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Initial Patches Posted For Bringing Up The Linux Kernel On Apple Silicon M1 Hardware
Still being worked on is the DeviceTree portion, other driver support for different components on these new Apple Macs, and related bits. Those initial RFC patches for the Linux kernel can be found via lore.kernel.org.
Why the heck is there still a need to expose the DeviceTree? Does Apple not use UEFI as the boot firmware for the M1 Macs?
ARM SystemReady specifications specifically dictates that SR systems must not expose or require a DeviceTree binary.
Thank you so much for posting this link! I watched for about 20 minutes over lunch today as he brought up initramfs! If I was 20 again, I'd be all in on ARM and helping Marcan with this...
No GPU, no WiFi, no support for any acceleration hardware, does not impress me. There is a very long road ahead.
GPU works, you see the pixels on the display, WiFi/LAN via an USB dongle - for now. It's important to have a working starting point so people (not only authors of these M1-Linux projects) can contribute themselves. That requires a full graphical system with internet (so you don't need a second device and transfer updated files manually after each build). This will allow more hobbyist to accelerate the development.
EDIT: I see in another post here someone already started to use the GPU acceleration - programming the fragment shader (modern GPUs, especially iGPUs, are mostly just a fragment shader - vertex processing is via SIMD instructions on the CPU and there's a separate silicon in the SoC for video codecs etc.).
No GPU, no WiFi, no support for any acceleration hardware, does not impress me. There is a very long road ahead.
Of course there is, but although Apple hasn't locked Linux, Windows or (presumably) anyone or anything else out of M1, they also haven't, to my knowledge, given anyone any help. So even although what you say is true, what's happened so far has been faster than I expected, and I'm still impressed.
Yes changing the payload of the bootloader was way faster than expected, but also Apple can change the bootloader like they want and all effort can be ruined in one update.
That there is no restriction now does not mean this will always be the case.
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