4 ms·

I wonder if the driver could be ported to Mac OS?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
encryptluks2 4y ago
Maybe, but it seems bizarre that open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem when the manufacturer doesn't only make it difficult but they at times actually intentionally impede their work. That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I think that's not an unreasonable point, but, well: 1. I try not to tell people what to do with their free time. While you may think it's "bizarre", this use of their time has value to them, not only in the hopeful end result (fully-functional Linux on ARM Macs), but also in the satisfaction of the technical challenge, bragging rights, and general reputation. I'm sure there are some people who might look at what you do with your spare time and think you're "wasting" it sometimes. But that's in the eye of the beholder, and at any rate, that's your prerogative, as this is theirs. 2. I used to run Linux on Mac laptops (gave up around 2016 or so, tried again in 2018, gave up again shortly after), and I get the appeal: the hardware is really nice. And by all accounts, the ARM Macs are even nicer than the Intel Macs. Sure, they're not perfect (lack of upgradeability/repairability, etc.), but running Linux on them can be great, if the hardware support is there. "I like this hardware and I want to run Linux on/with it, so I'll figure it out myself" seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Many of the drivers in the Linux kernel for various bits of hardware only exist because someone adopted this attitude. I also just think your premise is a bit flawed: > open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem This is a little bit of a weird statement, because these developers aren't doing that. The "closed source proprietary ecosystem" is macOS and its app store. The hardware itself is more or less just as open (or closed) as most non-Apple hardware. I mean, I can't rewrite the BIOS in my Framework Laptop, nor can I make heads or tails of any of the binary firmware blobs Linux loads into the WiFi chipset, graphics chipset, etc. Apple's hardware is undocumented, certainly, but that's pretty common when it comes to Linux hardware support. > but they at times actually intentionally impede their work Do they, though? From what I've read of the Asahi project's progress, they didn't run into cases where Apple intentionally tried to make things harder on them. Sure, some things were harder, but I don't think we can ascribe a malicious motive to Apple. The most likely explanation is that they just decided to design things in a particular way because they felt it would be best for their own purposes, and didn't really care to think about anything else. They could have decided to actively cryptographically lock down the boot process to prohibit other OSes from running, but they didn't do that. > That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with. Why "should" they? All hardware manufacturers decide what software to write, and what platforms to support. If they don't think the cost of writing and supporting drivers for Linux is worth what they'll get in return, they'll make the logical choice to just... not do that. We've seen plenty of vendors over the 30-odd-year lifetime of Linux do that math and decide Linux support wasn't worth it to them. It's a shame, but I don't think it's fair to come down on them hard for that. Certainly some vendors (nvidia comes to mind) have been actively hostile toward the Linux community at times, but I don't think we can say the same of Apple.
  - simonh 4y ago
    In fact Asahi team have argued before that Apple has actually gone to great lengths to provide documentation and tools to enable the development of third party OS kernels.
- zer0zzz 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure the asahi developers themselves would totally disagree with you there. Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them. This project is no different than Linux in the old days: it’s just a piece of good hardware that kernel devs have reversed to run an alternate OS on and they’ve become quite good at it. I don’t see people making the same statements about work on the nouveau driver or on the Broadcom opensource wifi drivers. But somehow because the hardware was built by apple folks seem to think it’s more proprietary than anything else linux has run on.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    > Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them. Didn't they make an undocumented change to the boot loader that serves literally no purpose other than to give Asahi a somewhat stable target than what they were using before?
    - zer0zzz 4y ago
      Yeah something like that. While I’m sure they don’t like folks reversing their hardware I doubt they care to stop this if they know there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it. I think it’s more likely they become consumers of asahi Linux’ work than it is for them to actively take measures to break them.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them No, a person who used to work on the bootloader at Apple said on Twitter they did it because they wanted to enable different OSes. That's not an "Apple confirmed", that's "employee X said".
    - zer0zzz 4y ago
      That’s tacit apple approval. Apples PR department would probably have an employee fired for stating something like that without prior approval.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Regardless of all the points the siblings make, first and foremost this is fun. It's fun to reverse engineer stuff. It's fun to get things working that were previously not working. A lot of peoples careers start this way. A lot of the hacking and the cracking scene was born this way. There is a certain kind of pleasure and satisfaction involved when you get a device that was previously not designed to do a certain thing behave in that way.
phh 4y ago
As far as I know the backend to have the driver running on macos is already merged in mesa, so it should already work as-is?
- pedrocr 4y ago
  So ARM Macs in OSX can now or soon have true Vulkan support with just a custom userspace app code targetting the kernel interface directly?
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    I don't think the vulkan driver exists in a usable state yet. So far there's only an OpenGL driver.
  - AceJohnny2 4y ago
    No. As the article says, the macOS kernel interface is an undocumented, moving target.
gigatexal 4y ago
MacOS has been put on the back burner for Apple. It's all iPhone and iOS. It's clear that these scrappy hackers are going to fully utilize the hardware, clearly Apple doesn't care. Off-topic: FreeBSD had an early version of Grand Central Dispatch ported to it, I wonder if Linux could benefit from that maybe with some io-uring goodness.
- mort96 4y ago
  That ... really doesn't seem like the case. The macOS world has seen soo many big changes recently, with the complete visual overhaul of everything with Big Sur and then Ventura (whether you like that or not), the rewriting of a whole lot of applications and system stuff from AppKit to SwiftUI (again, whether you like that or not), porting the entire operating system to ARM, inventing an excellent x86_64 virtualization layer, overhauling everything related to booting and system upgrades (even if it's just taking what's already built for iOS and heavily modifying it to work for Macs), new window management features, etc etc. That's a lot of engineering resources invested. The sorry state of Apple's OpenGL drivers is a part of their strategy. They're choosing to not invest in OpenGL, and have even officially deprecated it. They want you to use Metal instead.
  - flatiron 4y ago
    Which is so bizarre to me. Metal isn’t cross platform and 3d is very much a cross platform technology. So then why footgun your OS for 3d?
    - kelnos 4y ago
      It would make perfect sense if macOS was already the go-to platform for 3D apps and games. Third-party developers would then have to port to Metal in order to keep their customer base, and their OpenGL backend would be abandoned or at least a second-class citizen. That could be a competitive advantage for Apple. But macOS is not the go-to platform for this sort of thing, especially when it comes to games. This does seem like a strategic mistake. Maybe they just don't care, for whatever reason. I mean, it doesn't seem like Metal has been catastrophic for Apple, has it? Then again, OpenGL is probably still good enough on macOS for most 3D apps, deprecated or not. And if Apple does decide to actually remove it, I believe there are projects that implement the OpenGL API on top of Metal (certainly with performance impact). And third-party developers certainly have the option to wait to write a Metal backend only after Apple announces OpenGL is being dropped completely.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Maybe, but it seems bizarre that open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem when the manufacturer doesn't only make it difficult but they at times actually intentionally impede their work. That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with.

kelnos 4y ago
I think that's not an unreasonable point, but, well: 1. I try not to tell people what to do with their free time. While you may think it's "bizarre", this use of their time has value to them, not only in the hopeful end result (fully-functional Linux on ARM Macs), but also in the satisfaction of the technical challenge, bragging rights, and general reputation. I'm sure there are some people who might look at what you do with your spare time and think you're "wasting" it sometimes. But that's in the eye of the beholder, and at any rate, that's your prerogative, as this is theirs. 2. I used to run Linux on Mac laptops (gave up around 2016 or so, tried again in 2018, gave up again shortly after), and I get the appeal: the hardware is really nice. And by all accounts, the ARM Macs are even nicer than the Intel Macs. Sure, they're not perfect (lack of upgradeability/repairability, etc.), but running Linux on them can be great, if the hardware support is there. "I like this hardware and I want to run Linux on/with it, so I'll figure it out myself" seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Many of the drivers in the Linux kernel for various bits of hardware only exist because someone adopted this attitude. I also just think your premise is a bit flawed: > open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem This is a little bit of a weird statement, because these developers aren't doing that. The "closed source proprietary ecosystem" is macOS and its app store. The hardware itself is more or less just as open (or closed) as most non-Apple hardware. I mean, I can't rewrite the BIOS in my Framework Laptop, nor can I make heads or tails of any of the binary firmware blobs Linux loads into the WiFi chipset, graphics chipset, etc. Apple's hardware is undocumented, certainly, but that's pretty common when it comes to Linux hardware support. > but they at times actually intentionally impede their work Do they, though? From what I've read of the Asahi project's progress, they didn't run into cases where Apple intentionally tried to make things harder on them. Sure, some things were harder, but I don't think we can ascribe a malicious motive to Apple. The most likely explanation is that they just decided to design things in a particular way because they felt it would be best for their own purposes, and didn't really care to think about anything else. They could have decided to actively cryptographically lock down the boot process to prohibit other OSes from running, but they didn't do that. > That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with. Why "should" they? All hardware manufacturers decide what software to write, and what platforms to support. If they don't think the cost of writing and supporting drivers for Linux is worth what they'll get in return, they'll make the logical choice to just... not do that. We've seen plenty of vendors over the 30-odd-year lifetime of Linux do that math and decide Linux support wasn't worth it to them. It's a shame, but I don't think it's fair to come down on them hard for that. Certainly some vendors (nvidia comes to mind) have been actively hostile toward the Linux community at times, but I don't think we can say the same of Apple.
- simonh 4y ago
  In fact Asahi team have argued before that Apple has actually gone to great lengths to provide documentation and tools to enable the development of third party OS kernels.
zer0zzz 4y ago
I’m pretty sure the asahi developers themselves would totally disagree with you there. Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them. This project is no different than Linux in the old days: it’s just a piece of good hardware that kernel devs have reversed to run an alternate OS on and they’ve become quite good at it. I don’t see people making the same statements about work on the nouveau driver or on the Broadcom opensource wifi drivers. But somehow because the hardware was built by apple folks seem to think it’s more proprietary than anything else linux has run on.
- pdpi 4y ago
  > Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them. Didn't they make an undocumented change to the boot loader that serves literally no purpose other than to give Asahi a somewhat stable target than what they were using before?
  - zer0zzz 4y ago
    Yeah something like that. While I’m sure they don’t like folks reversing their hardware I doubt they care to stop this if they know there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it. I think it’s more likely they become consumers of asahi Linux’ work than it is for them to actively take measures to break them.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them No, a person who used to work on the bootloader at Apple said on Twitter they did it because they wanted to enable different OSes. That's not an "Apple confirmed", that's "employee X said".
  - zer0zzz 4y ago
    That’s tacit apple approval. Apples PR department would probably have an employee fired for stating something like that without prior approval.
rjzzleep 4y ago
Regardless of all the points the siblings make, first and foremost this is fun. It's fun to reverse engineer stuff. It's fun to get things working that were previously not working. A lot of peoples careers start this way. A lot of the hacking and the cracking scene was born this way. There is a certain kind of pleasure and satisfaction involved when you get a device that was previously not designed to do a certain thing behave in that way.

phh 4y ago

As far as I know the backend to have the driver running on macos is already merged in mesa, so it should already work as-is?

pedrocr 4y ago
So ARM Macs in OSX can now or soon have true Vulkan support with just a custom userspace app code targetting the kernel interface directly?
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I don't think the vulkan driver exists in a usable state yet. So far there's only an OpenGL driver.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  No. As the article says, the macOS kernel interface is an undocumented, moving target.

gigatexal 4y ago

MacOS has been put on the back burner for Apple. It's all iPhone and iOS. It's clear that these scrappy hackers are going to fully utilize the hardware, clearly Apple doesn't care. Off-topic: FreeBSD had an early version of Grand Central Dispatch ported to it, I wonder if Linux could benefit from that maybe with some io-uring goodness.

mort96 4y ago
That ... really doesn't seem like the case. The macOS world has seen soo many big changes recently, with the complete visual overhaul of everything with Big Sur and then Ventura (whether you like that or not), the rewriting of a whole lot of applications and system stuff from AppKit to SwiftUI (again, whether you like that or not), porting the entire operating system to ARM, inventing an excellent x86_64 virtualization layer, overhauling everything related to booting and system upgrades (even if it's just taking what's already built for iOS and heavily modifying it to work for Macs), new window management features, etc etc. That's a lot of engineering resources invested. The sorry state of Apple's OpenGL drivers is a part of their strategy. They're choosing to not invest in OpenGL, and have even officially deprecated it. They want you to use Metal instead.
- flatiron 4y ago
  Which is so bizarre to me. Metal isn’t cross platform and 3d is very much a cross platform technology. So then why footgun your OS for 3d?
  - kelnos 4y ago
    It would make perfect sense if macOS was already the go-to platform for 3D apps and games. Third-party developers would then have to port to Metal in order to keep their customer base, and their OpenGL backend would be abandoned or at least a second-class citizen. That could be a competitive advantage for Apple. But macOS is not the go-to platform for this sort of thing, especially when it comes to games. This does seem like a strategic mistake. Maybe they just don't care, for whatever reason. I mean, it doesn't seem like Metal has been catastrophic for Apple, has it? Then again, OpenGL is probably still good enough on macOS for most 3D apps, deprecated or not. And if Apple does decide to actually remove it, I believe there are projects that implement the OpenGL API on top of Metal (certainly with performance impact). And third-party developers certainly have the option to wait to write a Metal backend only after Apple announces OpenGL is being dropped completely.