Asahi Linux Issues First Alpha Release For Running Linux On Apple Silicon

[partcyborg]

GPUs are easy to reverse engineer. The problem is finding someon with the time, interest, and ability to write a driver.

The best way to make one of those appear is to have someone with an M1 machine as their only computer who bricked their macOS install but really wants to play 3D games on it.

No, that wouldn't work at all, and simply is just not how successful reverse engineering projects work. You have to be able to interact with functioning hardware to understand how things work. In fact, from my understang much of this work wouldnt have been possible without some custom virtualization software that allowed things like monitoring of things like pci bus traffic

[intelfx]

This alpha, made possible in part by apple's engineers gifting the team a fix for the one part of the asahi installer process that required a hacky race condition.

Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

Sounds like an interesting story. Did marcan write about it somewhere?

[Britoid]

A real gift would be GPU documentation.

Apple likely won't, they have no commercial incentive to release it and they just don't care.

They won't block Asahi Linux and dual booting though, because for now locking down Macs and macOS like that doesn't do much for them.

That said, it's been wildly rumoured and likely true that the Apple silicon team uses Linux to test Apple silicon, because waiting for the Darwin team to add support and makes changes takes too long. This won't be open sourced or released though and is likely not even in a state that can be merged into the kernel.

[andre30correia]

This alpha, made possible in part by apple's engineers gifting the team a fix for the one part of the asahi installer process that required a hacky race condition.

Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

where you read that?

[bobbie424242]

Running Linux baremetal on Apple Silicon may be 90% there in 5 years if lucky, make 95% in 10 years if super lucky. The last 5% however will never be reached and it will always be second rate compared to macOS.
You just don't buy Apple hardware to run Linux baremetal on it: it doesn't make sense.

[miskol]

We want some benchmarks

[qarium]

This alpha, made possible in part by apple's engineers gifting the team a fix for the one part of the asahi installer process that required a hacky race condition.
Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

right for me it looks like apple want to enter the linux market wiŧh their hardware.

remember apple is not very strong in the server market if apple could sell high price servers with linux support they could win a lot.

[Vistaus]

right for me it looks like apple want to enter the linux market wiŧh their hardware.

remember apple is not very strong in the server market if apple could sell high price servers with linux support they could win a lot.

They stripped their server offerings, even on the software side not much is left of their server software, so I highly doubt they want to go back to that market. That's like saying LG will be coming back to the smartphone market.

[Vistaus]

It's quite clear by now that apple has important plans and goals for linux on M1 silicon.

I'm not so sure about that, as Apple is also experimenting with RISC-V, so maybe ARM is just a stop-gap for now.

[hyperchaotic]

I'm not so sure about that, as Apple is also experimenting with RISC-V, so maybe ARM is just a stop-gap for now.

I don't think they see ARM as a stop gap but staying current on RISC-V is a smart insurance policy.