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Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives
- 404mm 4y agoI’ll take advantage of the appropriate audience here.. does this mean that M1/M2 Mac Mini just became a viable hardware for home server?
- danw1979 4y agoUse downstream Asahi and it probably already is. Read their todos, but much of it is “desktop” user related.
- rwl4 4y agoNo mention of Hector Martin, who leads the project, is made in that whole article. Alyssa has been instrumental on the GPU front, but I'd think marcan deserves at least a passing mention.
- photoGrant 4y agoYeah, beyond. It ventures less into oversight than it does a slight.
- duxup 4y agoSeems like innocent mistake is most likely.
- pietro72ohboy 4y agoExactly! Seems weird to miss out the name of the project lead.
- frozenport 4y agoMoral: When you have a large project don't mention anybody in specific. You will only alienate those you didn't mention.
- Dalewyn 4y agoPeople these days need to grow thicker skins.
- dymk 4y agothis really doesn’t seem like a “it was better in the past” type situation
- mort96 4y agoWell, it's fine to mention the names of key players. But if you choose to do that, it's weird to not mention the name of the person who started the project and has been driving it.
- andsoitis 4y agoEach choice we make in this world alienates some. We don’t need to avoid it. The upside of recognizing people on the team probably far outweighs the downside of missing someone. One should probably know who made significant contributions on one’s project. If films are able to have credits for everyone who worked on the project, then so can we.
- MBCook 4y agoI’ll also note I’ve been following him and it’s sad to see how much many pointless drive by objections he seems to get from non-maintainers when trying to upstream code.
- friendlyHornet 4y agoTbh after I maintained a medium sized open-source project for a while, I became a real misanthrope and gave it up. I decided my life is worth too much to me to waste it on random ingrates who sent me actual death threats for not doing what they want. Why would I put up with this? Though tbf, the number of wonderful people was much greater, but I just couldn't take the negativity i was getting from a not insignificant minority of manchildren who have probably never heard the word "no" from mommy and daddy while growing up
- Gigachad 4y agoAt least he does seem to be getting paid via patreon subscribers.
- aumerle 4y agoThere's a very vocal group of such people, sadly. Thank you for saying no to them as long as you did. Makes it a little less likely the rest of us will encounter them in our open source projects.
- darthrupert 4y agoI suppose here's a reason why many people choose to contribute to private companies instead -- better compensation, more respect. Only thing that's better in public projects is the knowledge that you might be doing something good for everyone.
- froggit 4y agoThose 2 things aren't mutually exclusive.
- 4y ago
- silisili 4y agoI also found that line really strange. Not to take away from Alyssa's brilliant work, but the sentence made it sound like she's carrying the company/project on her back here.
- tcmart14 4y agoProbably more of the unfortunate part is that the GPU stuff is what everyone is most excited about. Hector's work is instrumental and he is instrumental to all of it coming together, but his work just doesn't get seen as being as flashy. Make sure I also mention, yes Alyssa's work is brilliant too. They are all brilliant and deserve praise, but GPU work is gonna be more exciting to see for the lay person.
- chippiewill 4y agoBut even that's a bit weird in the context of the kernel 6.2 release because Alyssa's work generally hasn't been around the Kernel, she's been working on the userspace driver. It's Asahi Lina who really did the kernel driver (building on Alyssa's reverse engineering work).
- delroth 4y ago> It's Asahi Lina who really did the kernel driver (building on Alyssa's reverse engineering work). Mostly based on her own reverse engineering work actually (which was all livestreamed). Alyssa's work was on the shader ISA and what goes into the various command queues to get the GPU to do useful things, Lina's work was on the lower level aspects of how the queues even work, interactions with the firmware, power management, etc.
- kristianp 4y agoIsn't Asahi Lina, Marcan's alter-ego? Apologies if I got the wrong end of the stick there.
- viraptor 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jchw 4y agoI hate to speculate, but I wouldn't be surprised if Hector Martin explicitly instructed them to put the spotlight on somebody else. It's certainly a nice gesture if so.
- throwaway2037 4y agoThis is a good point.
- notpushkin 4y agoI'm pretty sure he'd mention Asahi Lina as well then?
- woleium 4y agoI love the idea of Linux on a mac, but until the touchpad software is up to the same standard as the apple version I'll make do with osx. edit: I believe they are looking for donations.. I'll find a link when I have time.
- Y_Y 4y agohttps://asahilinux.org/support/ https://asahilinux.org/support/
- btown 4y agoAlso don't forget to subscribe to Asahi Lina! https://www.youtube.com/c/AsahiLina https://www.youtube.com/c/AsahiLina
- smoldesu 4y agoLinux has had Magic Trackpad support long predating it's support for Apple Silicon. On KDE/GNOME sessions in Wayland, you'll get 1:1 touchpad gestures for desktop management. Asahi should be using Wayland out of the box, so you'll be getting trackpad gestures along with the regular HID support. Edit: here's what it looks like in action - https://youtu.be/aBEsxTVRsEo?t=100 https://youtu.be/aBEsxTVRsEo?t=100 It's also worth noting that Firefox ships with pinch-to-zoom and swipe-back gestures by default for Wayland now, too.
- b112 4y agoAll of that is meaningless, if you move, and click, when typing.
- smoldesu 4y agoI've not noticed any issues with palm-rejection when typing on Linux. If your trackpad does have issues, you can disable it while typing (but most Windows Precision trackpads work fine). I'm mostly using the Magic Trackpad on my desktop though. It's very possible you might find a laptop with bad palm-rejection firmware, but I don't think that's an issue with these. Or Synaptics touchpads, in my experience.
- POiNTx 4y agoNot too familiar with this but does this mean that eventually Asahi Linux will be obsolete? Is Asahi a forked Linux kernel and the work will eventually be merged right into the main Linux Kernel?
- ccouzens 4y agoYes, check out the second entry in the FAQ https://asahilinux.org/about/ https://asahilinux.org/about/ Their work goes beyond the kernel. For example Mesa (the user space part of the Linux GPU stack), boot tooling and installation tooling. And of course the incredible amount of reverse engineering.
- uncletaco 4y agoThat's the end goal.
- viraptor 4y agoAnd the original plan, but recently Hector is getting more and more annoyed with the process of upstreaming the patches. I really hope the situation improves so we don't get another PaX situation :( (different reasons of course, but similar result)
- raybb 4y agoWhat is the PaX situation? I tried googling but didn't find it
- joshuaissac 4y agoIn short, PaX and grsecurity were security patches for the Linux kernel that failed to be upstreamed.
- MobiusHorizons 4y agoresults of my Googling: PaX seems to refer to the PaX team: https://pax.grsecurity.net/ https://pax.grsecurity.net/ There seems to have been drama related to some of their patches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14633163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14633163.
- zozbot234 4y agoNote that Linux 6.2 does not include anything like a full upstreaming of Apple Silicon support. You'll still want to run the downstream Asahi kernel for a while.
- Gigachad 4y agoYou’ll also likely always need a special installer since macs can not boot off a usb, you have to create a partition and set the security settings up. But in the future the project could be reduced to a simple bash script you run and then it’s a stock distro
- davidw 4y agoI remember the 'bad old days' in the 90ies when all the big companies had their own chips. SGI Mips, DEC Alpha, HPUX on PA-RISC, Sun SPARC, etc... I really hope we don't go back to that. Especially with a company that defaults to 'proprietary' for so many things like Apple.
- treve 4y agoIs anyone else besides Apple doing this?
- quux 4y agoThe nearest thing I can think of in the modern world is game consoles and smartphones. Except they are locked down much much more than an M1 Mac.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _kbh_ 4y agoThose are mostly AMD SoCs with relatively mainstream x86 cores and AMD discrete graphics cards with some changes on the same die. The most exotic thing about them is usually the unified memory controller.
- palata 4y agoNon-Apple smartphones mostly run Android, with a GPLv2 Linux kernel. I guess this already is more open than Apple, because OEMs need to open source their downstream kernel.
- dagmx 4y agoI don’t think it really makes that big a difference. Apple already open sources their kernel. The issue is mostly device drivers, which even on Android tend to be external binary blobs. It kind of leaves you in the same place in my opinion
- urbandw311er 4y agoCould somebody explain in very simple terms how I might get my M1 Mac Pro to dual boot between MacOS & Linux? Is there a guide or HowTo? Or am I a few months early re mainstream Linux rollout.
- maxchristman 4y ago[dead]
- bri3d 4y agoRun "curl https://alx.sh https://alx.sh | sh" , ???, profit. This will download and execute the Asahi Linux installer. If you want to check the source ahead of time, it's on the Asahi Linux GitHub. While functionality improves rapidly every day, it is still decently rough around the edges. However, the installer is very streamlined and it's easy to get set up and try it out.
- MaxLeiter 4y agoJust pointing out anyone can purchase a domain and redirect it to the official website while also serving a malicious script.
- mulmen 4y agoIn this case however the official site provides the same guidance. Still, don’t pipe scripts to shells. At least read the script first.
- sebzim4500 4y ago>Still, don’t pipe scripts to shells Why not? Without looking, I assume that the script is downloading a binary and running it. What could it be doing that is more dangerous than that?
- mulmen 4y ago
- vouaobrasil 4y agoI used to use Linux as my primary OS for almost 20 years, but I switched to MacOS recently with my M1. While I wouldn't want to use Linux now on it, and I have to admit I now prefer MacOS a LOT, I am very happy for projects like these because by the time Apple stops supporting my M1 Macs, Linux will probably be very stable on them and will save them from the recycling plant. (I also resurrected a Macbook Pro 2011 and got it to run about 5 years after Apple stopped supporting it as well.)
- AdamJacobMuller 4y agoI've run both back and forth and simultaneously for many years (since probably 1997/1998). My ultimately conclusion is that when I run linux on my desktop I focus too much on the OS and too little on what I'm trying to accomplish. Oh cool there's a .001 version bump on the graphics drivers, let me spend all day recompiling that and tweaking my awesomerc. MacOS, you just can't do that simply by virtue of being less customizable. Am I quite as efficient as I was when my computer would reboot in <30 seconds to a desktop with all of my browsers open exactly as I wanted them (slack here, different monitoring/graphs exactly tiled exactly on another monitor) and I could switch between specific task-focused desktops with awesome (programming work here, ops here, email/biz work here, etc) no I am not as productive, but, how much time did I spend fine-tuning that setup? It felt like A LOT and I know (for a variety of reasons, this being only one of them) that I'm generally more productive since I retired my last Linux desktop in 2018. That said, please don't take any of this to diminish the accomplishment of the Ashai team. The fact that they did what they did and did it well enough to get mainstreamed is an absurd feat. The fact that it was significantly (primarily?) done by an anime-girl live streaming on twitch is absolutely hilarious.
- worldsavior 4y agoCan't wait for stable Linux to run on macOS. Wish I could work on a project like Asahi Linux, it looks a very interesting one.
- unwind 4y agoUh what? Linux would be the OS, from kernel an up, it wouldn't run "on macOS"? Are you talking about virtualization?
- adastra22 4y agoI assume he got autocorrected from "macs" or some variant thereof.
- worldsavior 4y agoA mistake on my phrasing. I meant MacBooks, not macOS.
- midoridensha 4y agoThese days, you don't have to admit to mistakes like this: you can just blame them on auto-correct.
- zuhsetaqi 4y agoThe tools we use are not responsible for the things we do with them. We are!
- gjsman-1000 4y agoYeah... but Apple Silicon requires firmware for a lot of the peripherals. The upstream Linux kernel will now happily be able to load said firmware into the right place... but it doesn't come with it, so don't expect it to be as easy as rebuilding the kernel and dropping into a generic ARM image.
- X-Cubed 4y agoThat's why Asahi Linux has a custom installer. Amongst other tasks, it installs a stub macOS partition that contains known supported Apple firmware versions. See "Whats with all the disk space?" under the FAQ at https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/
- 2bitencryption 4y agojust wondering, does this mean a Rust build pipeline is officially part of the mainline Linux build pipeline? Since (as far as I know) the GPU drivers for the M1 are written in Rust by Asahi Lina?
- pantalaimon 4y agoThis is only initial bringup, the GPU driver is not mainline yet. (And it's UAPI is going to change to properly support Vulkan)
- nicoburns 4y agoI believe the GPU driver isn’t included yet, but separately from that, the first Rust For Linux patches have indeed been merged into mainline linux. The support is being merged gradually over time though, so there’s still a lot that hasn’t been upstreamed yet.
- CuriousCosmic 4y agoIt appears so. It exists and is in tree but it's probably going to stay "optional features only" for the foreseeable future since rust can't currently target all platforms that the kernel supports. 1. https://docs.kernel.org/rust/index.html https://docs.kernel.org/rust/index.html 2. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/v6.2/rust https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/v6.2/rust
- rnestler 4y agoThe build pipeline was already part of Linux 6.1. I played around with it on ArchLinux with the target to compile an out of tree hello world kernel module in Rust: * https://blog.rnstlr.ch/building-an-out-of-tree-rust-kernel-module.html https://blog.rnstlr.ch/building-an-out-of-tree-rust-kernel-m... * https://blog.rnstlr.ch/building-an-out-of-tree-rust-kernel-module-part-two.html https://blog.rnstlr.ch/building-an-out-of-tree-rust-kernel-m... I'll probably make a follow up post with Linux 6.2
- karmelapple 4y agoAfter moving from an Intel MacBook Pro to an M1, I’ve lost the ability to run Ubuntu in a VM with Vagrant. If I understand right, this is an important step to getting an Apple Silicon version of Ubuntu, correct?
- sleepybrett 4y agodocker desktop certainly runs some type of linux in a vm to support the containers you run in it. So it's certainly possible, probably just need to do some research.
- jpgvm 4y agoYeah you need an aarch64 Linux build. Suggest just using UTM if you don't need anything fancy. Pretty sure they have an ARM64 Ubuntu image in their gallery thing. I'm running Archlinux ARM in a VM as my primary development environment on an M2 Macbook Pro and it works great.
- karmelapple 4y agoThey list an ARM64 Ubuntu image in their gallery - https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/ubuntu-20-04 https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/ubuntu-20-04 - but there is no download link. Any idea how to get that? I would love to give it a shot.
- jpgvm 4y agoJust install UTM and it will allow you to install from gallery. There is probably a way to download the disk image directly but the app will handle it for you to get started.
- nicoburns 4y agoYou can run Ubuntu in VM today (and have been able to do so since day 1 of Apple Silicon machines). It’s possible that vagrant doesn’t support this, and you need different VM software (UTM and parallels both work). This is about getting Ubuntu and other linux distros to run bare metal on Apple Silicon without virtualisation or macOS being invovled.
- teleforce 4y agoApparently recently other CPU architectures including RISC-V SoC and Snapdragon 8 also gain mainstream Linux compatibility: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-kernel-adds-risc-v-jh7100-support https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-kernel-adds-risc-v-j...
- nathants 4y agoi just built 6.2 for arm64. what timing! https://github.com/nathants/mighty-snitch/releases https://github.com/nathants/mighty-snitch/releases
- iuafhiuah 4y agoWork from the Asahi Linux team has been upstreamed since 5.13. This article makes it sound like 6.2 is good to go when that's really not the case. There is a list of upstreamed and missing functionality on the Asahi Linux wiki here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Linux 6.2 adds (checks notes): cpufreq to M1s, devicetree for newer hardware, HDMI out to Mac Studio (2022) and bluetooth support. That doesn't sound as interesting as this article suggests when stuff like USB, the touchpad, keyboard, speakers, 3.5mm audio, suspend/sleep are all still WIP downstream. This isn't a dig at the Asahi Linux developers. They're making solid progress. This is just a bad article.
- benatkin 4y agoThere's an M1 Mac Mini. What's this about a touchpad?
- Jcowell 4y agoM1 Mac mini supports the shiv trackpad of course. Comes in clutch when you have limited desk space (and to me the superior input device).
- RockRobotRock 4y agoIt seems difficult to use long-term for RSI. What are your thoughts?
- andyferris 4y agoI totally had this problem with a magic touchpad. Great device. Loved it - for about a month. Couldn’t touch it without pain after that.
- dfee 4y agoNo idea what a shiv trackpad is. I did find this while googling for it though: https://www.etsy.com/listing/783328345/ https://www.etsy.com/listing/783328345/
- rkingy 4y agoWondering how long it will take for our engineers to be requesting this installed on their machines..
- EnigmaCurry 4y agoLinux 6.2 lands support for the odroid M1 too (no relation, but also ARM) https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=15997&p=69649&hilit=odroid+m1#p69649 https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=15997&p=...
- olliej 4y agoHurrah for the asahi folk! They’ve been working incredibly hard and dealing with some seemingly crappy maintainer pushback to make this happen.
- uberduper 4y agoI still own too many Macs that Apple arbitrarily decided I shouldn't be able to use anymore. As much as I'd like a new M mac, I wont buy one until I know I can run problem free linux on it when Apple decides it's time for me to upgrade again.
- k_roy 4y agoI'm curious what exactly this is in reference to? Like I was around for the whole 68k and PPC transition. Obviously the Intel transition too. I think the Intel was the worst, at least for us that doubled down on expensive G5s that barely had any shelf life to them. Beyond that? Apple is pretty reasonable. Android Phones that were released at the same time as the XR, which still runs iOS 16, have been deprecated for almost 2.5 years in any kind of support. I feel sorry for people that bought Intel Macs in 2019, as those are really the ones going to be left out in the cold. Outside of that, as far as installing a brand new Apple OS on a 5 year old+ computer, is a crap shoot from the performance perspective. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. Maybe it will require too many concessions. Intel's forever 14nm++++++ honestly sort of stagnated things for a while, but now they've taken off again, and you can often feel the age on those machines in a lot of use cases.
- uberduper 4y agoI have a 2006 Mac Pro with a 32bit efi. Apple released an, I think, 8800GT gpu in the 2008 model and explicitly prevented it from being used in the 2006 mac. I don't remember exactly when, but I think by 2010 the 2006 Mac Pro was EOL and "couldn't run" the next major version of OSX. I think they blamed the 32bit EFI. There was a fairly easy workaround for this so I was able to keep installing updates for quite some time. The old macbooks with the coreDuo CPUs, only lasted a few years before a next major osx release dropped 32bit cpu support. I have a 2011 15" macbook pro that Apple ended the life of around 2015 or 2016, I believe, by discontinuing the GPU drivers in next major osx release. How many releases do you think before x86 is dropped completely from OSX?
- synergy20 4y agoWhat's the use case here, buy Apple's M1 hardware and reinstall it with Linux? Apple's hardware is relatively expensive and part of that price might be from its MacOS, I will just buy a PC instead, better yet, a PC with no OS(or Linux installed). I do need get a Mac Mini to test flutter apps there, not happy with its default small DDR size(8GB) and pricey upgrades, and, of course it's not upgrade-able either, disappointed.
- sega_sai 4y agoApple's hardware is pretty much the best (and I don't particularly care about the price for something I use as much as my laptop). In the same time I've been using Linux for 20 years and I am happy with it, so I don't want to change to MacOS. Thus I would happy to buy apple & install linux on it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stakhanov 4y ago> What's the use case I think the answer is that it's a uniform piece of desktop hardware with a huge installed base. Apple's market share in the desktop space may be small compared to PC, but the PC ecosystem is heterogeneous, so the economics of supporting a large fraction of PCs is disadvantageous for open source maintenance. If support for linux and other open source OSes on apple desktop hardware becomes a thing, it may well quickly become the best-supported and best-tested hardware of all, which would be a huge leap forward for open source on the desktop. Besides: The relationship between Intel and open source is not exactly a love affair either. Maybe Apple will be nicer to open source, or maybe the sheer fact that there is a second hardware player in the open source desktop space will be a shift in competitive dynamics that's advantageous to open source.
- rkangel 4y agoThe M1 chips are astonishingly quick, and extremely power efficient. You get something that outperforms all but the most powerful desktops for development tasks like "compile the whole of an embedded Linux distro", and will happily do that for 12 hours on the battery. The only Apple hardware I've owned was a mac mini for the exact same use case as you, but the M1 laptops might change that if I can run Linux. I did not enjoy Mac OS when using it on the Mini!
- kytazo 4y agoGod bless the asahi devs for liberating my machine, a true thank you form the bottom of my heart
- shetill 4y agoWhy would you pay so much for mac OS and end up using free linux?
- zuhsetaqi 4y ago> Why would you pay so much for mac OS and end up using free linux? Because Apples MacBook Pro with M-Series Pro and Max chips are arguably the best allrounder laptops on the market right now
- diffeomorphism 4y agoThey also start at 2400€ for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, soldered, and over 3000€ with double RAM and storage. At that price point they better be good.
- sofixa 4y agoYou would be paying for the hardware which is pretty good (as long as you can accept the downsides, most notably that it isn't upgradeable nor maintainable, and Apple charge an arm and a leg for memory/storage). It'd be like buying a laptop that came with Windows and installing a Linux distro on it. Why not? If you're more comfortable with it that with the base OS, even better that there's choice.
- shetill 4y agoYou are paying a pretty decent chunk of this for the mac OS too, because you can get similar spec Windows laptop for half the price
- paddim8 4y agoYou can not get a similar Windows laptop for half the price. That is absolutely ridiculous. Show me a single Windows laptop that has a similar screen, keyboard, trackpad, build quality, processor, battery life and silence. I'm waiting.
- forty 4y agoMainstream or mainline? I would think mainstream kernel is Debian 's or Ubuntu's, while mainline is kernel.org's :)
- neonsunset 4y agoAs long as Hector Martin refuses to grow up and become a kinder person, I am not touching Asahi Linux project with a ten-foot pole.