Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress

Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-M2-Linux-Starts

[anarki2]

Awesome news, keep them coming!

[rabcor]

While the M1 and M2 chips are quite impressive they're not really that impressive by themselves, they have possibly the best iGPU in the world, and they have the best performance per watt of any laptop cpu and gpu you'll ever find as well (unless possibly when competing against other ARM or RISC laptops) they're potentially the most desirable chips on the market for people who want power efficiency and things like good battery life.

What's really impressive about the whole thing is Rosetta, the x86_64 -> ARM compatibility layer. As far as I can tell linux has never had anything similar, even Wine still... in 2022... needs a separate prefix for 32 bit and 64 bit applications, and winetricks is still.... in 2022... broken for x64 prefixes because the feature to differentiate between a 32 bit and 64 bit prefix and install appropriate versions of stuff based on that is apparently too hard to implement.

Do we actaully have anything that could compare to rosetta? The ability to run x86 (soon to be called legacy) applications is rather critical in these early stages of adoption where we are clearlly gonna be transitioning away from x86 architecture (no matter how hard Intel and AMD are trying to delay it).

[Tomin]

Do we actaully have anything that could compare to rosetta? The ability to run x86 (soon to be called legacy) applications is rather critical in these early stages of adoption where we are clearlly gonna be transitioning away from x86 architecture (no matter how hard Intel and AMD are trying to delay it).

QEMU has had the capability for a long time. It's not as fast as Rosetta though AFAIK.

qemu-user-static(1)
List of qemu-user-static commands

[andrei_me]

Do we actaully have anything that could compare to rosetta?

FEX would be the closest thing that I recall as a performant x84 -> Aarch64 a la rosetta

https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX

[Dukenukemx]

Don't care. Apple sucks, ARM sucks, and the M1 and M2's suck the most. The issue I have is that Hector Martin who put Linux on the PS4, I think should have done the same for the PS5. More people would rather run Linux on a PS5 than run Linux on a Apple product. What Apple user is going to want to replace Mac OSX for Linux? Pretty sure that violates their religion or something.

[jacob]

Do we actaully have anything that could compare to rosetta? The ability to run x86 (soon to be called legacy) applications is rather critical in these early stages of adoption where we are clearlly gonna be transitioning away from x86 architecture (no matter how hard Intel and AMD are trying to delay it).

I don't think x86 will be called legacy anytime soon, there is still nothing even remotely competitive against it based on aarch64 for the desktop. Of course having something similar to rosetta would be nice, but on the other hand, in the open source ecosystem much more software will be available natively much sooner than with proprietary software like that on MacOS.

[direc85]

Rosetta on M1/M2 is so fast, because the hardware implements some extra x86-like instructions that are the hardest nd slowest to "emulate" using pure ARM instructions only.

[andrei_me]

What Apple user is going to want to replace Mac OSX for Linux? Pretty sure that violates their religion or something.

Agree with you in that I part, I see this effort in the other way around, a Linux user ended up receiving/using a Apple hardware and want a OS that allows you to own your hardware

[vladpetric]

While the M1 and M2 chips are quite impressive they're not really that impressive by themselves, they have possibly the best iGPU in the world, and they have the best performance per watt of any laptop cpu and gpu you'll ever find as well (unless possibly when competing against other ARM or RISC laptops) they're potentially the most desirable chips on the market for people who want power efficiency and things like good battery life.

What's really impressive about the whole thing is Rosetta, the x86_64 -> ARM compatibility layer. As far as I can tell linux has never had anything similar, even Wine still... in 2022... needs a separate prefix for 32 bit and 64 bit applications, and winetricks is still.... in 2022... broken for x64 prefixes because the feature to differentiate between a 32 bit and 64 bit prefix and install appropriate versions of stuff based on that is apparently too hard to implement.

Do we actaully have anything that could compare to rosetta? The ability to run x86 (soon to be called legacy) applications is rather critical in these early stages of adoption where we are clearlly gonna be transitioning away from x86 architecture (no matter how hard Intel and AMD are trying to delay it).

They are actually impressive by themselves.

The instruction set doesn't matter as much as the microarchitecture (which greatly affects the IPC, or how many instruction you can complete in a single cycle). And in terms of performance per Watt in the high end area (not wimpy processors) Apple M processors beat the crap out of the competition.

I typically recommend

https://www.google.com/search?q=hennessy+and+patterson+computer+architecture&oq=hennessy+and+patterson+computer+archit&aqs=chrome.0.0i512j69i57j0i22i30l2j0i390.3359j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Though I doubt people will read it ...