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This is a great project. Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? It is not possible to simply reverse engineer everything nowadays --

This is a great project. Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? It is not possible to simply reverse engineer everything nowadays -- it could take years to build a polished system and in the meanwhile there will always be new hardware from Apple. It's a never ending game of "catch up". Are there some scenarios where Apple might want to allow "proper" Linux on Mx to happen ? The fact that Apple has not totally locked down these machines is tremendously heartening. Could it be in Apple's interest to somehow help the Asahi guys move faster -- release hardware specifications in the open etc.? I think that if Apple hardware releases Mx hardware specs, a high quality linux implementation can then take shape on the Mx. This will create some competition with the Apple software folks. People will benchmarks software running on Mx Linux vs Mx MacOS. This could create some healthy competition. Just like the arrival of llvm helped gcc improve its game, a well functioning software stack on Mx Linux can create some healthy competition for the Apple software team. Their software is quite decent already -- it can achieve greater heights with some competition !

xanaxagoras 4y ago
> This is a great project. Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? > It is not possible to simply reverse engineer everything nowadays -- it could take years to build a polished system and in the meanwhile there will always be new hardware from Apple. It's a never ending game of "catch up". I would think it's very much in their favor to help. If it takes years to build a polished release, a lot of people will value years old apple hardware over whatever more recently released. Cut that down to months and they just added a new (albeit smaller) segment chomping at the bit for their latest hardware.
fweimer 4y ago
It's very difficult to do more to help Asahi Linux. If they upstreamed things properly into Linux (which is arguably the most cost-effective way to support hardware on a broad scale), Mesa, QEMU and related projects, Asahi Linux as a separate project would turn obsolete fairly quickly.
- humanwhosits 4y ago
  They are upstreaming as much as they can
  - fweimer 4y ago
    But Apple isn't, that's my point.
    - sliken 4y ago
      Ah, I didn't read it that way, too many pronouns.
enragedcacti 4y ago
Just to add, Apple has helped a little bit in the form of adding a raw image boot mode that wouldn't be useful internally but helps Asahi 's boot process not break in the future. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Apple also helped by not copying the iOS Boot mechanism to macOS, which they could have. This entire "Permissive Security" mode allowing for installation without jailbreaking took extra work to make and was not necessary otherwise.
  - humanwhosits 4y ago
    They probably want to entice arm windows and chromeos support longer term
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Reading between the lines, Apple wanted Windows support at release, but Microsoft signed an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm for windows on ARM so they weren't able to make that happen even if they wanted to.
      - srmatto 4y ago
        Is that ever set to expire?
        nicoburns 4y ago
        Yes, quite soon (this year? next year?) IIRC
      - IntelMiner 4y ago
        It's fair to speculate that Microsoft likely has Windows already running on M1 machines somewhere deep within their labs. Even if it's just some engineers doing it "in their free time" Wonder what Qualcomm had to do to get that agreement though. All signs seem to point to Qualcomm being absolutely poisonous to work with and their ARM offerings being uncompetitive with Apple's now
zozbot234 4y ago
> it could take years to build a polished system That's the reality of Linux support on pretty much any hardware - it can easily take years to really shape up and become polished. The Apple M1/M2 if anything are making surprisingly fast progress.
- hu3 4y ago
  It's not comparable. I can buy brand new Intel/AMD hardware and Linux generally boots out of the box with mostly everything working except some quirks that have a good chance to be fixed within a few months. Whereas Asahi still sports a rudimentary GPU driver written in Python... Current guesstimate to achieve hardware acceleration is... years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327
  - gpm 4y ago
    Your link just goes back to this HN comment section.
    - hu3 4y ago
      Thanks. I mean't to link this comment in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327
      - rvz 4y ago
        Thank you for show casing the true reality of the GPU progress and that there is still no H/W acceleration yet which is more straight to the point and accurately concise than most of the Linux fans vaguely screaming 'iT w0RkS'. I don't care about that. If there is no H/W acceleration, then it is not useful as a daily driver at all. We wait until there is proper support of H/W acceleration before using such a system. Otherwise all your memory eating programs or graphical intensive apps will run the computer to the ground.
- chungy 4y ago
  Any hardware? You can basically take any PC with brand new components and have high confidence that it'll work perfectly with Linux.
Cannabat 4y ago
I wonder if Apple has a secret internal Linux distribution in use on Mx. I seem to recall reading that they had an x86/x86-64 internal distribution but maybe I am thinking of another company...
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  According to marcan’s twitter Apple likely has an internal one for silicon validation, but it’s probably not complete / something you’d want to use as a daily driver.
- quesera 4y ago
  Apple had an internal project of OSX running on x86 (amd64?) for a while before they got serious about it. It's less likely that they have an internal ARM/Mx Linux project though. Doesn't serve any known purpose that I'm aware of.
  - fweimer 4y ago
    What operating system(s) do they use to run their cloud services? Given that MacOS has moved in a different direction for many years, it seems a bit unlikely that they run that at this point.
    - quesera 4y ago
      I think it's all Linux these days.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    There's a rumor that they have an internal Linux distro that the silicon validation team at Apple uses on their hardware so that they don't have dependencies on the software division.
    - quesera 4y ago
      I recall reading that was only for bringup though, not full peripheral support? Either way, that's a good point and does have clear internal utility. It's certainly easier to get Linux running on a new chip than OSX!
blinkingled 4y ago
> Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? Apple doesn't have a history of helping anyone but themselves and if you read the article it looks like they're not thinking at all about helping alternative OSes by using proprietary interfaces and overly complicated hardware/firmware designs and breaking things with macOS updates. It is a truly herculian task to get Linux merely booting up and usable on Apple M* SoCs - kudos to the Asahi Linux team for all the heroic efforts - personally it feels like it's a great reverse engineering project and they should continue fighting it but Linux on M1/2 is not going to be a daily driver like Linux on standard x64 machines is. Thankfully Intel and AMD are doing pretty good in performance department with their latest chips and it's only going to get better.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Linux was booting within weeks. Hardly a herculian task. I'm really not sure where this idea comes from. Yes of course initial investment is pretty high because of the new architecture. But it's pretty clear they have proven they can do it. M2 was working with a few hours of coding. GPU prototype driver has over 90% compliance. Like when does this idea die?
  - blinkingled 4y ago
    God it gets tiring - Did I say booting Linux on M1 was a herculean task? I even used the words daily driver - making that a daily driver is definitely a herculean task - it is still not there - the GPU driver piece is pretty herculean by itself.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      This is what you said: "It is a truly herculian task to get Linux merely booting up and usable on Apple M* SoCs". And you can use the M1 macs today and it's usable. Whether it's daily driveable is an entirely different, subjective, question. I could probably daily drive it just fine with some manageable pain points. That doesn't mean it's daily driveable for you or anyone else. But whether it's usable is really not in question at this point.
nicce 4y ago
It is not healthy competition only for the Apple software team ... it is competition for every hardware manufacturer. Vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters, and Apple provides premium hardware which is also usable by Linux systems. Before Apple Silicon days, the primary motivation to buy Apple devices was the software side, but now the hardware has gone to the next level, and buying for the hardware alone is tempting.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > Vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters, and Apple provides premium hardware which is also usable by Linux systems. Apple is practically the worst computer vendor when it comes to "decent Linux support"; even nvidia is better, at least they have proprietary drivers. It's quite a stretch to say that "vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters"; rather, the conclusion here would be that vendors should drop their game altogether since no one cares. People, even Linux users and developers apparently, buy the hardware anyway even if the vendor just totally ignores Linux (at best). I would find it quite telling if we go back to that era where all I see are MacBooks at the Linux kernel developers conferences, specially when the other manufacturers are now most definitely not ignoring Linux. Fortunately, that is not the case, so far.
  - nicce 4y ago
    I was applying more into the future than the current situation, in case Apple would start giving better support. Currently yes, Apple is the worst vendor. > rather, the conclusion here would be that vendors should drop their game altogether since no one cares. People, even Linux users and developers apparently, buy the hardware anyway even if the vendor just totally ignores Linux (at best). That's exactly the idea I was chasing - if Apple would care, then other vendors should care as well. But currently, Linux users are still in minority and it does not matter that much yet.
danaris 4y ago
> Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? I would guess that the best way to incentivize them is to let them know—en masse—that a large number of people would want to buy new Apple Silicon-based Macs to run Asahi Linux on if it were in better shape.

xanaxagoras 4y ago

> This is a great project. Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? > It is not possible to simply reverse engineer everything nowadays -- it could take years to build a polished system and in the meanwhile there will always be new hardware from Apple. It's a never ending game of "catch up". I would think it's very much in their favor to help. If it takes years to build a polished release, a lot of people will value years old apple hardware over whatever more recently released. Cut that down to months and they just added a new (albeit smaller) segment chomping at the bit for their latest hardware.

fweimer 4y ago

It's very difficult to do more to help Asahi Linux. If they upstreamed things properly into Linux (which is arguably the most cost-effective way to support hardware on a broad scale), Mesa, QEMU and related projects, Asahi Linux as a separate project would turn obsolete fairly quickly.

humanwhosits 4y ago
They are upstreaming as much as they can
- fweimer 4y ago
  But Apple isn't, that's my point.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Ah, I didn't read it that way, too many pronouns.

enragedcacti 4y ago

Just to add, Apple has helped a little bit in the form of adding a raw image boot mode that wouldn't be useful internally but helps Asahi 's boot process not break in the future. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Apple also helped by not copying the iOS Boot mechanism to macOS, which they could have. This entire "Permissive Security" mode allowing for installation without jailbreaking took extra work to make and was not necessary otherwise.
- humanwhosits 4y ago
  They probably want to entice arm windows and chromeos support longer term
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Reading between the lines, Apple wanted Windows support at release, but Microsoft signed an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm for windows on ARM so they weren't able to make that happen even if they wanted to.
    - srmatto 4y ago
      Is that ever set to expire?
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        Yes, quite soon (this year? next year?) IIRC
    - IntelMiner 4y ago
      It's fair to speculate that Microsoft likely has Windows already running on M1 machines somewhere deep within their labs. Even if it's just some engineers doing it "in their free time" Wonder what Qualcomm had to do to get that agreement though. All signs seem to point to Qualcomm being absolutely poisonous to work with and their ARM offerings being uncompetitive with Apple's now

zozbot234 4y ago

> it could take years to build a polished system That's the reality of Linux support on pretty much any hardware - it can easily take years to really shape up and become polished. The Apple M1/M2 if anything are making surprisingly fast progress.

hu3 4y ago
It's not comparable. I can buy brand new Intel/AMD hardware and Linux generally boots out of the box with mostly everything working except some quirks that have a good chance to be fixed within a few months. Whereas Asahi still sports a rudimentary GPU driver written in Python... Current guesstimate to achieve hardware acceleration is... years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327
- gpm 4y ago
  Your link just goes back to this HN comment section.
  - hu3 4y ago
    Thanks. I mean't to link this comment in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138327
    - rvz 4y ago
      Thank you for show casing the true reality of the GPU progress and that there is still no H/W acceleration yet which is more straight to the point and accurately concise than most of the Linux fans vaguely screaming 'iT w0RkS'. I don't care about that. If there is no H/W acceleration, then it is not useful as a daily driver at all. We wait until there is proper support of H/W acceleration before using such a system. Otherwise all your memory eating programs or graphical intensive apps will run the computer to the ground.
chungy 4y ago
Any hardware? You can basically take any PC with brand new components and have high confidence that it'll work perfectly with Linux.

Cannabat 4y ago

I wonder if Apple has a secret internal Linux distribution in use on Mx. I seem to recall reading that they had an x86/x86-64 internal distribution but maybe I am thinking of another company...

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
According to marcan’s twitter Apple likely has an internal one for silicon validation, but it’s probably not complete / something you’d want to use as a daily driver.
quesera 4y ago
Apple had an internal project of OSX running on x86 (amd64?) for a while before they got serious about it. It's less likely that they have an internal ARM/Mx Linux project though. Doesn't serve any known purpose that I'm aware of.
- fweimer 4y ago
  What operating system(s) do they use to run their cloud services? Given that MacOS has moved in a different direction for many years, it seems a bit unlikely that they run that at this point.
  - quesera 4y ago
    I think it's all Linux these days.
- monocasa 4y ago
  There's a rumor that they have an internal Linux distro that the silicon validation team at Apple uses on their hardware so that they don't have dependencies on the software division.
  - quesera 4y ago
    I recall reading that was only for bringup though, not full peripheral support? Either way, that's a good point and does have clear internal utility. It's certainly easier to get Linux running on a new chip than OSX!

blinkingled 4y ago

> Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? Apple doesn't have a history of helping anyone but themselves and if you read the article it looks like they're not thinking at all about helping alternative OSes by using proprietary interfaces and overly complicated hardware/firmware designs and breaking things with macOS updates. It is a truly herculian task to get Linux merely booting up and usable on Apple M* SoCs - kudos to the Asahi Linux team for all the heroic efforts - personally it feels like it's a great reverse engineering project and they should continue fighting it but Linux on M1/2 is not going to be a daily driver like Linux on standard x64 machines is. Thankfully Intel and AMD are doing pretty good in performance department with their latest chips and it's only going to get better.

rowanG077 4y ago
Linux was booting within weeks. Hardly a herculian task. I'm really not sure where this idea comes from. Yes of course initial investment is pretty high because of the new architecture. But it's pretty clear they have proven they can do it. M2 was working with a few hours of coding. GPU prototype driver has over 90% compliance. Like when does this idea die?
- blinkingled 4y ago
  God it gets tiring - Did I say booting Linux on M1 was a herculean task? I even used the words daily driver - making that a daily driver is definitely a herculean task - it is still not there - the GPU driver piece is pretty herculean by itself.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    This is what you said: "It is a truly herculian task to get Linux merely booting up and usable on Apple M* SoCs". And you can use the M1 macs today and it's usable. Whether it's daily driveable is an entirely different, subjective, question. I could probably daily drive it just fine with some manageable pain points. That doesn't mean it's daily driveable for you or anyone else. But whether it's usable is really not in question at this point.

nicce 4y ago

It is not healthy competition only for the Apple software team ... it is competition for every hardware manufacturer. Vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters, and Apple provides premium hardware which is also usable by Linux systems. Before Apple Silicon days, the primary motivation to buy Apple devices was the software side, but now the hardware has gone to the next level, and buying for the hardware alone is tempting.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> Vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters, and Apple provides premium hardware which is also usable by Linux systems. Apple is practically the worst computer vendor when it comes to "decent Linux support"; even nvidia is better, at least they have proprietary drivers. It's quite a stretch to say that "vendors must boost their game if they brand themselves as decent Linux supporters"; rather, the conclusion here would be that vendors should drop their game altogether since no one cares. People, even Linux users and developers apparently, buy the hardware anyway even if the vendor just totally ignores Linux (at best). I would find it quite telling if we go back to that era where all I see are MacBooks at the Linux kernel developers conferences, specially when the other manufacturers are now most definitely not ignoring Linux. Fortunately, that is not the case, so far.
- nicce 4y ago
  I was applying more into the future than the current situation, in case Apple would start giving better support. Currently yes, Apple is the worst vendor. > rather, the conclusion here would be that vendors should drop their game altogether since no one cares. People, even Linux users and developers apparently, buy the hardware anyway even if the vendor just totally ignores Linux (at best). That's exactly the idea I was chasing - if Apple would care, then other vendors should care as well. But currently, Linux users are still in minority and it does not matter that much yet.

danaris 4y ago

> Can Apple be incentivized somehow to help the Asahi Linux folks? I would guess that the best way to incentivize them is to let them know—en masse—that a large number of people would want to buy new Apple Silicon-based Macs to run Asahi Linux on if it were in better shape.