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I imagine they will receive a cease and desist? Did they reverse engineer something?

by jokoon 4y ago

stirlo 4y ago
This is a clean room open source implementation. Not property blobs are used. Additionally Apple intentionally designed the M1 architecture to support additional OSes. They have even made changes to their code that have fixed issues the Asahi project was having. So while there's no official support this project is certainly known to Apple and has raised no concerns so far.
- ankurdhama 4y ago
  > Additionally Apple intentionally designed the M1 architecture to support additional OSes How can you say that? Where is the documentation for M1 that can be used to implement support for other OSes?
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    See the section "Permissive Security Policy" at https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/sec7d92dc49f/web https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/sec7d92dc49f/... If you're looking for specific hardware documentation it doesn't really exist per se but the xnu kernel is open source, so if you want to look a lot of the basic architecture is out there I'm pretty sure. That said, afaik asahi is avoiding looking at the xnu source and is mostly using their own m1n1 bootloader/hypervisor to run macos under and monitor hardware interaction and deriving their drivers from that. (m1n1 is honestly some incredible work and I actually used it to get a non-Linux, non-macos os to boot to serial console a few weeks ago, it was fun)
    - allenrb 4y ago
      Now that’s an interesting teaser! Care to share more, even if it was just a personal project?
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        can't right now but hopefully eventually :)
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Could you explain what Apple changed in their code to help Asahi? Didn't you just say no proprietary code is used? I'm confused.
  - kreetx 4y ago
    AFAIK to reverse engineer Asahi runs a virtual machine between macOS and hardware. If Apple made changes in the code then perhaps these helped make the instruction logs more obvious as to what the GPU was doing.
    - roastedpeacock 4y ago
      Exactly - https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1
  - sushimako 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 [...] they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us. HN discussion about this tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578
  - dottedmag 4y ago
    One of recent macOS updates added a new option to boot non-macOS OS kernels easier. Apple engineers do not need this option, so it is presumably added to help Asahi (as there are no other known efforts to run non-macOS on these machines).
    - roastedpeacock 4y ago
      Perhaps releasing internal code or documentation is a mile of red-tape so some forward-thinking people are trying to do what they can to support the project while avoiding the above-mentioned issues.
roastedpeacock 4y ago
Not an attorney but from what I understand in the traditional view of copyright it is often legal to reverse-engineer a proprietary system for integration with third-patty hardware/software if nothing copyrighted from the original product otherwise not licensed to you ends up the final third-party product. Some people make a big deal out of reverse-engineering blobs through disassembly particularly for certain discrete components (e.g DSP or GPUs) but a) writing a set of clean-room specifications not containing any copyrighted information to use as a reference is a known task and often considered legal and b) m1n1 makes it in some cases easier to understand how the hardware is being used versus manual disassembly of blobs or drivers.

I imagine they will receive a cease and desist? Did they reverse engineer something?

by jokoon 4y ago

I imagine they will receive a cease and desist? Did they reverse engineer something?

This is a clean room open source implementation. Not property blobs are used. Additionally Apple intentionally designed the M1 architecture to support additional OSes. They have even made changes to their code that have fixed issues the Asahi project was having. So while there's no official support this project is certainly known to Apple and has raised no concerns so far.

ankurdhama 4y ago
> Additionally Apple intentionally designed the M1 architecture to support additional OSes How can you say that? Where is the documentation for M1 that can be used to implement support for other OSes?
- stormbrew 4y ago
  See the section "Permissive Security Policy" at https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/sec7d92dc49f/web https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/sec7d92dc49f/... If you're looking for specific hardware documentation it doesn't really exist per se but the xnu kernel is open source, so if you want to look a lot of the basic architecture is out there I'm pretty sure. That said, afaik asahi is avoiding looking at the xnu source and is mostly using their own m1n1 bootloader/hypervisor to run macos under and monitor hardware interaction and deriving their drivers from that. (m1n1 is honestly some incredible work and I actually used it to get a non-Linux, non-macos os to boot to serial console a few weeks ago, it was fun)
  - allenrb 4y ago
    Now that’s an interesting teaser! Care to share more, even if it was just a personal project?
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      can't right now but hopefully eventually :)
still_grokking 4y ago
Could you explain what Apple changed in their code to help Asahi? Didn't you just say no proprietary code is used? I'm confused.
- kreetx 4y ago
  AFAIK to reverse engineer Asahi runs a virtual machine between macOS and hardware. If Apple made changes in the code then perhaps these helped make the instruction logs more obvious as to what the GPU was doing.
  - roastedpeacock 4y ago
    Exactly - https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1
- sushimako 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 [...] they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us. HN discussion about this tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578
- dottedmag 4y ago
  One of recent macOS updates added a new option to boot non-macOS OS kernels easier. Apple engineers do not need this option, so it is presumably added to help Asahi (as there are no other known efforts to run non-macOS on these machines).
  - roastedpeacock 4y ago
    Perhaps releasing internal code or documentation is a mile of red-tape so some forward-thinking people are trying to do what they can to support the project while avoiding the above-mentioned issues.

roastedpeacock 4y ago

Not an attorney but from what I understand in the traditional view of copyright it is often legal to reverse-engineer a proprietary system for integration with third-patty hardware/software if nothing copyrighted from the original product otherwise not licensed to you ends up the final third-party product. Some people make a big deal out of reverse-engineering blobs through disassembly particularly for certain discrete components (e.g DSP or GPUs) but a) writing a set of clean-room specifications not containing any copyrighted information to use as a reference is a known task and often considered legal and b) m1n1 makes it in some cases easier to understand how the hardware is being used versus manual disassembly of blobs or drivers.