essentials are still missing: HDMI out, webcam, speakers, Thunderbolt, USB3, backlights, and of course, the GPU. This is "usable", but a long ways away from being a daily driver. I think you can cross the "mostly there" threshold when the GPU is working...
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Baloney. We had computers for decades before we had GPUs. And considering most computers are just used for browsing the web, writing documents, and writing code, most people rarely touch their GPU (YouTube being Media Engine Decoding and not technically the GPU). Even my job - I write web apps, I don't need a GPU. If it can play audio through a headphone jack, and draw a window nicely without aggravating amounts of tearing (though I might work in a full-screen CLI anyway), I don't care, it's Linux! [Edit: I'm not disputing a GPU is nice to have. I am dismissing the overly negative reply above.]
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    I wouldn't call the comment you replied to overly negative, at least by the text alone. Look at the full unsupported list; there's a lot of work left. Considering the pace the project has moved so far, I suspect we'll see most of it in the coming months, but for now there are big gaps. I mean, if all you want is browsing and a headphone out, why an M1? Any cheap device could do the same. The magic is in the "unnecessary" other things, like speedy rendering or, you know, speakers. It's coming for sure, probably soon, but not quite yet.
    - bestouff 5y ago
      It depends for who. I just need a fast mobile machine with lots of RAM for doing compilations and CPU-intensive work. I don't care about the GPU or sound. An M1 with Asahi looks fantastic to me.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    Baloney. If you want a Linux laptop, there are currently systems with purposeful Linux support. Asahi is an amazing feat, but panders to Apple's bullshit.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Couldn't have said it better myself. I genuinely respect the people who are capable of doing stuff like this, but genuflecting yourself at the altar of propriety is a shameful act, and there's no respect in licking the boots of a company that has kicked OSS in the teeth more times than you can count.
      - gjsman-1000 5y ago
        You might say they have kicked right to repair in the teeth many times, but OSS? Ha no, this is the company that brought us WebKit (browser engine) which later brought us Blink, and also brought us CUPS (which is what allows Linux to print right now - there's Apple code in your Linux distribution for everyday functionality, gasp!) They've also done a ton of work and basically brought us LLVM which many Linux systems use as part of compiling.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        > brought us WebKit (browser engine) Yes, the browser engine that had to be forked because Apple neglected it for so long. Brilliant example! > and also brought us CUPS Nope. That would be Michael Sweet. Apple later hired the main developer behind the effort, and adopted the standard as their own. Same thing happened with LLVM, so don't go around spreading those particular lies. Got anything else? All of your examples seem to be instances where Apple has neglected Open Source or just threw money at something they were incapable of competing with. > there's Apple code in your Linux distribution for everyday functionality, gasp! Man, wait until you hear who contributed the POSIX APIs, SMP support, multitasking/multiuser functionality and the entire networking stack to MacOS... ;)
        Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        Nitpick, partly because I suspect someone else will bring it up if I don’t, webkit didn’t start at Apple. I do think Apple’s open source contributions are largely undersold, although they’ve probably contributed less than other technology companies their size (e.g. Google).
  - frozenport 5y ago
    GPUs are more power efficient at rendering, which is important for mobile applications. GUIs will essentially emulate the GPU in software and reduce battery life.
  - olliej 5y ago
    The resolution of modern displays is such that you want specialized hardware doing the work. Modern font rendering engines run on GPUs as well now, because the resolution increases faster than single threaded speed. GPUs are also more power efficient at many of these things, because while they use more power while running they get done sufficiently quickly that they end up ahead. That’s before you include the power savings from rapidly dropping the power mode. Note that this isn’t specific to AS, or even arm in general: every laptop wants to get to low power as fast as possible, because constant low-ish power is much worse than brief spikes that you can disable power between.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    A GPU is an absolute must have for a laptop. Seriously. If you software render everything, your battery life will be horrible. The only reason modern laptops have 10h+ battery life is because of GPUs. Sure, without it you can manage, your power efficiency will just massively tank. However, this could be absolutely amazing for the new M1 desktops, or for the M1 Mac Mini. It could make a kick-ass server.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      And yet we're getting ~8h of battery life on these machines with software rendering. Did I mention the hardware is just that good? :-)
      - kergonath 5y ago
        Well, it could be better ;) Seriously though, you’re all doing a very impressive work!
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        I'm sure that's fine for terminal usage, but seriously; who out there is going to daily-drive a laptop that has a non-functional GPU? This line of reasoning sounds like you're trying to compensate for the fact that GPU support is a long ways away, and that we may well have an M2 on store shelves before you've even got M1 support to a usable point.
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        "I'm sure that's fine for terminal usage, but seriously; who out there is going to daily-drive a laptop that has a non-functional GPU?" Then how did Integrated Graphics sell so well in the broader marketplace? You'd think with their near-useless GPUs that were weaker than M1's software rendering that nobody could use them. Also, whatever about M2 - Apple has structured their hardware to require minimum driver changes on each release. M2 will probably just be a few patches on the core driver, not a rewrite.
        5y ago
- bogantech 5y ago
  Most of these things are broken for other machines running Linux anyway so the masochists running Linux on their laptops might not even notice
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    That's some bullshit right there.
  - shmerl 5y ago
    When did you use Linux last, 20 years ago?
  - wyclif 5y ago
    Not to be that guy, but all of the above works on the Arch Linux install on my ThinkPad.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Hector Martin: >That whole "optimized for macOS" thing is a myth. Heck, we don't even have CPU deep idle support yet and people are reporting 7-10h of battery runtime on Linux. With software rendering running a composited desktop. No GPU. The hardware is just that good. https://nitter.net/marcan42/status/1498923099169132545#m https://nitter.net/marcan42/status/1498923099169132545#m
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    That's not the issue? The issues are: 1. There is now a completely untapped resource on your SOC 2. Your CPU is being utilized unnecessarily for things it shouldn't have to run in the first place 3. It completely rules out any hardware-accelerated applications, which is a lot of desktop use cases
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      > 1. There is now a completely untapped resource on your SOC. If you’ve ever used a desktop PC with an Intel CPU and a dedicated GPU, you’ve also have a completely untapped resource in your machine (unless you were rocking a Xeon or some such). It’s not entirely illogical when you consider the benefits of economies of scale. What matters is whether the experience you can get with the hardware you do use is superior to competing offerings. Have Apple Silicon Macs reached that point for Linux users? Probably not, unless you have very specific requirements and are willing to live on the bleeding edge, but the case is starting to appear for some specific needs. And of course, they are working on drivers for the GPU and other hardware.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      > It completely rules out any hardware-accelerated applications, which is a lot of desktop use cases What does that even mean? We have a full composited desktop with shadows and transparency and everything. Software rendering doesn't mean no OpenGL. It's just software OpenGL.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  Speakers work in our kernel tree, we're just not shipping it yet because there's infrastructure work to be done because Linux as a whole has no subsystem for enforcing speaker volume safety limits, nor does it have any subsystem for speaker DSP/EQ. Both of those are critical for modern platforms to be safe and sound good. I do not consider not having that up to standard, so I won't enable speakers for end users until we have an answer. It's coming, it's just we have to be the first to develop all this infra because it's 2022 and Linux audio still sucks ;) USB3 and Thunderbolt are being worked on as we speak, and USB3 already works in Sven's kernel branch. The backlight works with the DCP display driver, which is already working but just needs to be productionized so we can ship it in our main kernel branch. Soon. And the GPU userspace work is at 90+% GLES2 spec compliance, and the hardware interface reverse engineering to write a kernel driver (which is the simpler part) has already started. Things are moving quickly.
  - bestouff 5y ago
    Impressive. This will make me choose an M1 to replace my XPS. You should be paid by Apple for this.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > You should be paid by Apple for this. Apple pays less than $500/year to BSD developers for the millions of lines of code that they poach from them. Giving back to open source developers for doing the things they should have done in the first place isn't really "their thing" so to speak.
      - gjsman-1000 5y ago
        Source? This is unfounded. Also Apple bought the rights to BSD before FreeBSD existed, back when it was BSD4.3 and FreeBSD would not arrive for over a decade later. Apple also hired a lot of FreeBSD's programmers (including their founder) full-time and some of Apple's technologies such as LLVM have made their way back to FreeBSD.
        5y ago
- microtonal 5y ago
  Even if laptop support is not there yet, I think a Mac Mini (or Mac Studio, if supported) with Asahi Linux would make a fantastic Linux machine for AArch64 development or build servers. Perhaps ironically, Apple's Mac Mini may be the best the performance per dollar AArch64 Linux machine you can currently get. What a time to live :).
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    Mac Studio isn't supported yet, but I expect bring-up to take a day or two once mine arrives! Some upstream kernel folks are already using Apple Silicon machines for development (to compile x86 kernels even) because they're faster than their x86 boxes, by a good margin :-). My M1 Pro laptop is about as fast at doing kernel builds as my 16-core Threadripper.
- r00fus 5y ago
  HDMI out and backlights are not essential for most folks. I agree with webcam, speakers and TB/USB3 (and GPU).

olliej 5y ago

Nothing for the GPUs but IIRC Alyssa Rosenzweig (https://twitter.com/alyssarzg https://twitter.com/alyssarzg) had a bunch of stuff going, but I don't recall how much

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fulafel 5y ago

To calibrate your expectations, even for recent x86 Macbooks there weren't working drivers for all the hw components. (see https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/ https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/)