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its insane to me that people are working so hard on reverse engineering apple silicon. like, the diagrams are right there in cupertino. it just seems like such

• asdasdsddd 2y ago
  whats the point of reverse engineering this again?
  • School-Cotton 2y ago
    To run Linux on MBPs
  • fragmede 2y ago
    Some people really like the hardware but can't stand the software, and have the skills to do something about it.
  • coconut08 2y ago
    if you want an arm laptop with incredible specs, incredible build quality, incredible battery life and incredible performance that runs linux what other option is there?
    • jrockway 2y ago
      Yeah, the M4 is apparently the fastest CPU on single-core benchmarks. If you want a fast laptop, you have to get it. Not being forced to use Mac OS would be nice.
    • tokinonagare 2y ago
      Just run Linux inside a VM. Problem solved.
      • Philpax 2y ago
        This is not a comparable user experience to running Linux natively for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious one is the relatively limited graphics acceleration. That's pretty important for a variety of use cases!
    • beeflet 2y ago
      You could wait a decade
  • Teever 2y ago
    It is an inspirational demonstration of the hacker spirit and a way for the individuals involved to both expand their technical abilities and demonstrate them to prospective employers. I personally consider it very inspirational though I recognize that I will probably never be able to undertake such a difficult task. I can imagine that it is very inspirational to the next generation of extremely proficient and dedicated teens who want to master software development and explore leading edge hardware.
  • linguae 2y ago
    1. Even if one loves macOS, Apple doesn't support its hardware forever. Being able to run an alternative operating system on unsupported hardware helps extends that device's useful life. My 2013 Mac Pro is now unsupported, but I could install Linux on it and thus run up-to-date software. 2. Some people want to use Apple's impressive ARM hardware, but their needs require an alternative operating system.
  • baq 2y ago
    macOS sucks. It does a disservice to the greatest laptop hardware package ever made.
  • dougall 2y ago
    It's fun :)
• runjake 2y ago
  I think it only fuels the possibility that Apple would open up the architecture documentation where it otherwise wouldn't if you didn't have people diligently reverse engineering it. Something similar to this happened in the early days of the iPhone, with the iPhone Dev Team. Initially, iPhone "apps" were going to be web pages, but then these reverse engineers came along and developed their own toolchain. Apple realized they had to take action and their "webpages as an app" strategy wasn't going to work.
  • hu3 2y ago
    That's a rather incomplete, revisionist and rose tinted glasses view of the history of native vs web apps in iPhone. A much more plausible theory is that Apple likes their 30% app store commission from big players. > https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/developers-generated-one-point-one-trillion-in-the-app-store-ecosystem-in-2022/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/developers-generated-... "App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022" People forget the only thing fueling big corps is profit.
    • reaperducer 2y ago
      That's a rather incomplete, revisionist and rose tinted glasses view of the history of native vs web apps in iPhone. As someone who built one of the first web apps featured by Apple, I can say that your view, too, is incomplete and revisionist. A much more plausible theory Theories are not necessary. Apple was very up-front about its trajectory with the iPhone at launch.
      • hu3 2y ago
        up-front at launch doesn't prevent changing their minds when looking at world record revenue. what makes you think it was set in stone?
        • kergonath 2y ago
          > what makes you think it was set in stone? It was not. But you got contradicted by people who actually remember what happened. It is fairly well documented, and was common knowledge even at the time. Jobs was initially sold on Web Apps for several reasons, and the state of iPhoneOS 1 and its internal APIs was very precarious and not stable enough for serious third-party development. Again, this was known at the time thanks to the jailbreak community, and it has been explained in details over the years by people who left Apple since then, and Jobs himself in Isaacson’s biography. When they pivoted towards the AppStore model, there was no predicting how big it would become, or even if it would be successful at all. The iPhone was exceeding expectations, but those were initially quite modest. It was far from world-record revenue.
• talldayo 2y ago
  A recurring theme you'll encounter across most of Apple's products is that any feature that forces first-party Apple software to compete on fair terms with other products is conspicuously missing.
• hu3 2y ago
  Specially because Apple seems to not care much about the project even after current progress. m3 support still not there (let alone m4) because things broke. Which is expected from Apple, they are just doing their thing and improving their products. If they cared they would have at least hired these people by now. It wouldn't make a dent in their budget.
  • Twisell 2y ago
    M3 and M4 is not there because the Asahi Teams have a roadmap and stick to it. They don't want to leave M1/M2 half botched before moving on to the next gen that will ultimately support more features. If you are not happy with the pace go on and contribute, but don't invent false issues.
    • ksynwa 2y ago
      You are misreading the comment. It is indicting Apple, not the Asahi team, for not caring. If Apple cared and hired the Asahi folks and provided them with help, they would probably be able to churn out drivers faster.
      • concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        Apple does not want it.
• almostgotcaught 2y ago
  You think that's bad? Imagine how much churn there is because NVIDIA doesn't have open source drivers. I'll actually do you one better: part of my PhD was working around issues in Vivado. If it were open source I could've just patched it and moved on to real "science" but that's not the world we live in. And I'm by far not the only "scientist" doing this kind of "research".
• moffkalast 2y ago
  If people wonder why some of us don't like Apple, this is the fundamental philosophy why. It's not about the M series, it's been their modus operandi since time immemorial. It's like if Microsoft owned x86 and nobody could run anything on it but Windows. And people would like it because it's a "cohesive ecosystem" or whatever.
  • rched 2y ago
    I'm not sure that's really the same thing. Apple doesn't own ARM and the main issue here seems to be the GPU no? Is this much different from how things work with Nvidia? I guess the difference is that Nvidia provides drivers for Linux while Apple does not. As far as I know Nvidia Linux drivers aren't open source either though.
    • moffkalast 2y ago
      Nvidia is not much better, but they do only make one component and generally ensure compatibility. If Nvidia went full Apple, their cards would have a special power connector for the Nvidia PSU, a custom PCIe express lane that only works with Nvidia motherboards, which also requires Nvidia RAM sticks and only boots NvidiaOS. And also most of the software that would run on it would be blocked from running on other OSes because fuck you that's why. Also if you tried running NvidiaOS in a VM, they would sue you. It's still profoundly weird to me that nobody can run Safari outside MacOS, even for testing. At least the EU has strong armed them into dropping thunderbolt ports now, so we have that minor interoperability going for us, which is nice.
      • kaba0 2y ago
        Are we living in the same world? Nvidia only recently started caring about Linux (due to profit obviously, it turns out servers don't run anything else nowadays). May I remind you of the famous `--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia` flag in Linux compositor? Meanwhile, apple literally went out of their way to make secure boot for third-party OSs possible.
        • 2y ago
• robbiewxyz 2y ago
  This definitely sucks. I feel similarly about e.g. the jailbreaking community: I appreciate the work they do and at the same time I very much wish it wasn't necessary. If Apple and other companies like them were a little less greedy we could have far more nice things for free and Alyssa and other brilliant engineers could go work on other great projects. Also if regulators were a little more vigilant and a little less corrupt. Someday.
  • WD-42 2y ago
    To me what makes it suck even more is the fact that Apple has no qualms exploiting FOSS themselves. BSD, WebKit, their new “game porting toolkit”. And look what they provide in return. It’s so gross.
    • musicale 2y ago
      Apple does develop WebKit, Swift, and clang/llvm, as well as other things like open source ML models, but I understand what you're saying. One important lesson I've learned regarding open source is that companies absolutely love it when you work for them for free. Something I've learned about Apple is that one of their primary businesses is selling hardware with proprietary software running on it.
      • WD-42 2y ago
        Agree, at least WebKit can be used outside of Apple. They still did KHTML dirty though. Your point about working for free is right on the money. I get that asahi is probably intellectually stimulating to work on, but I couldn’t do it knowing I am essentially enriching a company that doesn’t have public benefit in mind.
        • musicale 2y ago
          Clang can definitely be used outside of Apple, and can even compile Linux. Swift technically can be used anywhere, though it is largely driven by Apple and laughs at backward compatibility. The people I know at Apple actually do have public benefit in mind. They believe in things like usability, privacy, accessibility, sustainability, etc. They don't want to replace you with intrusive AI (yet). And personally I like Apple's products and am using one right now. Unfortunately all large companies tend to turn into monsters that do their best to grind up resources - natural or human - in order to turn them into money. And the designer of the iPhone regrets turning us into zombies - that was not an intended effect.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• cheesycod 2y ago
  For many people, the Apple Silicon GPU is an interesting problem to solve given that the firmware is loaded by the bootloader and all and its actually generally easier to interact with than say NVIDIA while having decent perf. Also GPUs in general are really complex beasts involving IP from tons of companies in general. Would not be surprised if even Apple doesn't have the full schematics...
  • vlovich123 2y ago
    > and its actually generally easier to interact with than say NVIDIA while having decent perf I’m pretty sure that Turing and newer work the same way. The drivers basically do nothing but load the firmware & do some basic memory management if I recall correctly.
• FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
  I get what you mean. I'm glad that they're doing this; it's great that the best laptop hardware is going to run Linux before long; it's a fun endeavor -- but when you zoom way out and take the philosophical view, yeah, it seems silly that it should be necessary, in the same that way it feels absurd that impressive and courageous feats in battle should have actually needed to happen.
• tonymet 2y ago
  blame the lawyers. any effort to share specs would be an implicit license.
  • robbiewxyz 2y ago
    I'm not familiar with this. Suppose Apple released docs under an "as is" type disclaimer like is so common in the open source community: would doing so potentially come back to bite them?
• kaba0 2y ago
  Is it really a far comparison? Apple has a proper bootloader capable of secure booting 3rd party OSs. What part of the open-source ecosystem was built differently? It just so happened that after possibly even more painstaking reverse engineering, the responsible hardware vendor later realized that server machines are de facto linux, and they better support it properly. Like, that Intel chip working that good was not achieved differently, we just like to wear rose-tinted glasses.
• WD-42 2y ago
  Honestly I can only imagine it's because the team enjoys the challenge. Once they get bored/fed up, goodbye Linux on Macs. If you think you want to run Linux, don't buy hardware from a company that views it as a threat to their business model, simple as that.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    You're just stating the problem the parent content was upset about. It's all well and good to state the facts and say "face reality" but in this case we all apparently know that it's a fragile state of affairs.
  • kaba0 2y ago
    > If you think you want to run Linux, don't buy hardware from a company that views it as a threat to their business model, simple as that. Show me any hardware that is 100% "libre"? Even the pinephone itself has plenty of closed source blobs running as firmware.
    • beeflet 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be 100% libre. This is about booting any OS you want in the first place. If you take some random windows laptop off the shelf, it will boot linux (and continue to do so in the future) because they have to support UEFI. If you take a "linux" friendly vendor off the shelf, you may even have coreboot or something on-board. But with this apple situation there is no guarantee the next generation of hardware won't lock you out, or they might push out an OTA firmware update that locks you out. It's like porting linux to the playstation or something.
    • WD-42 2y ago
      False dichotomy. You know very well there is a spectrum on which Apple resides on nearly the opposite side of pine phone.
      • kaba0 2y ago
        Does it?
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  My wife's 2017 MBP has gotten so dog-slow since Apple dropped support for it that it can't handle more than 3 Chrome tabs at a time now. The reality of Apple products is that the manufacturer sees them as eminently disposable. As early ARM macbooks age, the ability to run something, anything that isn't MacOS will be an asset. Otherwise, they're all landfill fodder.
  • bschwindHN 2y ago
    My 2014 MBP is still going strong and can handle more than 3 browser tabs, not sure what's up with your wife's machine but that doesn't sound normal. You can also trade it back in to get recycled, no one should be straight up throwing computer hardware in the trash.
    • ryukoposting 2y ago
      More than half of "recycled" e-waste just gets exported to developing countries without environmental regulations where it either gets burned or buried. The only sustainable thing you can do with a bad laptop is fix it or part it out, but for all my years taking apart fragile electronics, is it really worth the effort to take apart a device that was intentionally designed to be difficult or impossible for the owner to repair?
    • Reason077 2y ago
      The last few macOS updates have really been killing performance on Intel Macs. Your 2014 is probably safe because it'll still be running an older macOS.
  • jcul 2y ago
    I have an old google nexus 7 tablet that I recently installed uboot and postmarketos on. I can ssh to it, run X apps over ssh, print directly from it. It's pretty cool. I also have a really old iPad 2. It works perfectly HW wise, screen, wifi etc. But is effectively a paper weight due to software. I am logged into it from my old Apple account, that was only ever used for this tablet. I have the username and password but cannot log in as I don't know the security questions, so I can't reset the device or try to install apps. I even phoned apple but they said there's nothing they can do. It pains me to just dump a perfectly good piece of hardware.
• _lvbh 2y ago
  Seriously, Macs would be so much more attractive if Apple just straight up supported Linux
  • tim-- 2y ago
    In a roundabout way, Apple tried this in the x86 era with OpenDarwin, and there was no interest for an Apple led open source operating system. Apple does not have a reason to support any other operating system. Apple engineers do however both officially and unofficially support Asahi, so there's that.
    • linguae 2y ago
      I’ll go back a little further: at one point before Apple purchased NeXT, Apple had its own version of the Linux kernel called Mklinux (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux).
    • WD-42 2y ago
      Oh please. OpenDarwin lasted what, 2 years? The people running it realized their efforts were merely going towards enriching OSX, it was not a truly open source effort.
• robgibbons 2y ago
  I have to agree with this take, as much as I appreciate the indelible hacker spirit of jailbreaking closed hardware and making it available to freedom loving individuals... A huge, vocal part of me also feels like the entire effort is truly just empowering Apple to sell more closed down hardware and even the freedom loving nerds will buy it because it's sexy. There's no getting around the sexiness of Apple hardware. But there's also no getting around how closed it is. You implicitly support Apple's business model when you buy their hardware, regardless of whether you run Asahi or Mac OS.
• esjeon 2y ago
  Yeah, I agree. I do respect the effort itself, but it always feels like a huge waste of talent. Imagine what could have been created with all that time and energy. I believe the best solution to proprietary hardware is not to buy them in the first place. Buy from vendors who are more open/supportive, like Framework and Thinkpad. This helps those vendors keep supporting open source.