6 ms·

I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems

by JSR_FDED 4mo ago

amelius 4mo ago
[flagged]
- lopis 4mo ago
  These efforts will also save a lot of old macbooks from the landfill in the future.
- rbits 4mo ago
  What do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.
  - preisschild 4mo ago
    Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable. And I'm not even talking about drivers
    - bzzzt 4mo ago
      UEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development? It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.
      - preisschild 4mo ago
        You don't have to support "legacy stuff", just make sure a modern linux kernel can boot without apple-specific workarounds
        smith7018 4mo ago
        Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? Should they also ensure Windows and Android can boot on the hardware easily?
        outadoc 4mo ago
        > Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? To sell more hardware? Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. It's not like Apple needs this tiny market, but it wouldn't hurt them either.
        t-3 4mo ago
        > Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. Citation needed.
        wpm 4mo ago
        Apple still ships a copy of Boot Camp Assistant in macOS Tahoe. It was great to be able to dual boot on Intel Macs and licensing BS aside it would be nice to be able to boot Win11 ARM on an M1.
    - mschuster91 4mo ago
      > Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. In the x86 sphere it isn't that much better either, most ACPI tables are thoroughly broken if Linux announces itself as Linux and not as Windows. In fact, a lot of machines' ACPI tables barely work on Windows.
- smith7018 4mo ago
  These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something unsupported? Most of those cases were met with friction by the original OEM. If anything, Apple has been pretty laissez faire about the whole thing compared to Nintendo and Sony who will ban your console if you hack it.
  - bzzzt 4mo ago
    Those laptops don't need to go to any landfill. They are much too precious to not recycle the metals and other materials and will be taken care of if you return them to the manufacturer. (by law, at least in the EU)
    - dml2135 4mo ago
      Still, reuse > recycling
    - coldtea 4mo ago
      Recycling the metals is obviously far less useful than being able to still operate them even if Apple stops macOS updates for them!
- simonh 4mo ago
  marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585 For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon. >In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU. Also these comments are worth considering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377
  - amelius 4mo ago
    What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.
    - simonh 4mo ago
      >What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical. >Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door. >Wishful thinking if you ask me. If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?
- panick21_ 4mo ago
  Yeah should they design their own computer chips? And do literally everything need for such a platform. That is literally 10000x the effort. There is no change the same group of people could create such an open solution. Hardware is just much harder in so many ways and no comparable OpenPlatform exists.
bigyabai 4mo ago
Many of the problems aren't cracked whatsoever. For instance, Apple Silicon's PSCI power management interface is a mystery. PSCI code exists in other Linux devicetrees, but nobody knows how Apple implements theirs. So for the better half of a decade, Asahi users have relied on a hack to prevent their battery from draining constantly. We still don't have any prospective solutions, to my knowledge. This is the weal-and-woe of reverse engineering. It's awesome that these machines now have native Vulkan 1.2 drivers, but it took years to get there. There are still unsolved problems 7 years after Apple Silicon hit shelves, and most newer hardware is broadly unsupported. The lesson here is a reiteration of what Linux users have always said - proprietary drivers suck.
- AKSF_Ackermann 4mo ago
  Apple's PSCI interface is not a mystery, and there is perfect knowledge on how it is implemented. It isn't. Which is the actual problem, Linux wants PSCI, Apple platforms do not have it.
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    Case in point. Devicetree drivers make this much harder than ACPI (say what you will about ACPI) and there's no documentation that fills the gap.
- tacon 4mo ago
  Is this something like Fable can help with?
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    This is something that documentation would help with. Fable doesn't know anything that human engineers don't.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
nightshift1 4mo ago
This project is impressive but I wonder if those efforts would not have been better spent on an open platform that actually respects its users and that is less likely to kill the whole project on a whim. It seems like building a house on someone's else property.
- TingPing 4mo ago
  Almost no hardware is open anyway. Plus all of the hard problems have been solved on typical pc hardware.
- cavoirom 4mo ago
  I use MacBook anyway, this project brings open platform to my MacBook, I'm happy with that. I guess many people have the same situation like me. I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
  - ActorNightly 4mo ago
    >I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook. Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there. I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?
    - AKSF_Ackermann 4mo ago
      Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.

I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems

amelius 4mo ago

[flagged]

lopis 4mo ago
These efforts will also save a lot of old macbooks from the landfill in the future.
rbits 4mo ago
What do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.
- preisschild 4mo ago
  Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable. And I'm not even talking about drivers
  - bzzzt 4mo ago
    UEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development? It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.
    - preisschild 4mo ago
      You don't have to support "legacy stuff", just make sure a modern linux kernel can boot without apple-specific workarounds
      - smith7018 4mo ago
        Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? Should they also ensure Windows and Android can boot on the hardware easily?
        outadoc 4mo ago
        > Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? To sell more hardware? Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. It's not like Apple needs this tiny market, but it wouldn't hurt them either.
        t-3 4mo ago
        > Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. Citation needed.
        wpm 4mo ago
        Apple still ships a copy of Boot Camp Assistant in macOS Tahoe. It was great to be able to dual boot on Intel Macs and licensing BS aside it would be nice to be able to boot Win11 ARM on an M1.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    > Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. In the x86 sphere it isn't that much better either, most ACPI tables are thoroughly broken if Linux announces itself as Linux and not as Windows. In fact, a lot of machines' ACPI tables barely work on Windows.
smith7018 4mo ago
These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something unsupported? Most of those cases were met with friction by the original OEM. If anything, Apple has been pretty laissez faire about the whole thing compared to Nintendo and Sony who will ban your console if you hack it.
- bzzzt 4mo ago
  Those laptops don't need to go to any landfill. They are much too precious to not recycle the metals and other materials and will be taken care of if you return them to the manufacturer. (by law, at least in the EU)
  - dml2135 4mo ago
    Still, reuse > recycling
  - coldtea 4mo ago
    Recycling the metals is obviously far less useful than being able to still operate them even if Apple stops macOS updates for them!
simonh 4mo ago
marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585 For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon. >In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU. Also these comments are worth considering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377
- amelius 4mo ago
  What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.
  - simonh 4mo ago
    >What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical. >Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door. >Wishful thinking if you ask me. If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?
panick21_ 4mo ago
Yeah should they design their own computer chips? And do literally everything need for such a platform. That is literally 10000x the effort. There is no change the same group of people could create such an open solution. Hardware is just much harder in so many ways and no comparable OpenPlatform exists.

bigyabai 4mo ago

Many of the problems aren't cracked whatsoever. For instance, Apple Silicon's PSCI power management interface is a mystery. PSCI code exists in other Linux devicetrees, but nobody knows how Apple implements theirs. So for the better half of a decade, Asahi users have relied on a hack to prevent their battery from draining constantly. We still don't have any prospective solutions, to my knowledge. This is the weal-and-woe of reverse engineering. It's awesome that these machines now have native Vulkan 1.2 drivers, but it took years to get there. There are still unsolved problems 7 years after Apple Silicon hit shelves, and most newer hardware is broadly unsupported. The lesson here is a reiteration of what Linux users have always said - proprietary drivers suck.

AKSF_Ackermann 4mo ago
Apple's PSCI interface is not a mystery, and there is perfect knowledge on how it is implemented. It isn't. Which is the actual problem, Linux wants PSCI, Apple platforms do not have it.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  Case in point. Devicetree drivers make this much harder than ACPI (say what you will about ACPI) and there's no documentation that fills the gap.
tacon 4mo ago
Is this something like Fable can help with?
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  This is something that documentation would help with. Fable doesn't know anything that human engineers don't.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

nightshift1 4mo ago

This project is impressive but I wonder if those efforts would not have been better spent on an open platform that actually respects its users and that is less likely to kill the whole project on a whim. It seems like building a house on someone's else property.

TingPing 4mo ago
Almost no hardware is open anyway. Plus all of the hard problems have been solved on typical pc hardware.
cavoirom 4mo ago
I use MacBook anyway, this project brings open platform to my MacBook, I'm happy with that. I guess many people have the same situation like me. I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
- ActorNightly 4mo ago
  >I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook. Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there. I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?
  - AKSF_Ackermann 4mo ago
    Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.