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This is cool! At the same time, not being part of the Apple ecosystem, should I be worried about the closed nature of this. I have been using Linux for over tw
by linuxhansl 4y ago
This is cool!
At the same time, not being part of the Apple ecosystem, should I be worried about the closed nature of this. I have been using Linux for over two decades now, and Intel seems to be falling behind.
(I do realize Linux runs on the M1. But it's a mostly hobby projects, the GPU is not well supported, and the M1/M2 will never(?) be available with open H/W.)
- eropple 4y agoThere are other ARM providers, and personally I expect to see some of them ramping up significantly in the next couple years. Qualcomm's taking another shot, for example. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-18/qualcomm-is-plotting-a-return-to-server-market-with-new-chip https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-18/qualcomm-...
- xref 4y agoWhat would be your concern? M1/M2 is just arm which Linux has run on for decades?
- heavyset_go 4y agoLinux support is about much more than instruction set support. Most ARM chips are shipped on SoCs which can take a lot of work to get Linux running on, and even then it might not run well.
- 3pm 4y agoI think the concern is there is currently no 'IBM-compatible'-like hardware ecosystem around ARM. Raspberry Pi is closest, but nothing mainstream yet. And it looks like RISC-V will have a better chance than ARM.
- snvzz 4y agoYou're right. RISC-V barely has any end-user visible deployment yet. Despite that, it has strong platform standarization (OS-A Profile, RVA22 and standardized boot process through SBI, UEFI specs). This is all just in time for VisionFive2, just announced. I suspect it will ship in large amounts.
- TheBigSalad 4y agoThere is... another
- heavyset_go 4y agox86 processors will be produced on the same nodes. Many ARM SoCs require binary blobs or otherwise closed source software, so they are not the best choice to run Linux on if you're approaching it from a longevity and stability perspective.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoI'm running Asahi Linux on the M2 and it's great. Drivers are not all complete yet, but it's awesome.
- arjvik 4y agoAs your daily driver machine?
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi've not switched over to try that yet.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoin my case i could use it as a daily driver, since i'm just needing a fast browser and Linux with compilers etc. but i've been using macos as a daily driver despite loathing (since the dawn of time) its font rendering. i'll switch at some point, probably.
- garblegarble 4y ago>despite loathing (since the dawn of time) its font rendering. Could you expand on that a little please? I've always found the Mac's fonts & font rendering to be most pleasing so I'm interested to hear a different opinion - what annoys you about it?
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi've got super sharp vision fortunately, so i see the half shading and such, and it strains my eyes which, otherwise, "expect" to bring edges into sharp contrast. My eyes love the rendering engine on Win11, or whatever trickery they're using for fonts, and similarly on ArchLinux.
- garblegarble 4y ago
- afarrell 4y agoGood question https://aws.amazon.com/pm/ec2-graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/pm/ec2-graviton/ is an indication that Amazon cares about linux support for the arm64 architecture. So the question is how much variance there is to the M1 relative to that.
- School-Cotton 4y agoEventually non-Apple laptops will be sold with silicon from this process node. You just won’t be the first to use it, which is fine. Also, Asahi is getting closer to “generally usable” at an astounding pace, so who knows.
- 3pm 4y agoI think that is what the parent meant by feeling left behind. It is either Apple or something underwhelming like ThinkPad with Snapdragon.
- School-Cotton 4y agoBut this is how everything works. I’m sure Ferrari has certain technology before normal cars do. Sure, you will not get computers with N3 chips for a year or two if you don’t want to use Apple, but I just don’t see why that’s a huge problem.
- 3pm 4y agoYou are probably right. But computers were not like that for the last 40 years. I wonder about alternative history without IBM PC Compatible. Maybe we just hit the performance wall and now the only way forward is system on chip. Anyway, better move on and start thinking about your computer as an appliance.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y agoAMD is not behind at all. Have you seen the latest benchmarks? https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-linux/15 https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-linux/15
- free652 4y agoIt's behind, looks like they are comparing the high end 5900hx with the low end m1 in multi core tests.
- Tsarbomb 4y agoAs the other reply mentioned they are testing against the M2, and they are also testing the lower powered AMD part 6850U which does best the M2 in some tests. Not sure why you came out so strong with such a false statement.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y agoDunno what you're talking about it's definitely the M2 in the test. It's also the same price.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago5900HX TDP: 35-80W depending on boost setting. Most gaming laptops set it at 60W+. M2 TDP: 20W
- kimixa 4y agoPower use tends to scale non-linearly past a point - disabling turbo modes would likely significantly reduce the peak power use, and ~18% performance differenceis pretty big buffer to lose. The 6850u also beats it rather comprehensively according to those same results, and that's only 18-25w. Really, you'd need everything power normalized, and even the rest of the hardware and software used normalized to compare "just" the CPU, which is pretty much impossible due to Apple and their vertical integration - which is often a strength in tests like this.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
- johnklos 4y agoApple isn't going to somehow make 64 bit ARM in to something proprietary. Sure, they have their own special instructions for stuff like high performance x86 emulation, but aarch64 on Apple is only going to mean more stuff is optimized for ARM, which is good not only for Linux, but for other open source OSes like the BSDs.
- saagarjha 4y agoThere are no special instructions for x86 emulation.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoThere's a whole special CPU/memory mode for it, actually. https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903104 https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903104
- saagarjha 4y agoI don't really need Rob to explain to me how Apple's processors do TSO ;) There are no special instructions for Rosetta regardless.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago>I don't really need Rob to explain to me how Apple's processors do TSO ;) Lemme just look up TSO and... https://github.com/saagarjha/TSOEnabler https://github.com/saagarjha/TSOEnabler ...Oh. Fair enough, my mistake :P Is there not an instruction to switch into TSO mode, though? Wouldn't that technically count? :P
- saagarjha 4y agoIt happens to be a standard ARM instruction, Apple pushes some bits into ACTLR_EL1 (Auxiliary Control Register, EL1, "Provides IMPLEMENTATION DEFINED configuration and control options for execution at EL1 and EL0") in the kernel on context switch. The DTKs used a proprietary register and touched it using msr, but again, no custom instructions. Apple does in fact ship custom instructions on their silicon, but where those are used, how they work, and how ARM lets them get away with it is a story for another day :)
- dheera 4y agoMe too. I really wish I could buy a Samsung Galaxy Book Go 360 which is ARM and has amazing battery life, and install Ubuntu on it, but I don't think there's a known possible way to do so. I really want a competent, high-end ARM Ubuntu laptop to happen. The Pinebook Pro has shitty specs and looks like shit with the 90s-sized inset bezels and 1080p screen.
- jacquesm 4y agoLikewise, I'd be on that for sure. Right now I'm using older MacBook Air's running Ubuntu as my daily drivers and a big dell at the home office for other work. Longer battery life and something like the Galaxy Book Go would definitely make me happy.
- dheera 4y agoUbuntu on MacBook M1 is a horrible experience. Screen tearing and lots of other issues.
- jacquesm 4y agoYes, I'm not touching that until it is at least a few more years older. Being on the bleeding edge doesn't pay off if you just need stuff to work.
- ParetoOptimal 4y agoM1 with NixOS through VMware is my daily driver because they have graphics sorted out well enough. Otherwise I'd just use qemu. I'm happy to say I forget i'm even on a Mac.
- jacquesm 4y agoThat's a nice trick!
- chaxor 4y agoI just spent a lot of time looking around for a laptop that had good battery life to develop on (i.e. ssh). I eventually went with the MacBook pro with M2 because - *it actually is amazing*. It lasts for like 3-5 days of all day use in typical vim/firefox use for me on a single charge. I debated going with a system 76, falcon Northwest TLX, etc for more power and x86 such that archlinux would be more compatible, but most laptops with x86 processors only have ~1-2 hours with a dGPU or maybe ~<10 hours with windows as the os (~drops significantly with Linux typically). It's unfortunate, but x86 is really awful in this area - so I went for ARM, and the best ARM based computer i could find (aluminum chassis / great durability) is the M2 based MacBook pro (slightly larger battery than the air). What's nice is it completely beat out my expectations. I have a nice and fairly new desktop with an i7 on arch. My desktop takes 12 minutes to compile duckdb. The M2? 6 minutes. Color me impressed. Just got it recently, and I'm looking forward to sourcing Asahi Linux on it tomorrow. Along with Linus' recent push to Linux kernel from the M2, I think it's likely that a very large portion of Linux users will be using apple silicon soon.
- pabs3 4y agoGPU progress looks pretty great, here is the latest post: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html