4 ms·

Woah, this is amazing. I’ve been looking for an ARM Linux machine for a while and ended up about to get M2 Pros in a rack running Asahi. It has been near imposs

by arjie 1y ago

Woah, this is amazing. I’ve been looking for an ARM Linux machine for a while and ended up about to get M2 Pros in a rack running Asahi. It has been near impossible to get a Snapdragon Elite machine. The IdeaCentre or whatever is 2x the cost / performance and as far as I know is poorly supported. This changes the game. I’d rather use native Linux than Asahi (though the latter is amazing).

jabedude 1y ago
Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a manufacturer making a device with this chip?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
3836293648 1y ago
How is Asahi not native?
- vlovich123 1y ago
  Presumably OP meant a Linux distro using a normal upstream kernel?
- bigyabai 1y ago
  The drivers, while impressively reverse-engineered, are basically alpha-quality by Linux standards. Even well-studied M1 machines will have spotty support in comparison to what an OEM can provide officially.
  - noname120 1y ago
    Those that are implemented have been very reliable in my experience, I think that labeling them “alpha-quality by Linux standards” is a ridiculous claim
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      Then you need an Intel or AMD laptop as a frame of reference. M1 is implemented as-is with much of the silicon's onboard accelerators entirely dark. Hardware accelerated video encode/decode is a lost cause, Thunderbolt will likely never happen, NEON is your fastest SIMD accelerator and cpuidle is still not really figured out. Those are all perfectly acceptable limitations for a POC. And the GPU drivers are particularly well-made. But it doesn't really come close to how seriously AMD and Intel take Linux.
      - wtallis 1y ago
        There's a big difference between saying that many of the drivers are missing entirely, and saying that the drivers that exist are alpha-quality.
    - nicman23 1y ago
      my dude no. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#table-of-contents https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#tab... even in the m1 there are 4 WIP in the support table, 2 TBA and 10 non mainline boxes for the M1 pro
      - noname120 1y ago
        > Those that are implemented
    - neobrain 1y ago
      +1. Been running Asahi Linux for half a year now. Everything that's advertized as working is working great.
- StillBored 1y ago
  Asahi is also still a platform with a huge pile of out of tree patches on top because the platform itself is pretty unusual, requiring for example, a 16K page size kernel which is unlike pretty much every other arm Linux platform.
moondev 1y ago
Get a DGX spark. Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04. Tons of cores and RAM. Very quiet and small UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm edition just by booting the ISO usb-c power input (kinda cool) Insane connectx 200GbE RoCE networking 10GbE Ethernet Oh and an nvidia gpu with cuda and access to 128GB of unified memory It would be perfect if it had some kind of BMC or IPMI/redfish and an exposed PCIE slot. But this thing is an awesome arm64 workstation no doubt. May try to install to a USB drive and hang another gpu off the nvme port just to see what happens
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- didip 1y ago
  Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?
  - moondev 1y ago
    My microcenter has nvidia OEM flavor in stock. There are also flavors from all the other OEMs that differ slightly on cooling but mainly on chassis design.
- Keyframe 1y ago
  This might sound silly question, but those of you who have digits/spark machine, has anyone run Fedora on it? I kind of ran away from Ubuntu back to Fedora because reasons. Bonus question, far-fetched, steam and games with FEX?
  - my123 1y ago
    Fedora boots ootb
  - wtallis 1y ago
    Steam gaming with FEX is possible on the DGX Spark. The GPU is approximately a mobile 5070 with much less memory bandwidth. The CPU cores are relatively weak, especially after the instruction set translation overhead. There's a lot of stuff that's playable, but the performance is laughably bad for a $4000 machine.
imiric 1y ago
I don't think this changes the game as much as you think. AFAIU, the biggest challenge of running Linux on ARM machines is supporting the devicetree of each machine. After all, there is mainline kernel support for previous Qualcomm chips, yet very few machines with those chips can actually run Linux distros. So this is good news, but in practical terms it's just a marketing piece.

by arjie 1y ago

jabedude 1y ago

Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a manufacturer making a device with this chip?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

3836293648 1y ago

How is Asahi not native?

vlovich123 1y ago
Presumably OP meant a Linux distro using a normal upstream kernel?
bigyabai 1y ago
The drivers, while impressively reverse-engineered, are basically alpha-quality by Linux standards. Even well-studied M1 machines will have spotty support in comparison to what an OEM can provide officially.
- noname120 1y ago
  Those that are implemented have been very reliable in my experience, I think that labeling them “alpha-quality by Linux standards” is a ridiculous claim
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Then you need an Intel or AMD laptop as a frame of reference. M1 is implemented as-is with much of the silicon's onboard accelerators entirely dark. Hardware accelerated video encode/decode is a lost cause, Thunderbolt will likely never happen, NEON is your fastest SIMD accelerator and cpuidle is still not really figured out. Those are all perfectly acceptable limitations for a POC. And the GPU drivers are particularly well-made. But it doesn't really come close to how seriously AMD and Intel take Linux.
    - wtallis 1y ago
      There's a big difference between saying that many of the drivers are missing entirely, and saying that the drivers that exist are alpha-quality.
  - nicman23 1y ago
    my dude no. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#table-of-contents https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#tab... even in the m1 there are 4 WIP in the support table, 2 TBA and 10 non mainline boxes for the M1 pro
    - noname120 1y ago
      > Those that are implemented
  - neobrain 1y ago
    +1. Been running Asahi Linux for half a year now. Everything that's advertized as working is working great.
StillBored 1y ago
Asahi is also still a platform with a huge pile of out of tree patches on top because the platform itself is pretty unusual, requiring for example, a 16K page size kernel which is unlike pretty much every other arm Linux platform.

moondev 1y ago

Get a DGX spark. Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04. Tons of cores and RAM. Very quiet and small UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm edition just by booting the ISO usb-c power input (kinda cool) Insane connectx 200GbE RoCE networking 10GbE Ethernet Oh and an nvidia gpu with cuda and access to 128GB of unified memory It would be perfect if it had some kind of BMC or IPMI/redfish and an exposed PCIE slot. But this thing is an awesome arm64 workstation no doubt. May try to install to a USB drive and hang another gpu off the nvme port just to see what happens

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
didip 1y ago
Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?
- moondev 1y ago
  My microcenter has nvidia OEM flavor in stock. There are also flavors from all the other OEMs that differ slightly on cooling but mainly on chassis design.
Keyframe 1y ago
This might sound silly question, but those of you who have digits/spark machine, has anyone run Fedora on it? I kind of ran away from Ubuntu back to Fedora because reasons. Bonus question, far-fetched, steam and games with FEX?
- my123 1y ago
  Fedora boots ootb
- wtallis 1y ago
  Steam gaming with FEX is possible on the DGX Spark. The GPU is approximately a mobile 5070 with much less memory bandwidth. The CPU cores are relatively weak, especially after the instruction set translation overhead. There's a lot of stuff that's playable, but the performance is laughably bad for a $4000 machine.

imiric 1y ago

I don't think this changes the game as much as you think. AFAIU, the biggest challenge of running Linux on ARM machines is supporting the devicetree of each machine. After all, there is mainline kernel support for previous Qualcomm chips, yet very few machines with those chips can actually run Linux distros. So this is good news, but in practical terms it's just a marketing piece.