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I'm not sure the "moving target" argument holds up to much scrutiny. Asahi has been able to re-use the UART driver from the Samsung SoCs that went into the earl

I'm not sure the "moving target" argument holds up to much scrutiny. Asahi has been able to re-use the UART driver from the Samsung SoCs that went into the earliest iPhones, the I2C driver from PA Semi's PowerPC chips, and the GPU reverse engineering was greatly helped by the PowerVR heritage. There's clearly a fair bit of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in Apple's hardware design strategy. Meanwhile, on the Wintel side the past ~decade has seen a complete overhaul in how systems sleep, and CPU features like TSX and SGX and MPX have come and gone, presenting OS developers with plenty of churn to deal with.

zamadatix 3y ago
I wouldn't say Apple is any less a moving target rather they've only released 2 generations of the M series so far. As an example it's looking like the 3rd generation will swap the GPU architecture you mentioned for something completely new. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't change much, and that I2C driver is a good example, but that doesn't really mean the target as a whole is particularly stable it just means they don't feel the need to rewrite I2C every chip revision. Meanwhile many of the things churning on the x86 side, like memory encryption, don't really matter for projects like this.
- wtallis 3y ago
  I wasn't trying to say that Apple's platform is remarkably stable, only that there's no evidence it is particularly unstable. Even if their next GPU architecture requires a more or less complete re-write of the drivers, that on its own still wouldn't justify considering Apple's platform to be more of a moving target than the PC/Wintel platform—though it would bolster complaints about the necessity of reverse engineering rather than having documentation available (complaints that apply just as much against NVIDIA's GPUs). It'll probably take at least one or two more generations of Apple hardware before one can reasonably accuse them of being a constantly moving target. For now, the best evidence we have to go on is the fact that it took Asahi about a week to bring M2 support up to parity with the M1 support they had at that time.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    That the first updated version didn't just boot automatically is 100% evidence it's more unstable than your typical system family. It partially comes down to Apple putting absolutely nothing into Linux, even Nvidia does better than that these days, but even then you can at least expect to boot year old Linux on a new PC even if it doesn't support the latest CPU scheduling optimizations for it or whatever. I'm also not sure I'd even agree M2 is even at parity with M1 in Asahi yet, let alone the first week. They did get a lot of things working quickly but I think that's far overselling what happened.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      > but even then you can at least expect to boot year old Linux on a new PC even if it doesn't support the latest CPU scheduling optimizations for it or whatever. It's still extremely common that booting a year-old distro on brand new hardware leaves you with a blank screen due to missing GPU drivers, or leaves you with unaccelerated graphics on par with what Asahi currently offers by default. And it's hardly unheard of to have issues with power management and even audio with new x86 platforms in recent years. Going a bit further back, Intel has been known to break NVMe and not require OEMs to offer a BIOS option to put the chipset in the standards-compliant mode.
      - zamadatix 3y ago
        And yet if all that happened it would still be a better state than the M2 support in Asahi at launch. When the GPU acceleration doesn't work at least the display output can. When a certain chipset has an issue with NVMe at least you can still boot other ways than the internal NVMe drive. When the M2 launched you couldn't boot the kernel. When you could boot the kernel you couldn't handle displays. When you could handle displays you couldn't connect to Wi-Fi. All this in the first minor update to the SoC, one where nothing major even changed yet. This is why, despite my love and regular use of Asahi, I'll never believe a claim new Apple systems are a remotely stable target. Certainly not more than x86, where I can boot a decade old distributor and still at least get video output.

zamadatix 3y ago

I wouldn't say Apple is any less a moving target rather they've only released 2 generations of the M series so far. As an example it's looking like the 3rd generation will swap the GPU architecture you mentioned for something completely new. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't change much, and that I2C driver is a good example, but that doesn't really mean the target as a whole is particularly stable it just means they don't feel the need to rewrite I2C every chip revision. Meanwhile many of the things churning on the x86 side, like memory encryption, don't really matter for projects like this.

wtallis 3y ago
I wasn't trying to say that Apple's platform is remarkably stable, only that there's no evidence it is particularly unstable. Even if their next GPU architecture requires a more or less complete re-write of the drivers, that on its own still wouldn't justify considering Apple's platform to be more of a moving target than the PC/Wintel platform—though it would bolster complaints about the necessity of reverse engineering rather than having documentation available (complaints that apply just as much against NVIDIA's GPUs). It'll probably take at least one or two more generations of Apple hardware before one can reasonably accuse them of being a constantly moving target. For now, the best evidence we have to go on is the fact that it took Asahi about a week to bring M2 support up to parity with the M1 support they had at that time.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  That the first updated version didn't just boot automatically is 100% evidence it's more unstable than your typical system family. It partially comes down to Apple putting absolutely nothing into Linux, even Nvidia does better than that these days, but even then you can at least expect to boot year old Linux on a new PC even if it doesn't support the latest CPU scheduling optimizations for it or whatever. I'm also not sure I'd even agree M2 is even at parity with M1 in Asahi yet, let alone the first week. They did get a lot of things working quickly but I think that's far overselling what happened.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    > but even then you can at least expect to boot year old Linux on a new PC even if it doesn't support the latest CPU scheduling optimizations for it or whatever. It's still extremely common that booting a year-old distro on brand new hardware leaves you with a blank screen due to missing GPU drivers, or leaves you with unaccelerated graphics on par with what Asahi currently offers by default. And it's hardly unheard of to have issues with power management and even audio with new x86 platforms in recent years. Going a bit further back, Intel has been known to break NVMe and not require OEMs to offer a BIOS option to put the chipset in the standards-compliant mode.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      And yet if all that happened it would still be a better state than the M2 support in Asahi at launch. When the GPU acceleration doesn't work at least the display output can. When a certain chipset has an issue with NVMe at least you can still boot other ways than the internal NVMe drive. When the M2 launched you couldn't boot the kernel. When you could boot the kernel you couldn't handle displays. When you could handle displays you couldn't connect to Wi-Fi. All this in the first minor update to the SoC, one where nothing major even changed yet. This is why, despite my love and regular use of Asahi, I'll never believe a claim new Apple systems are a remotely stable target. Certainly not more than x86, where I can boot a decade old distributor and still at least get video output.