25 ms·

Attempting Linux on Microsoft Dev Kit 2023

90 points by moondev 4y ago

gtirloni 4y ago
TL;DR; It doesn't boot Linux (even 6.x)
- tyingq 4y ago
  Though the article mentions this: "Patrick Wildt, an OpenBSD maintainer replied to one of my tweets and told me he had OpenBSD 7.2 up and running on his, so I thought I would at least try that out." And on twitter he mentions it's unmodified OpenBSD..."@bluerise told me OpenBSD would work just by flashing a USB pen drive. He was right..." So it's likely possible with some experimentation.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    I guess that there's something weird that trips the Linux kernel, but at least it's possible to boot third-party OSes.
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      It is very good that it is possible to boot non-Windows OSes. Nevertheless, using this computer will require a lot of reverse-engineering work for various devices, e.g. the GPU, the WiFi interface and many others. For now, OpenBSD can use only a frame buffer for display. There was not long ago a presentation from Lenovo about the support of Linux on their products. They make a laptop with the same Qualcomm chip. After some efforts, their Linux team has succeeded to boot Linux on it, but many of the peripherals are not working yet and they do not intend to provide official support for Linux on it, because there is no help or documentation from Qualcomm.
      - zinekeller 4y ago
        > Nevertheless, using this computer will require a lot of reverse-engineering work for various devices, e.g. the GPU, the WiFi interface and many others. For now, OpenBSD can use only a frame buffer for display Unfortunately you're right, reverse-engineering Adreno would take monumental effort.
        zozbot234 4y ago
        The freedreno driver supports some Adreno GPU's already, so adding support for this ought to be quite possible.
        kcb 4y ago
        Nope. OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenGL ES is all already there.
      - tyingq 4y ago
        > For now, OpenBSD can use only a frame buffer for display Patrick Wildt posted the boot log for OpenBSD if anyone's curious what else OpenBSD sees on the device (and doesn't see). https://t.co/DCKHBUyvJZ https://t.co/DCKHBUyvJZ
      - aseipp 4y ago
        Freedreno already has OGL 4.3 for supported devices and I believe people have confirmed it's working on the ThinkPad X13s, so graphics isn't that far off. Wifi I think works as well by now with the latest kernels/dbt, but other stuff like power management or audio I don't know about. The nice little NPU is almost certainly never going to go anywhere either (I know of no reasonably usable NPU with any open source linux driver.) Honestly the reality is that people will still buy this for Linux usage, even if some of the peripheral support is bad, because the options for UEFI-capable "desktop class" ARMv8 is still pretty bad. You can't buy anything with reasonable upstream support that is ARMv8.2+ capable, and almost no easy-acquirable ARMv8.2+ silicon exists even without upstream support -- except Apple, of course. Maybe the best alternative I know of is those NXP Layerscape processors. But this comes stacked with RAM and NVMe out of the box, compared to those. These things are relatively fast, completely integrated OOTB, and can fit under your desk and so it'll still be a hit because it ticks all those boxes even if like, the camera doesn't work. It's honestly a very good price for an all-in-one CI machine that you could throw in a closet or whatever.
raesene9 4y ago
FWIW whilst it doesn't run Linux directly at the moment, it runs WSL2 just fine, and you can setup Windows OpenSSH server to launch WSL2's bash on connection, so you can use it for remote Linux work ok.
- trelane 4y ago
  Or you could buy hardware that comes with and supports Linux, instead of relying on Microsoft's walled garden for your Linux needs.
rcarmo 4y ago
I'm a bit biased here, but trying this kind of thing on a machine that is both completely new and designed to be a Windows development kit has somewhat predictable outcomes. (I suspect it will eventually be a click-through process, but to flip the script I don't typically try to run Windows on my Raspberry Pis -- and have reasonable expectations of the outcomes if I do, even with WoR) That said, I would _definitely_ buy one for myself if it was available in my country, to run WSL2 and do some ARM development (full disclosure: I'm an MS FTE who's primarily Linux and Mac-centric, _and_ writing at taoofmac.com for 20 years, so I try to have an even stance in these things).
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Since this keeps getting upvoted and downvoted in waves and is thus obviously garnering some attention, allow me to point out that the Khadas Edge 2 is a pretty amazing ARM SBC that runs Ubuntu just fine, and would most certainly have been a much better experience for the OP. It's on my list of prospective Xmas "self-presents", although I would still need to spend a little more to match the devkit specs (although it is available in a "pro" config that is closer).
realgeniushere 4y ago
Unrealistic and unfair expectations here. Microsoft isn’t doing anything to stop you from booting other OSes on this device. OpenBSD devs did the work, so OpenBSD boots on it. Linux devs now need to do the same if they want to support this dev kit. Not Microsoft’s problem.
- tyingq 4y ago
  >OpenBSD devs did the work It doesn't appear they did anything specific for this kit, nothing obvious in the changelog anyway. Perhaps just some combination of things they've done for other UEFI bootable Arm64 hardware. OpenBSD arm64 uses u-boot, so also maybe just some support that was already there.
  - realgeniushere 4y ago
    Okay. Anyway, OpenBSD works, proving that there’s nothing stopping Linux from working except the time and interest of Linux developers. I’m sure they are interested and the necessary modifications will be made soon enough.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Embedded-looking systems usually need an FDT blob for booting Linux, this seems to be the missing piece according to the article. It shouldn't be hard to provide it on the hardware developer's end, while a bit more complicated to infer from the OS developer side.
  - realgeniushere 4y ago
    And yet, somehow, OpenBSD works just fine already. Perhaps relatedly, this device is UEFI based, so unlike most ARM devices, it has a standard boot process and hardware enumeration mechanism.
- contextfree 4y ago
  The article seems like less a critique and more of an informational report of this person's experience.
orthoxerox 4y ago
> What's that I hear Hacker News and Reddit cry? "It's a Dev Kit for Windows, you moron!" That may be the case, but Microsoft "Loves Linux", and clearly has worked hard to make WSL2 available out of the box on these devices. If people start buying MS Dev Kits to run Linux CI agents on them this defeats the whole purpose of having a dev kit: getting more people to write programs on and for Windows 11 on ARM.
- jglathe 4y ago
  why compile for a dead market. F'n hell no. I will tinker with this thing nonetheless, just for the fun of it and to learn something. FreeBSD(or was it OpenBSD?) already boots on this thing, which should make writing up a device tree not impossible.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  That's an ARM platform sold by Microsoft. It's supporting Windows alright, but it's a hardware platform at the end of the day. Dev kits are unlimited/unlocked machines by historical definition. They should allow experimentation. Locking Linux behind WSL2 is Microsoft's dream, and being oblivious about it won't help us in the future. People get crazy when people point out that Microsoft is deprecating it's 3rd party CA slowly, or making secure boot permanent step by step, or systemd slowly adds support for closed down hardware platforms which doesn't allow running unsigned/unsanctioned kernels. GPLv3 came to being because of TiVO pulled off a similar thing, and required its kernels to be signed by their own private key. Now why we allow another company do it and applaud them for doing so? If we want general computing to live, we need to have mechanisms to allow us to tinker with our own devices, and shouldn't need a company to sanction a specific kernel behind closed doors. It's 90s all over again, sigh. > If people start buying MS Dev Kits to run Linux CI agents on them this defeats the whole purpose of having a dev kit We're running Linux on computers bundled with Windows out of the box. So, are we defeating the purpose of the devices we buy with our own money? Same for installing ROMs to android devices, and Jailbreaking iOS devices. The device is mine. I paid for it. I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
  - trelane 4y ago
atemerev 4y ago
What an interesting device. Sadly, it is available only in the US and maybe a few other countries. If you try to access the MS store page from, say, Switzerland, they are very passively-aggressively saying "Page not found". I hate so much these availability restrictions.
belltaco 4y ago
I really enjoyed the post till this: > Whilst I enjoy this kind of tinkering, it was disappointing that a "Dev Kit", built for developers can neither boot Linux, nor enable a custom Linux Kernel for WSL2. > What's that I hear Hacker News and Reddit cry? "It's a Dev Kit for Windows, you moron!" That may be the case, but Microsoft "Loves Linux", and clearly has worked hard to make WSL2 available out of the box on these devices. If something is named "Dev Kit" does it have to revolve around supporting a monoculture right out of the box? Secure boot is trivially unlockable, and Microsoft is losing money on the R&D and probably hardware as well. Someone will probably figure out how to get Linux natively running. Looks like they're just not happy that they're not able to immediately (ab)use the hardware meant for Windows on ARM developers for dozens or hundreds of cheap CI/CD machines for their commercial operation, which would prompt MS to raise the price for everyone or make it closed for verified Windows devs only(like Xbox Dev kits). I respect the grind, and Hacker News is all about using and abusing hardware in unintended ways, but I don't like the attitude and expectations in the quoted parts that everything should revolve around their niche use case of being able to run cheap CI/CD servers just because it has dev in it's name.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  When installing other operating systems to hardware platforms became abusing such platforms? What we expect next? BSA to raid my home because I run Linux on my Microsoft branded hardware, or connect Microsoft mouse to a Linux box?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  If something says it is for developers, does it have to revolve around UNIX clones as if there aren't any other kind of developers?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    It's not about unix, it's about running anything and everything that you want.
    - 4y ago
zozbot234 4y ago
Tl;dr: it boots OpenBSD successfully already, so getting Linux to run can't be that hard even though mainline support is obviously not here yet. Someone will figure out how to boot a Linux kernel on this, probably the PostmarketOS or Asahi folks.
- alexellisuk 4y ago
  Mainline support is available, we are missing the device tree blobs for this specific unit. OpenBSD AFAIK boots in APCI mode so doesn't require them.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    So Linux ought to boot on this hardware if acpi=force (documented at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/arm64/arm-acpi.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/arm64/arm-acpi.html ) is used?
mikedelago 4y ago
I'd love a powerful ARM machine that supports linux, and I don't want to use Windows with WSL either. Looking forward to further development.
- julianbuse 4y ago
  the apple silicon macs are probably your best bet right now.
schaefer 4y ago
The article mentions trying USB boot media known to work with the Lenovo x13s… I wish there was a reference to that. I’d love to read an up to date report on how hardware support for that arm laptop is coming along.
- wezm 4y ago
  https://github.com/ironrobin/archiso-x13s/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/ironrobin/archiso-x13s/wiki/Feature-Suppo...
- rcarmo 4y ago
  A friend of mine has one. Have yet to get my hands on it, but he reports great battery life and calls it "very snappy". Then again, he is not a developer (he's a salesperson in the medical industry), so YMMV.
grecy 4y ago
So, ah, how well does windows run? Can you even tell it's running on ARM instead of x86? Anything interesting to report about that?
- wezm 4y ago
  It runs really well. There's nothing at all that makes it obvious it's running an entirely different architecture.
squarefoot 4y ago
Meanwhile, of all the boards around meant to run Linux, and there's a boatload of them, I fail to see a single one that prevents to install Microsoft software on purpose.
- jglathe 4y ago
  good one
irusensei 4y ago
Surprised that OP managed to disable secure boot (implies there is a normal UEFI boot style firmware), managed to at least attempt to boot certain Linux versions and got OpenBSD working. Seriously I thought this thing was going to be locked to the bone or restricted by black magic arcane hardware like the M1. Color me (pleasantly) surprised.
- MisterTea 4y ago
  > Surprised that OP managed to disable secure boot (implies there is a normal UEFI boot style firmware) Windows RT tablets had UEFI/ACPI. I Assume it was easier to bolt Intel baggage onto Arm machines so they didn't have to change core windows kernel components which are probably deeply anchored to the PC architecture.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    I haven't tracked Windows ARM beyond the IoT editions, but you are mostly right. I see it as good re-use of something that makes complete sense if you want to match Intel configuration and hardware security options.

90 points by moondev 4y ago

gtirloni 4y ago

TL;DR; It doesn't boot Linux (even 6.x)

tyingq 4y ago
Though the article mentions this: "Patrick Wildt, an OpenBSD maintainer replied to one of my tweets and told me he had OpenBSD 7.2 up and running on his, so I thought I would at least try that out." And on twitter he mentions it's unmodified OpenBSD..."@bluerise told me OpenBSD would work just by flashing a USB pen drive. He was right..." So it's likely possible with some experimentation.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  I guess that there's something weird that trips the Linux kernel, but at least it's possible to boot third-party OSes.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    It is very good that it is possible to boot non-Windows OSes. Nevertheless, using this computer will require a lot of reverse-engineering work for various devices, e.g. the GPU, the WiFi interface and many others. For now, OpenBSD can use only a frame buffer for display. There was not long ago a presentation from Lenovo about the support of Linux on their products. They make a laptop with the same Qualcomm chip. After some efforts, their Linux team has succeeded to boot Linux on it, but many of the peripherals are not working yet and they do not intend to provide official support for Linux on it, because there is no help or documentation from Qualcomm.
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      > Nevertheless, using this computer will require a lot of reverse-engineering work for various devices, e.g. the GPU, the WiFi interface and many others. For now, OpenBSD can use only a frame buffer for display Unfortunately you're right, reverse-engineering Adreno would take monumental effort.
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        The freedreno driver supports some Adreno GPU's already, so adding support for this ought to be quite possible.
      - kcb 4y ago
        Nope. OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenGL ES is all already there.
    - tyingq 4y ago
      > For now, OpenBSD can use only a frame buffer for display Patrick Wildt posted the boot log for OpenBSD if anyone's curious what else OpenBSD sees on the device (and doesn't see). https://t.co/DCKHBUyvJZ https://t.co/DCKHBUyvJZ
    - aseipp 4y ago
      Freedreno already has OGL 4.3 for supported devices and I believe people have confirmed it's working on the ThinkPad X13s, so graphics isn't that far off. Wifi I think works as well by now with the latest kernels/dbt, but other stuff like power management or audio I don't know about. The nice little NPU is almost certainly never going to go anywhere either (I know of no reasonably usable NPU with any open source linux driver.) Honestly the reality is that people will still buy this for Linux usage, even if some of the peripheral support is bad, because the options for UEFI-capable "desktop class" ARMv8 is still pretty bad. You can't buy anything with reasonable upstream support that is ARMv8.2+ capable, and almost no easy-acquirable ARMv8.2+ silicon exists even without upstream support -- except Apple, of course. Maybe the best alternative I know of is those NXP Layerscape processors. But this comes stacked with RAM and NVMe out of the box, compared to those. These things are relatively fast, completely integrated OOTB, and can fit under your desk and so it'll still be a hit because it ticks all those boxes even if like, the camera doesn't work. It's honestly a very good price for an all-in-one CI machine that you could throw in a closet or whatever.

raesene9 4y ago

FWIW whilst it doesn't run Linux directly at the moment, it runs WSL2 just fine, and you can setup Windows OpenSSH server to launch WSL2's bash on connection, so you can use it for remote Linux work ok.

trelane 4y ago
Or you could buy hardware that comes with and supports Linux, instead of relying on Microsoft's walled garden for your Linux needs.

rcarmo 4y ago

I'm a bit biased here, but trying this kind of thing on a machine that is both completely new and designed to be a Windows development kit has somewhat predictable outcomes. (I suspect it will eventually be a click-through process, but to flip the script I don't typically try to run Windows on my Raspberry Pis -- and have reasonable expectations of the outcomes if I do, even with WoR) That said, I would _definitely_ buy one for myself if it was available in my country, to run WSL2 and do some ARM development (full disclosure: I'm an MS FTE who's primarily Linux and Mac-centric, _and_ writing at taoofmac.com for 20 years, so I try to have an even stance in these things).

rcarmo 4y ago
Since this keeps getting upvoted and downvoted in waves and is thus obviously garnering some attention, allow me to point out that the Khadas Edge 2 is a pretty amazing ARM SBC that runs Ubuntu just fine, and would most certainly have been a much better experience for the OP. It's on my list of prospective Xmas "self-presents", although I would still need to spend a little more to match the devkit specs (although it is available in a "pro" config that is closer).

realgeniushere 4y ago

Unrealistic and unfair expectations here. Microsoft isn’t doing anything to stop you from booting other OSes on this device. OpenBSD devs did the work, so OpenBSD boots on it. Linux devs now need to do the same if they want to support this dev kit. Not Microsoft’s problem.

tyingq 4y ago
>OpenBSD devs did the work It doesn't appear they did anything specific for this kit, nothing obvious in the changelog anyway. Perhaps just some combination of things they've done for other UEFI bootable Arm64 hardware. OpenBSD arm64 uses u-boot, so also maybe just some support that was already there.
- realgeniushere 4y ago
  Okay. Anyway, OpenBSD works, proving that there’s nothing stopping Linux from working except the time and interest of Linux developers. I’m sure they are interested and the necessary modifications will be made soon enough.
rzzzt 4y ago
Embedded-looking systems usually need an FDT blob for booting Linux, this seems to be the missing piece according to the article. It shouldn't be hard to provide it on the hardware developer's end, while a bit more complicated to infer from the OS developer side.
- realgeniushere 4y ago
  And yet, somehow, OpenBSD works just fine already. Perhaps relatedly, this device is UEFI based, so unlike most ARM devices, it has a standard boot process and hardware enumeration mechanism.
contextfree 4y ago
The article seems like less a critique and more of an informational report of this person's experience.

orthoxerox 4y ago

> What's that I hear Hacker News and Reddit cry? "It's a Dev Kit for Windows, you moron!" That may be the case, but Microsoft "Loves Linux", and clearly has worked hard to make WSL2 available out of the box on these devices. If people start buying MS Dev Kits to run Linux CI agents on them this defeats the whole purpose of having a dev kit: getting more people to write programs on and for Windows 11 on ARM.

jglathe 4y ago
why compile for a dead market. F'n hell no. I will tinker with this thing nonetheless, just for the fun of it and to learn something. FreeBSD(or was it OpenBSD?) already boots on this thing, which should make writing up a device tree not impossible.
bayindirh 4y ago
That's an ARM platform sold by Microsoft. It's supporting Windows alright, but it's a hardware platform at the end of the day. Dev kits are unlimited/unlocked machines by historical definition. They should allow experimentation. Locking Linux behind WSL2 is Microsoft's dream, and being oblivious about it won't help us in the future. People get crazy when people point out that Microsoft is deprecating it's 3rd party CA slowly, or making secure boot permanent step by step, or systemd slowly adds support for closed down hardware platforms which doesn't allow running unsigned/unsanctioned kernels. GPLv3 came to being because of TiVO pulled off a similar thing, and required its kernels to be signed by their own private key. Now why we allow another company do it and applaud them for doing so? If we want general computing to live, we need to have mechanisms to allow us to tinker with our own devices, and shouldn't need a company to sanction a specific kernel behind closed doors. It's 90s all over again, sigh. > If people start buying MS Dev Kits to run Linux CI agents on them this defeats the whole purpose of having a dev kit We're running Linux on computers bundled with Windows out of the box. So, are we defeating the purpose of the devices we buy with our own money? Same for installing ROMs to android devices, and Jailbreaking iOS devices. The device is mine. I paid for it. I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
- trelane 4y ago

atemerev 4y ago

What an interesting device. Sadly, it is available only in the US and maybe a few other countries. If you try to access the MS store page from, say, Switzerland, they are very passively-aggressively saying "Page not found". I hate so much these availability restrictions.

belltaco 4y ago

I really enjoyed the post till this: > Whilst I enjoy this kind of tinkering, it was disappointing that a "Dev Kit", built for developers can neither boot Linux, nor enable a custom Linux Kernel for WSL2. > What's that I hear Hacker News and Reddit cry? "It's a Dev Kit for Windows, you moron!" That may be the case, but Microsoft "Loves Linux", and clearly has worked hard to make WSL2 available out of the box on these devices. If something is named "Dev Kit" does it have to revolve around supporting a monoculture right out of the box? Secure boot is trivially unlockable, and Microsoft is losing money on the R&D and probably hardware as well. Someone will probably figure out how to get Linux natively running. Looks like they're just not happy that they're not able to immediately (ab)use the hardware meant for Windows on ARM developers for dozens or hundreds of cheap CI/CD machines for their commercial operation, which would prompt MS to raise the price for everyone or make it closed for verified Windows devs only(like Xbox Dev kits). I respect the grind, and Hacker News is all about using and abusing hardware in unintended ways, but I don't like the attitude and expectations in the quoted parts that everything should revolve around their niche use case of being able to run cheap CI/CD servers just because it has dev in it's name.

bayindirh 4y ago
When installing other operating systems to hardware platforms became abusing such platforms? What we expect next? BSA to raid my home because I run Linux on my Microsoft branded hardware, or connect Microsoft mouse to a Linux box?
pjmlp 4y ago
If something says it is for developers, does it have to revolve around UNIX clones as if there aren't any other kind of developers?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  It's not about unix, it's about running anything and everything that you want.
  - 4y ago

zozbot234 4y ago

Tl;dr: it boots OpenBSD successfully already, so getting Linux to run can't be that hard even though mainline support is obviously not here yet. Someone will figure out how to boot a Linux kernel on this, probably the PostmarketOS or Asahi folks.

alexellisuk 4y ago
Mainline support is available, we are missing the device tree blobs for this specific unit. OpenBSD AFAIK boots in APCI mode so doesn't require them.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  So Linux ought to boot on this hardware if acpi=force (documented at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/arm64/arm-acpi.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/arm64/arm-acpi.html ) is used?

mikedelago 4y ago

I'd love a powerful ARM machine that supports linux, and I don't want to use Windows with WSL either. Looking forward to further development.

julianbuse 4y ago
the apple silicon macs are probably your best bet right now.

schaefer 4y ago

The article mentions trying USB boot media known to work with the Lenovo x13s… I wish there was a reference to that. I’d love to read an up to date report on how hardware support for that arm laptop is coming along.

wezm 4y ago
https://github.com/ironrobin/archiso-x13s/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/ironrobin/archiso-x13s/wiki/Feature-Suppo...
rcarmo 4y ago
A friend of mine has one. Have yet to get my hands on it, but he reports great battery life and calls it "very snappy". Then again, he is not a developer (he's a salesperson in the medical industry), so YMMV.

grecy 4y ago

So, ah, how well does windows run? Can you even tell it's running on ARM instead of x86? Anything interesting to report about that?

wezm 4y ago
It runs really well. There's nothing at all that makes it obvious it's running an entirely different architecture.

squarefoot 4y ago

Meanwhile, of all the boards around meant to run Linux, and there's a boatload of them, I fail to see a single one that prevents to install Microsoft software on purpose.

jglathe 4y ago
good one

irusensei 4y ago

Surprised that OP managed to disable secure boot (implies there is a normal UEFI boot style firmware), managed to at least attempt to boot certain Linux versions and got OpenBSD working. Seriously I thought this thing was going to be locked to the bone or restricted by black magic arcane hardware like the M1. Color me (pleasantly) surprised.

MisterTea 4y ago
> Surprised that OP managed to disable secure boot (implies there is a normal UEFI boot style firmware) Windows RT tablets had UEFI/ACPI. I Assume it was easier to bolt Intel baggage onto Arm machines so they didn't have to change core windows kernel components which are probably deeply anchored to the PC architecture.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I haven't tracked Windows ARM beyond the IoT editions, but you are mostly right. I see it as good re-use of something that makes complete sense if you want to match Intel configuration and hardware security options.