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The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
- __patchbit__ 4mo agoCan the ThinkPad T14 ARM Snapdragon variant function without pain as a daily Linux/BSD driver?
- shevy-java 4mo agoWithout pain? I mean, there is pain when using Linux. It just works better than, say, Windows.
- hparadiz 4mo agoI just setup Gentoo on a Lenovo laptop last week. It was the least painful process for a Linux laptop of my entire career. Everything just works. Even sleep and the fingerprint sensor for sudo. LLM tuis replaced Google entirely. I can't even say there was any pain whatsoever. The experience is now more akin to MacOS circa 10.6.x years.
- sedatk 4mo agoSnapdragon has excellent single-thread performance (unlike Ampere) if that’s what you’re asking.
- izacus 4mo agoNo. The driver support is very poor and won't run at all well. Even. Setting it up is a pain: https://github.com/Jeremiah-Hawley/Linux-on-Snapdragon https://github.com/Jeremiah-Hawley/Linux-on-Snapdragon It can run Windows well though.
- bpye 4mo agoWhen I looked at this before I found https://github.com/kuruczgy/x1e-nixos-config https://github.com/kuruczgy/x1e-nixos-config - reasonable though not 100% support. I believe Ubuntu also has semi official X1 elite support, no idea if they're working on the latest generation.
- neobrain 4mo agoUnlikely. I've been daily-driving the predecessor (X13s). While it's usable and technically all drivers are there, it's far from "without pain" due to endless number of small but annoying quirks. Just to give you an idea: boot fails 4 out of 5 times, external displays aren't recognized unless plugged in/out several times, sporadic resets during overnight sleep, etc. On top of that speakers will sound prohibitively tinny due unimplemented software-side speaker protection. I haven't tried T14s, but at least the audio issues will still apply there. Apple devices supported by Asahi are a far more polished experience.
- M95D 4mo ago> software-side speaker protection What's that?
- neobrain 4mo agoSee https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/#speakers https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/#speakers The effect is understated there, perhaps because Apple speakers are actually somewhat usable without this feature. For the X13s, the speakers might as well not exist in the current state on Linux.
- M95D 4mo agoComplexity in the name of cost cutting. A hardware power limiter based on temperature would cost... $1? A thermal pipe from speakers to case acting as a radiator would be... $5?
- jordand 4mo agoQualcomm are slowly but steadily improving Linux support for the X1/X2 Snapdragon CPUs (such as the qcom-hamoa-ec driver in 7.2), so it's still a wait. I think there's some challenges with Secure Boot and the firmware with these Lenovo devices though.
- shevy-java 4mo agoThe Desktop Linux will take over from here guys. Next year it will be ready, together with GNU Hurd for everyone and their Grandma.
- mort96 4mo agoHas anyone ever pretended that (non-Apple) ARM hardware running Linux makes for a remotely suitable desktop experience for the general public or are you shadow boxing here?
- HerbManic 4mo agoI'm not surprised at the outcome. These Ampere system single core/thread performance is pretty low and that is where you feel it. The OS/software simply cannot allocate the threads across enough cores effectively to make up for this difference. This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, they have single thread performance exactly were it is needed. Maybe we will need 80 cores in future, that is cool but for daily home use it is still just way too much for what we need.
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoApple M series is also aarch64 architecture, isn't it? Could you explain more why you expect Ampere to be slow but M series to be fast?
- rwmj 4mo agoApple design their own Arm-compatible cores from scratch. Ampere use a modified Arm Neoverse N1 core. In addition, the Ampere server that Marcin is using is about 6 years old, and would have been tuned for core count over single thread performance (good for web serving). Basically Arm's own cores aren't nearly as good as Apple's at the best of times, and having a 6 year old server makes things even worse.
- dzaima 4mo agoAmpere Altra is for cloud/datacenters/servers where multithreaded throughput is approximately all that matters. Apple M series is for consumers.
- jdub 4mo agoBecause they're designed for different things. Ampere's primary focus is running lots of simple tasks concurrently, at relatively low power, with lots of I/O. So, many tens to hundreds of cores, not too fast, at lower power draw than amd64, with lots of PCIe lanes for storage and network. Apple's primary focus is user experience and power efficiency. That's why you'll find a handful of fast performance cores and low power efficiency cores, along with graphics acceleration to drive high resolution displays.
- anthonj 4mo agoI see the problem, but I don't see a clear analysis on the actual source of the problem. I assumed the issue was mainly single core performance, but he is also suggesting context switches could be the cause? So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores. My naive view is that such high core count system comes with tradoff on core size and interconnect/memeory bus complexity. And I mean.. my phone is a middle lower end device and for sure I can play youtube videos (maybe in a popup as well) and run the browser without noticing that much difference from my laptop.
- KaiserPro 4mo agoI think the single core performance would be bearable if it wasn't combined with maintaining a custom built kernel.
- NavinF 4mo agoI don't think youtube playback is a relevant comparison since it uses ~0 CPU. Pretty much all phones have hardware accelerated decoding. Lots of TVs and streaming devices use an ancient Android phone SoC yet they too can play YT and run a browser. The entire UI is often a local web app.
- anthonj 4mo agoI imagine, be he mentions video playback on youtube making things worse, and he does have a dedicated amd gpu. But iirc for both Firefox and chromium on Linux desktop hw acceleration is tricky so maybe it's that.
- NavinF 4mo agoYes anything GPU related other than CUDA is a shit show on Linux desktop. Another issue is that YT loves to use AV1 if they know you're on desktop. Almost all desktop users have a CPU powerful enough to software decode it in realtime, but if you're on a prebuilt PC you'll definitely notice the fans kick in
- rvz 4mo agoThe AArch64 desktop experiment started in 2020 with the Macbook M1 and it ended in 2026 with great success with Apple phasing out support for Intel. It is called Apple Silicon.
- preisschild 4mo agoWhich is somewhat useless because it doesn't properly support ACPI/UEFI so that you can boot other operating systems
- boxed 4mo agoLinux on apple silicon is a thing though: https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/
- preisschild 4mo agoTrue, but they had to implement their own bootloader chain and because of such overhead they need a lot of effort to port to each new apple SoC generation
- boxed 4mo agoOk.. and? That's job someone has already done, so what does it matter? From what I've understood there's significant backwards compatibility for the new SoCs, so the significant work they need to do is to support new features, not getting things running.
- dezgeg 4mo agoThat is the reality for huge amount of ARM powered hardware, unless you fancy running vendor forks of kernel, u-boot, etc.
- preisschild 4mo agoTrue, but not for all arm powered hardware. Especially the more expansive ones. The ampere altra based boards for example do support booting an uefi iso just like on amd64 PCs. Look out for Systemready
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoI use a DGX Spark every day as my daily driver and it's great. I barely use the "AI" facilities of it, but as an Aarch64 desktop Linux, I have no complaints.
- anthonj 4mo agoWell it's also more than double the price
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoIt wasn't super badly priced when I bought it back in December. It was high, but not insane. It's memory and storage prices that have spiked it. Remember the thing has 128GB of RAM. If you spec a Mac out with the same quantity, it will be in the same price range. Certainly way cheaper than a Ampere system like the author here is talking about. I actually looked into building such a system and ... it feels weird to gripe about DGX Spark prices when building out a system like that. The Altra requires ECC RAM (though DDR4 at least). Have fun kitting that out. Those systems were built for highly highly concurrent multicore server (or some workstation) loads. Meant to be carved up into multiple virtual machines, really. I have plenty of applications that would do well on a machine like that, but playing YouTube videos etc is not one of them.
- anthonj 4mo agoAhh that's true, I forgot how badly prices are raising
- aj_hackman 4mo agoI'm glad I'm not the only weirdo like this. I dropped an unfathomable $800 on a Jetson AGX Xavier in early 2020 simply because I was obsessed with SBCs at the time and couldn't stop thinking about it. This was before the Raspberry/Orange Pi 5 and Apple Silicon. I still use it as a graphics development workstation.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
- edg5000 4mo ago> there was no org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia in Flatpak repositories for AArch64 All he had to do was build some packages from source, right? It's really worth learning how to do this, since it removes a lot of constraints. And the kernel patch should land in the kernel pretty soon, I hope? He won't have to run a patched kernel forever. Should be possible to get that in a release in a year or so?
- jsnell 4mo agoI don't know if it's your intent, but that reads really condescending. It's obvious the author knows how to build packages from source. They're working professionally for a Linux distro on arch support! But that was several layers deep into yak shaving broken graphics, and at some point you need to actually get your real work done.
- edg5000 4mo agoThat he ran into blockers with the exotic setup is understandable. After overcoming a bunch of challenges, I was surprised to read that the missing Flatpak package stopped him in his tracks, that felt surprising when I read it. It feels like a lesser challenge than the issues he has already addressed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago> at some point you need to actually get your real work done I guess my impression was that in this case the yak shaving was the real work, or at least a part of it? If you're trying to make ARM support fully work in your distro, then daily-driving it and dealing with these things is how you get there. Granted, if that's not the goal and they were just having fun by using an ARM box, that's fair.
- fragmede 4mo agoFascinating! I've been running the laptop version-ish of this experiment with the 14M9610, and my major complaint is Device Tree sucks. It's been explained to me why all of ARM can't just enumerate devices like PCs do, but it still sucks. This means every ARM device starts off in custom kernel territory, which makes all sorts of hacks okay to begin with, since you need a custom kernel anyway.
- bpye 4mo agoACPI does exist for Aarch64, but is only really used for Windows client devices, and server hardware - though I think the Ampere hardware in the article would use ACPI not DT. If you want to run Linux on one of the modern Qualcomm Windows laptops, you still generally end up needing to use device tree.
- bestouff 4mo agoThis is not completely true. You can use a generic kernel with a custom device tree. The only problem is that distributions currently tend to package them together, but that shouldn't be obligatory.
- dezgeg 4mo agoYou can't if the firmware provided DTB doesn't follow any upstream Linux approved bindings and instead uses some vendor kernel specific bindings.
- M95D 4mo ago
- dn3500 4mo agoI don't understand the kernel problem. Why did he feel he had to rebuild the kernel weekly? When the amdgpu stopped working why couldn't he just go back to the last working kernel?
- nevi-me 4mo agoI presumed that as a kernel developer, he would run the kernel he runs, which would require rebuilding periodically. Daily doesn't make sense, monthly is too infrequent given the rate of change in the kernel. My speculation though. When I was building an app I was using, I used to run a recent stable build on my device instead of just the one released in the Play Store. Simplifies having to keep multiple devices.
- M95D 4mo agoHe said he needed patches to make the GPUs work. Kernel package auto-updated does not have those patches and overwrites the custom kernel he built every time there was an update available.
- ginko 4mo agoI wonder if a source-based distro like Gentoo would have made OP's life slightly easier. Portage for instance should allow you to maintain a set of patches to automatically apply when you update your kernel. Those flatpak problems also shouldn't exist there.
- lonelyasacloud 4mo agoAt very least it would have given all those cores something to do :-)
- 10000truths 4mo agoI'm not sure why the author didn't attempt to dive deeper into the error message he saw. amd_vcn_dec sounds like it's an issue with the GPU's video decoding logic. If there's a timeout when trying to process a decode request, it may be that power management for the GPU is buggy somehow. Given that this is a server build and idle power consumption is likely not a big deal, I'd suggest pinning the GPU power state to see if it resolves the issue (see amdgpu.ppfeaturemask and amdgpu.runpm kernel parameters).
- bayindirh 4mo agoI believe something I call "the window phenomenon" has occurred. Sometimes, life allows you have the time to do these big experiments on your life and then it gets busy again and you can't dive into it with the same capacity, so you have to do what you have to do while surviving what you have at hand. I have gone through many patches like this, and I believe he had to handle life while is experimental workstation had to limp through. Then when he had the time, he had just pulled the plug.
- vk5tu 4mo agoI designed and built my own DSL router: component selection, PCB design, and so on. When NBN upgraded the link to my home I simply went and bought a 10Gbps ethernet router. Despite any compact PC with SFP+ cages doing the same job more cheaply. Exactly because the window of time I had for fooling with home networking had closed.
- bayindirh 4mo agoSame here, I was digging a bug in TrueNAS. I traced the bug, dug the code up, isolated it and let people know. Before doing the detailed bug report, life happened. At least the code is there, info is there and other people are picking up the flag where I left. This is how I comfort myself. At least I was able to push the process a little further.
- john_alan 4mo agoI’ve been using ARM Debian desktop stably for a long time. I don’t see what the issue is, am I missing something or is this just his hardware choice?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo agoLargely hardware-specific problems, yes, which is typical for ARM in my experience. Although, I would argue that > It turned out that there was no org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia in Flatpak repositories for AArch64. And I used both of those tools quite often. is more on the side of being a software problem... with this particular hardware.
- dlahoda 4mo agohe does not mention AI usage. how it helped to solve problems and search over git sources. intresting what he would achieve mixing nixos and ai for patches.
- bayindirh 4mo agoAI will be more harmful than helpful than a very big and unexplored (for them) codebase for them. Moreover, playing with code which fiddles with hardware directly is neither simple, nor easy, nor fun.
- dlahoda 4mo agoBig is what AI good at. What exactly codebase is unexplored in article? Patches? Just load them in context. Linux is already in model as well as nix and hardware specs. AI is good in search and playing(constrained synthesis) over hardware, Linux and configurations specs. Not fun thing.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo agoI would like to take a moment for this line: > The “wooster” system stays powered on, churning through RISC-V package builds. It may be weak in single-thread, but it flies when it comes to multi-core load. Feels vaguely hilarious that the ARM box didn't work out as a desktop, so instead it gets repurposed to cross-compiling RISC-V packages:)
- kjellsbells 4mo agoI feel that OP should be congratulated on trying! I dont see this experiment as any kind of "failure". Something was learned, and OP is better off for it. Computing and science literature would be a lot better off if people, like OP, honestly documented where things went wrong.
- mattbaconz 4mo ago[dead]
- st3fan 4mo agoMy ARM64 experiment started in 2020 with the MacBook Air M1 and I have not looked back. ARM on the desktop or your lap is possible.
- brucejackson 4mo ago[flagged]