4 ms·

What are you on about? Apple locking down their platform is their prerogative. If it comes to that and the Asahi team cannot continue their reverse-engineering

What are you on about? Apple locking down their platform is their prerogative. If it comes to that and the Asahi team cannot continue their reverse-engineering efforts then they'll stop. Consider why they began in the first place. The M1 and their subsequent M2 and future chips are amazing. The M1 was such a huge leap in performance per watt that it wow'd everyone. In fact it's a huge testament to the hardware team at Apple for creating such an amazing bit of kit that a team of Linux hackers wanted to work on porting Linux to it. This rebellious striving for freedom is refreshing and amazing. They're going to get Linux working on the M1/2... hardware working under Linux and it'll be even more performant than under MacOS. That's huge. But now folks are saying why Apple? Because nobody has a chip that rivals the M1. Why would you settle for worse performance? Why would you settle for build quality from a lesser hardware manufacturer? Qualcomm and others don't have chips that are as performant. They might in the future but by then the M3 or M4 will likely be out. Why are we punishing hackers -- in teh purest sense of the word -- for opening up a platform that is superior (hardware wise) to any of the other offerings from all the other deep pocketed ARM laptop/desktop manufacturers? Oh, right, because of tribal hate of Apple. Smh. If the other manufacturers get off their butts and pour billions into chip design and process and can get laptops out with similar or better performance characteristics then perhaps other teams will attempt what Asahi is doing, and if these same manufacturers wanted to release the specs or work with the upstream Linux community and release drivers themselves that'd be even better. Until then I will continue to support the Asahi team and champion their efforts in every ear that will hear me because I am just so astounded by what they've accomplished so far. I say all of this as a former Apple-stan. I had macbooks every year since college until now. That's some 15 years. I've since gone full time on Fedora and Thinkpads (currently a P14s but maybe an X1 Carbon in the future). Edit: I don't think there will be a huge wave of sales because of this for Apple but it will mean that i can get a used M1 and run my favorite distro of Linux because the Asahi team is working with upstream to get their changes up-streamed -- they're amazing like that. It really is how open source work thrives.

amelius 4y ago
Apple produces consumer hardware. You can't build anything hardware-wise using the M1 or M2 processors. There are hackers and startups who love to build new hardware. They now see Apple buying entire supply chains and dominating the market. If this continues, then after a while these hackers will not be able to fully depend on technological progress because it will all be locked up.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  What? None of that makes any sense. There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. The M1 and M2 chips are proprietary to Apple and so be it; the Asahi folks are allowing us to run Linux on them at full acceleration. What’s not to love?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA. > What’s not to love? You sound like the people preaching the Nouveau drivers right now. "we reverse-engineered this proprietary GPU and got it working at 50% speed and 3x power consumption, what's not to love?" Nvidia's first-party drivers are far-and-away the more popular (and faster, more power-efficent, more well-supported, etc.) option. What's "not to love" is the fact that we're cheering for someone doing thankless and redundant work that wouldn't exist if the multi-billion dollar corporation dedicated a couple engineers to Linux support. You can't even consistently control the brightness on these machines more than a year after they've launched, it's obvious that there are significant problems WRT reverse-engineering the hardware.
    - gigatexal 4y ago
      “ > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.” AMD and Nvidia and Apple are going to be buying from the new plant. Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company. Given what is possible and what’s possible is what you can control and what you can control is what you do, so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened. What’s easier? Getting apple to make like Intel and have a Linux division? Haha. So they took it upon themselves and that effort is laudable nay it’s worthy of lots of praise. Heaps of it. The Noveau argument is a false flag. Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side. I just don’t understand what people want? Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. Instead people would rather whine and moan or write apology pieces about hardware that sucks in comparison. Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. Give me a 14 inch MacBook Pro with 32GB or ram and Asahi Linux any day of the week.

amelius 4y ago

Apple produces consumer hardware. You can't build anything hardware-wise using the M1 or M2 processors. There are hackers and startups who love to build new hardware. They now see Apple buying entire supply chains and dominating the market. If this continues, then after a while these hackers will not be able to fully depend on technological progress because it will all be locked up.

gigatexal 4y ago
What? None of that makes any sense. There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. The M1 and M2 chips are proprietary to Apple and so be it; the Asahi folks are allowing us to run Linux on them at full acceleration. What’s not to love?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA. > What’s not to love? You sound like the people preaching the Nouveau drivers right now. "we reverse-engineered this proprietary GPU and got it working at 50% speed and 3x power consumption, what's not to love?" Nvidia's first-party drivers are far-and-away the more popular (and faster, more power-efficent, more well-supported, etc.) option. What's "not to love" is the fact that we're cheering for someone doing thankless and redundant work that wouldn't exist if the multi-billion dollar corporation dedicated a couple engineers to Linux support. You can't even consistently control the brightness on these machines more than a year after they've launched, it's obvious that there are significant problems WRT reverse-engineering the hardware.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    “ > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.” AMD and Nvidia and Apple are going to be buying from the new plant. Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company. Given what is possible and what’s possible is what you can control and what you can control is what you do, so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened. What’s easier? Getting apple to make like Intel and have a Linux division? Haha. So they took it upon themselves and that effort is laudable nay it’s worthy of lots of praise. Heaps of it. The Noveau argument is a false flag. Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side. I just don’t understand what people want? Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. Instead people would rather whine and moan or write apology pieces about hardware that sucks in comparison. Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. Give me a 14 inch MacBook Pro with 32GB or ram and Asahi Linux any day of the week.