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

[tunnelblick]

Amazing progress from the team but this is pulled off by very good people who know what they do.
The documentation alone on how the hardware works is incredible and why I think porting Linux to an architecture is great for conservation as you can see how they work (ed).
I can see and understand why people don't like Apple but on x86 things aren't better at all and it seems Apple didn't only make a good ARM processor but also a lot of thought went into the whole platform.

[qarium]

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.

they failed on the server market with macos... they will not fail on the server market with linux as an OS,,,

[tunnelblick]

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.

The server market is a whole different beast and totally different to what they do now. Also there is no indication that they do something with Linux, at all. They are just not restrictive with their current approach but I've yet to see a single line of code in the kernel code from Apple, let alone starting a server business where they can sell their silicon for a premium like they do on consumer hardware.

[zcansi]

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

Yeah I feel like that was at least partially inspired by the WTF moment when it seemed like nVidia might buy ARM.

[Linuxxx]

Also there is no indication that they do something with Linux, at all.

Then why the hell are/were they looking to hire expensive Linux experts to join their ranks?

[Developer12]

A real gift would be GPU documentation.

Already past the point where they need it.

[Developer12]

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

most recently: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1504318434573979649

There was a thread way back when they were forced to introduce the race condition, but I think it was 2-3 months ago.

[Developer12]

where you read that?

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1504318434573979649

There was another thread 2-3 months ago when they were forced to introduce the awful race condition hack.

[Developer12]

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.

"Experimenting." Everyone right now is "experimenting" with RSIC-V.

RISC-V might as well not exist at all. There's barely any tooling, no high-performance systems, and zero ecosystem. It's basically where ARM was in the 90's, if even that, and will take the next decade to catch up. Even POWER9 is ahead in terms of "packages that actually build." For the foreseeable future RISC-V is going to be trapped in microcontrollers and cheap low-performance chinese SoCs.

Compare that to ARM. If there are two architectures on earth you can be sure someone's package targets it's 1. x86 and 2. ARM.

Apple have a full OS, a full system, and the whole wider ARM ecosystem out there too. They also have the absolute fastest ARM chip on earth.

They rival the best x86 chips in performance while drawing a fraction of the power. What they have is a blockbuster server chip on their hands. But to take advantage of that they need linux. Nobody will deploy real servers on macos.

[Developer12]

GPUs are easy to reverse engineer. The problem is finding someone 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.

She hasn't bricked it, but they do have a very competent gpu driver developer daily-driving one of these things who also happens to be the person developing the M1 gpu driver.