6 ms·

Hector Martin: we care about fixing Linux problems on Asahi

146 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cozzyd 4y ago
Lenovo will release firmware updates for Linux users even on systems that don't officially support Linux (though, it can take a while). But I guess that's one of the exceptions that proves the rule
- commoner 4y ago
  Devices actively supported by vendors on LVFS tend to be Linux-friendly. The vendors with the most firmware updates pushed to LVFS in the last 6 months are Dell (796), Lenovo (364 combined), HP (35), Star Labs (29), and the Pine64 community (3). - LVFS vendor list: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/ https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/ - LVFS supported devices: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/
  - klooney 4y ago
    Surprising to see tiny Star Labs in there
    - ddalex 4y ago
      This makes me feel better about their laptop offerings, which seem very good.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Awesome, is this basically the "what should I buy for running Linux on it" list?
    - commoner 4y ago
      Yes, but it's not complete. I'd also include manufacturers that maintain Linux distros designed to support their devices, such as System76 (Pop!_OS), Purism (PureOS), and Tuxedo Computers (Tuxedo OS), if you're willing to use these distros. These 3 manufacturers have their own firmware update methods outside of LVFS.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Good for dell and lenovo but good lord it’s depressing that 5th place takes a grand total of 3 pushes
- GLaNIK 4y ago
  Is it? Last time I tried to use t480, which is listed as officially supports Ubuntu, I had to use rather ugly hack to fix CPU throttling: https://github.com/erpalma/throttled https://github.com/erpalma/throttled It affects other models as well and not fixed up to this day (at least not by vendor) Lenovo had a post in their blog acknowledging it, but after some time it mysteriously disappeared EDIT: Lol, there are HN post about this "fix" happened few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025838 By quickly checking comments seems like better solution is already available: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html
- kaba0 4y ago
  Will they ever fix their newer thinkpads throttling like hell on Linux (and even windows, actually)?
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    That happened to me back when I bought my T490. Later they released a firmware update that fixed it. So the only case where I saw such issue, Lenovo fixed it quickly.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      There are plenty of forum posts like this ranging over years: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T-series-Laptops/T480-throttling-and-high-CPU-temps/m-p/4036815?page=1#4036852 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T-... Anecdotal, but the T14 was also prone to throttling all around my previous company.
  - izacus 4y ago
    Yes.
galoisscobi 4y ago
I’m very grateful for the Asahi project, Hector’s leadership and everyone who has contributed to or supported the project. This care for the nitty gritty details, in my view, makes a big difference and is a true service to the world. It is a heartfelt gift to the community. Thank you for caring.
tcmart14 4y ago
The amount of shit takes on that thread are astonishing from people wanting to paint Hector's comments in a bad light. Trying to twist his words to extrapolate a meaning that isn't there. Of course, there are tons of people who also have no clue how hardware support comes into being. Some hardware is buggy on linux, has been and may always will be. A lot of the reason is, either the drivers had to be reverse engineer, which takes a lot of time and effort. Or, something that happens a lot, vendors throw together shitty drivers and call it a day. No hate for the SEs at these companies though. Some of these companies invest all their money in the development of hardware and clench up the purse strings once it comes time to write the actual drivers. Then from here, either the driver is open source and no one gives a damn to go fix the driver, or your back at needing to do some reverse engineering.
- subarctic 4y ago
  >The amount of shit takes on that thread are astonishing from people wanting to paint Hector's comments in a bad light. Trying to twist his words to extrapolate a meaning that isn't there. [...] um isn't there only one comment that matches what you're describing? i actually thought it was pretty neat how that discussion started out in the vein of a twitter thread, with one person misinterpreting another person's tweet and moralizing about it, but then you have that super long comment from alyssa 6 hours later that says "i think you're both right" and goes way into depth about how things are the way they are on twitter there wouldn't have been the space for that comment and it would've been overrun by a bunch of people making quick moral judgements about a tweet they deliberately misinterpreted
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    This is actually my first time reading a mastodon thread, and I must say that the extra long comments allow for thoughtfulness, insightfulness and pleasant reading. At first I didn't read any of the replies because I was expecting the standard Twitter experience.
    - tcmart14 4y ago
      Definitely about Mastodon. I've been wanting to try out Mastodon and I finally took the plunge. So far, it seems a lot better because it allows for thoughtfulness. Will have to see how it goes!
rektide 4y ago
Computing everywhere seriosuly lack a coallition of the willing. There's so much regular industrial/capitalistic dialing it in, ultra-stratified systems where those who can are a thousand miles apart from those with any power. This post is remarkably on point, not just for the Linux kernel, but for such a huge majority of computing in general. The people close to the machine are not respected & heard. Those with the most refined tastes are ignored, distrusted aliens speaking their esoteric alien whayever, put far away from power & decision making. The system is set up to exercise only the priorities that can fight their way to the top, to clear visibility. Many of the "what have you done this quarter" problems are ultra real & compound this all. The structure is a problem, but to return back, computing's best are just not understandable by most. The deep concerns matter so much, computing is so much about maintaining & caring for complex technical ecosystems, but there's so few well travelled enough to weigh in & understand & make worthwhile assessments; the techies live a too peer-less existence, disconnected from so many non-technicals with so-so motivatiom, capability, & interest to care, & separated by other techies who have their own separate stakes & motivations. Just being around other people who care & want to make things widely better is a rare gem of a place to be in computing. It shouldnt be so, but it is, and it's awful, and we have such brighter better ways to be that are always so glistening great & close, but so damnably just out of reach. The best intents have so little backing. So much unknowing unseeing resistance impedes the good, purposelessly, ignorantly, from so many assailing places. Woe.
benreesman 4y ago
That’s a pretty baller story if it works out. I use Apple gear because all that shit works perfectly, but would I rather have a hackable tiling WM instead of divvy, obviously. Great dream if it happens.
- semi-extrinsic 4y ago
  Have you tried yabai as your WM on macos?
  - phneutral26 4y ago
    +1 for yabai! It's awesome, such a timesaver. I do miss dwm, but i think yabai is the best of the bunch when it comes to macOS tiling WM's.
captn3m0 4y ago
For me, the best example of the "we care" attitude from Asahi was in the installer itself - even in alpha it was well polished, and usable. Clear defaults, documented behaviour, help messages. And this is an installer that needs to go the extra mile to show up in Apple's bootloader. It was a breeze to install (M2 Air).
nix23 4y ago
I use Linux since ~25years, and he's totally right. I cant stand the amateurish "it works here" or "wait your laptop is 8 years old? For sure the new kernel cannot load your nvidia driver" or "yeah that intel wireless card never worked good, buy a atheros card" or "you cant use XFS with that game because of inode64, just use wine or use another filesystem" and and and. It's a real shitshow, i would never recommend any Linux-distro to anyone if i cant hold that users hand.
anonymousDan 4y ago
Does cuda etc work out of the box on Asahi? I would be minded to check it out if so.
- ZiiS 4y ago
  Dose Asahi even run on anything with an Nvidia GPU?
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Presumably you could put an nvidia gpu in a thunderbolt enclosure, and apple silicon Mac Pro shouldn’t be too far off, so the answer is “yes, if you connect one”. Nvidia actually already has armv8 drivers for the jetson platform, no idea how comprehensive they are though. Might only be the things they need for various generations of Jetson and maybe the odd Fujitsu thing. And because of the miracle of arm ISA versioning, there’s probably some fun gotchas there too.
    - ZiiS 4y ago
      Well the first step would be adding thunderbolt support to Ashai
- NavinF 4y ago
  AFAIK no eGPUs work on M1 and no CUDA support either.
goosedragons 4y ago
How much are they going to care in 7 years when the sheen of M series wears off, Apple's benefits in performance per watt are no longer as impressive and they just made some massive design change breaking loads of things? Will they really care then?
- yusefnapora 4y ago
  I personally think the odds are pretty good that Asahi ends up supporting the M1 series longer than macOS. Apple isn't shy about cutting off support for old hardware; the current version of macOS won't run on any machine more than five years old (according to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264).
ethicalsmacker 4y ago
I understand the project goals and everything but isn’t the primary weakness of it the same as every other laptop? If Apple decides to change something (which they will) or lock down the laptop more (which they will) then all of this work goes to nothing. Isn’t there a better case to be made to strive towards open hardware and driving a community around common hardware and goals? Something like system76, the pine hardware, etc.
- philistine 4y ago
  In a theological sense you're not wrong, but what are we supposed to do for the people who want to run Linux on a Mac? Have them pound sand? What about the people who want to run Linux on their Microsoft Surface? What seems to be the issue is that you have a group of people (Mac buyers) who are keenly inconvenienced by Linux's shortcomings and want to solve them. Let them, everybody will ultimately benefit.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > If Apple decides to change something (which they will) sure but there's only so much they can change - everything past the bootloader is open, non-apple software, by design. hardware changes? sure, could happen. Asahi Linux has already identified some likely ways that future uarchs might change. There could be supplier changes, etc. But there are still only N different hardware configurations to support, where N is like <10 right now. > lock down the laptop more (which they will) then all of this work goes to nothing. no probably not and they've actually gone out of their way to open it up even more - they actually have already changed things, and they changed them in a way that opened them up for the Asahi Linux people. And internally people have stated to Martin that the functionality exists is explicitly created to allow third-party OSs to work, that it is tested to work, because Apple has a hard policy for it to work. They're not going to make your OS for you, but they have a hard corporate policy of leaving the necessary pieces there for you to do your own work yourself. https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marca... https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marcan42/status/1554395184473190400 https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marca... This is where you and philistine below are wrong and are injecting your own personal biases and preconceptions into the issue - Apple is not "ideologically opposed to open software". You are literally being the precise "hackernews peanut gallery" that Marcan is calling out in the second tweet, on the exact issue he has called out in these tweets. Like seriously, the PG thing about "haters" being the mirror image of fanboys is so absolutely correct - some people are parasocially attached to brands in negative ways and they're just as blind and trite as the people who are parasocially attached in positive ways. Apple and NVIDIA and a few others have always generated these negative parasocial attachments. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html The macos platform is not the same thing as the iOS platform, and even then there have always been solid technical reasons behind the restrictions that Apple does - they take some security and policy arguments to the uncomfortable conclusions that nobody else will (or even can). But it's not coming from nowhere, or pure avarice, either: iOS is one valid way to build a platform with permissioning that actually matters, that can't be sidestepped by social attacks from powerful actors like Facebook demanding you bypass permissions for them. Same for nvidia… even when they open up adaptive sync, or opening their kernel land (while providing a userland that is far more usable than ROCm under Linux), or start adding Wayland support, they get nothing but shit. Celebrate the good changes when they happen, instead of nothing ever being good enough. Criticize the bad moves too, but understand there are often very significant technical or business reasons behind them. Just like there are good business reasons why ROCm is a mess for AMD. Companies can support different things and have different business priorities and that’s fine. But linus doing the middle finger is the end of it for a lot of people - it's the end of any consideration or conscious thought on the issue for a lot of people. Linus said "fuck nvidia" that makes me laugh out loud guys!!! It's always been more complicated than that, and Linus is just a (self-acknowledged) toxic asshole who (self-acknowledged) needs to tone it down, and that phase lasted for about a week before he was back to being a toxic asshole. Stop idolizing him, and realize he's not always right even on the issues in his own domain (see: his comments around AVX-512).

146 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Lenovo will release firmware updates for Linux users even on systems that don't officially support Linux (though, it can take a while). But I guess that's one of the exceptions that proves the rule

commoner 4y ago
Devices actively supported by vendors on LVFS tend to be Linux-friendly. The vendors with the most firmware updates pushed to LVFS in the last 6 months are Dell (796), Lenovo (364 combined), HP (35), Star Labs (29), and the Pine64 community (3). - LVFS vendor list: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/ https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/ - LVFS supported devices: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/
- klooney 4y ago
  Surprising to see tiny Star Labs in there
  - ddalex 4y ago
    This makes me feel better about their laptop offerings, which seem very good.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Awesome, is this basically the "what should I buy for running Linux on it" list?
  - commoner 4y ago
    Yes, but it's not complete. I'd also include manufacturers that maintain Linux distros designed to support their devices, such as System76 (Pop!_OS), Purism (PureOS), and Tuxedo Computers (Tuxedo OS), if you're willing to use these distros. These 3 manufacturers have their own firmware update methods outside of LVFS.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Good for dell and lenovo but good lord it’s depressing that 5th place takes a grand total of 3 pushes
GLaNIK 4y ago
Is it? Last time I tried to use t480, which is listed as officially supports Ubuntu, I had to use rather ugly hack to fix CPU throttling: https://github.com/erpalma/throttled https://github.com/erpalma/throttled It affects other models as well and not fixed up to this day (at least not by vendor) Lenovo had a post in their blog acknowledging it, but after some time it mysteriously disappeared EDIT: Lol, there are HN post about this "fix" happened few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025838 By quickly checking comments seems like better solution is already available: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html
kaba0 4y ago
Will they ever fix their newer thinkpads throttling like hell on Linux (and even windows, actually)?
- lokedhs 4y ago
  That happened to me back when I bought my T490. Later they released a firmware update that fixed it. So the only case where I saw such issue, Lenovo fixed it quickly.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    There are plenty of forum posts like this ranging over years: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T-series-Laptops/T480-throttling-and-high-CPU-temps/m-p/4036815?page=1#4036852 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T-... Anecdotal, but the T14 was also prone to throttling all around my previous company.
- izacus 4y ago
  Yes.

galoisscobi 4y ago

I’m very grateful for the Asahi project, Hector’s leadership and everyone who has contributed to or supported the project. This care for the nitty gritty details, in my view, makes a big difference and is a true service to the world. It is a heartfelt gift to the community. Thank you for caring.

tcmart14 4y ago

The amount of shit takes on that thread are astonishing from people wanting to paint Hector's comments in a bad light. Trying to twist his words to extrapolate a meaning that isn't there. Of course, there are tons of people who also have no clue how hardware support comes into being. Some hardware is buggy on linux, has been and may always will be. A lot of the reason is, either the drivers had to be reverse engineer, which takes a lot of time and effort. Or, something that happens a lot, vendors throw together shitty drivers and call it a day. No hate for the SEs at these companies though. Some of these companies invest all their money in the development of hardware and clench up the purse strings once it comes time to write the actual drivers. Then from here, either the driver is open source and no one gives a damn to go fix the driver, or your back at needing to do some reverse engineering.

subarctic 4y ago
>The amount of shit takes on that thread are astonishing from people wanting to paint Hector's comments in a bad light. Trying to twist his words to extrapolate a meaning that isn't there. [...] um isn't there only one comment that matches what you're describing? i actually thought it was pretty neat how that discussion started out in the vein of a twitter thread, with one person misinterpreting another person's tweet and moralizing about it, but then you have that super long comment from alyssa 6 hours later that says "i think you're both right" and goes way into depth about how things are the way they are on twitter there wouldn't have been the space for that comment and it would've been overrun by a bunch of people making quick moral judgements about a tweet they deliberately misinterpreted
- kstenerud 4y ago
  This is actually my first time reading a mastodon thread, and I must say that the extra long comments allow for thoughtfulness, insightfulness and pleasant reading. At first I didn't read any of the replies because I was expecting the standard Twitter experience.
  - tcmart14 4y ago
    Definitely about Mastodon. I've been wanting to try out Mastodon and I finally took the plunge. So far, it seems a lot better because it allows for thoughtfulness. Will have to see how it goes!

rektide 4y ago

Computing everywhere seriosuly lack a coallition of the willing. There's so much regular industrial/capitalistic dialing it in, ultra-stratified systems where those who can are a thousand miles apart from those with any power. This post is remarkably on point, not just for the Linux kernel, but for such a huge majority of computing in general. The people close to the machine are not respected & heard. Those with the most refined tastes are ignored, distrusted aliens speaking their esoteric alien whayever, put far away from power & decision making. The system is set up to exercise only the priorities that can fight their way to the top, to clear visibility. Many of the "what have you done this quarter" problems are ultra real & compound this all. The structure is a problem, but to return back, computing's best are just not understandable by most. The deep concerns matter so much, computing is so much about maintaining & caring for complex technical ecosystems, but there's so few well travelled enough to weigh in & understand & make worthwhile assessments; the techies live a too peer-less existence, disconnected from so many non-technicals with so-so motivatiom, capability, & interest to care, & separated by other techies who have their own separate stakes & motivations. Just being around other people who care & want to make things widely better is a rare gem of a place to be in computing. It shouldnt be so, but it is, and it's awful, and we have such brighter better ways to be that are always so glistening great & close, but so damnably just out of reach. The best intents have so little backing. So much unknowing unseeing resistance impedes the good, purposelessly, ignorantly, from so many assailing places. Woe.

benreesman 4y ago

That’s a pretty baller story if it works out. I use Apple gear because all that shit works perfectly, but would I rather have a hackable tiling WM instead of divvy, obviously. Great dream if it happens.

semi-extrinsic 4y ago
Have you tried yabai as your WM on macos?
- phneutral26 4y ago
  +1 for yabai! It's awesome, such a timesaver. I do miss dwm, but i think yabai is the best of the bunch when it comes to macOS tiling WM's.

captn3m0 4y ago

For me, the best example of the "we care" attitude from Asahi was in the installer itself - even in alpha it was well polished, and usable. Clear defaults, documented behaviour, help messages. And this is an installer that needs to go the extra mile to show up in Apple's bootloader. It was a breeze to install (M2 Air).

nix23 4y ago

I use Linux since ~25years, and he's totally right. I cant stand the amateurish "it works here" or "wait your laptop is 8 years old? For sure the new kernel cannot load your nvidia driver" or "yeah that intel wireless card never worked good, buy a atheros card" or "you cant use XFS with that game because of inode64, just use wine or use another filesystem" and and and. It's a real shitshow, i would never recommend any Linux-distro to anyone if i cant hold that users hand.

anonymousDan 4y ago

Does cuda etc work out of the box on Asahi? I would be minded to check it out if so.

ZiiS 4y ago
Dose Asahi even run on anything with an Nvidia GPU?
- paulmd 4y ago
  Presumably you could put an nvidia gpu in a thunderbolt enclosure, and apple silicon Mac Pro shouldn’t be too far off, so the answer is “yes, if you connect one”. Nvidia actually already has armv8 drivers for the jetson platform, no idea how comprehensive they are though. Might only be the things they need for various generations of Jetson and maybe the odd Fujitsu thing. And because of the miracle of arm ISA versioning, there’s probably some fun gotchas there too.
  - ZiiS 4y ago
    Well the first step would be adding thunderbolt support to Ashai
NavinF 4y ago
AFAIK no eGPUs work on M1 and no CUDA support either.

goosedragons 4y ago

How much are they going to care in 7 years when the sheen of M series wears off, Apple's benefits in performance per watt are no longer as impressive and they just made some massive design change breaking loads of things? Will they really care then?

yusefnapora 4y ago
I personally think the odds are pretty good that Asahi ends up supporting the M1 series longer than macOS. Apple isn't shy about cutting off support for old hardware; the current version of macOS won't run on any machine more than five years old (according to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264).

ethicalsmacker 4y ago

I understand the project goals and everything but isn’t the primary weakness of it the same as every other laptop? If Apple decides to change something (which they will) or lock down the laptop more (which they will) then all of this work goes to nothing. Isn’t there a better case to be made to strive towards open hardware and driving a community around common hardware and goals? Something like system76, the pine hardware, etc.

philistine 4y ago
In a theological sense you're not wrong, but what are we supposed to do for the people who want to run Linux on a Mac? Have them pound sand? What about the people who want to run Linux on their Microsoft Surface? What seems to be the issue is that you have a group of people (Mac buyers) who are keenly inconvenienced by Linux's shortcomings and want to solve them. Let them, everybody will ultimately benefit.
paulmd 4y ago
> If Apple decides to change something (which they will) sure but there's only so much they can change - everything past the bootloader is open, non-apple software, by design. hardware changes? sure, could happen. Asahi Linux has already identified some likely ways that future uarchs might change. There could be supplier changes, etc. But there are still only N different hardware configurations to support, where N is like <10 right now. > lock down the laptop more (which they will) then all of this work goes to nothing. no probably not and they've actually gone out of their way to open it up even more - they actually have already changed things, and they changed them in a way that opened them up for the Asahi Linux people. And internally people have stated to Martin that the functionality exists is explicitly created to allow third-party OSs to work, that it is tested to work, because Apple has a hard policy for it to work. They're not going to make your OS for you, but they have a hard corporate policy of leaving the necessary pieces there for you to do your own work yourself. https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marca... https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marcan42/status/1554395184473190400 https://web.archive.org/web/20220802091506/twitter.com/marca... This is where you and philistine below are wrong and are injecting your own personal biases and preconceptions into the issue - Apple is not "ideologically opposed to open software". You are literally being the precise "hackernews peanut gallery" that Marcan is calling out in the second tweet, on the exact issue he has called out in these tweets. Like seriously, the PG thing about "haters" being the mirror image of fanboys is so absolutely correct - some people are parasocially attached to brands in negative ways and they're just as blind and trite as the people who are parasocially attached in positive ways. Apple and NVIDIA and a few others have always generated these negative parasocial attachments. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html The macos platform is not the same thing as the iOS platform, and even then there have always been solid technical reasons behind the restrictions that Apple does - they take some security and policy arguments to the uncomfortable conclusions that nobody else will (or even can). But it's not coming from nowhere, or pure avarice, either: iOS is one valid way to build a platform with permissioning that actually matters, that can't be sidestepped by social attacks from powerful actors like Facebook demanding you bypass permissions for them. Same for nvidia… even when they open up adaptive sync, or opening their kernel land (while providing a userland that is far more usable than ROCm under Linux), or start adding Wayland support, they get nothing but shit. Celebrate the good changes when they happen, instead of nothing ever being good enough. Criticize the bad moves too, but understand there are often very significant technical or business reasons behind them. Just like there are good business reasons why ROCm is a mess for AMD. Companies can support different things and have different business priorities and that’s fine. But linus doing the middle finger is the end of it for a lot of people - it's the end of any consideration or conscious thought on the issue for a lot of people. Linus said "fuck nvidia" that makes me laugh out loud guys!!! It's always been more complicated than that, and Linus is just a (self-acknowledged) toxic asshole who (self-acknowledged) needs to tone it down, and that phase lasted for about a week before he was back to being a toxic asshole. Stop idolizing him, and realize he's not always right even on the issues in his own domain (see: his comments around AVX-512).