That's a super cynical way of looking at it. What I see is a triumph in the very hacker ethos of being able to reverse engineer these drivers. The team is even fixing bugs and will likely get better performance out of the hardware than can be found on MacOS when it's all said and done. And all of this is done without specs.
What's more cynical is that these hackers are helping Apple to eliminate the competition, and when that happens they'll put another layer of crypto on everything and the hackers and other developers have no platform left to work on without paying 90% Apple taxes.
> > What's more cynical is that these hackers are helping Apple to eliminate the competition [...]
> Nonsense premise.
Take Brew and any container runtime away from all developer's laptops. See how useful they are for development when compared to the more open competition.
Err, the premise is that Linux tech and effort is improving the appeal of Apple products, which hurts the more open, Linux-friendly competition. Look at the rest of this thread comparing MacBooks to other options. My point is that a MacBook without the free work by these hackers/tech would be a paperweight for development and the Linux-friendly options would get more business. Your retort of "take Linux tech away from Linux" doesn't make any sense.
Apple is entirely comfortable with using crypto to lock down its platforms when the competition is dead and users are left with no other choice.
Apple locking down their platform is their prerogative. If it comes to that and the Asahi team cannot continue their reverse-engineering efforts then they'll stop.
Consider why they began in the first place. The M1 and their subsequent M2 and future chips are amazing. The M1 was such a huge leap in performance per watt that it wow'd everyone. In fact it's a huge testament to the hardware team at Apple for creating such an amazing bit of kit that a team of Linux hackers wanted to work on porting Linux to it. This rebellious striving for freedom is refreshing and amazing. They're going to get Linux working on the M1/2... hardware working under Linux and it'll be even more performant than under MacOS. That's huge.
But now folks are saying why Apple? Because nobody has a chip that rivals the M1. Why would you settle for worse performance? Why would you settle for build quality from a lesser hardware manufacturer? Qualcomm and others don't have chips that are as performant. They might in the future but by then the M3 or M4 will likely be out.
Why are we punishing hackers -- in teh purest sense of the word -- for opening up a platform that is superior (hardware wise) to any of the other offerings from all the other deep pocketed ARM laptop/desktop manufacturers? Oh, right, because of tribal hate of Apple. Smh.
If the other manufacturers get off their butts and pour billions into chip design and process and can get laptops out with similar or better performance characteristics then perhaps other teams will attempt what Asahi is doing, and if these same manufacturers wanted to release the specs or work with the upstream Linux community and release drivers themselves that'd be even better. Until then I will continue to support the Asahi team and champion their efforts in every ear that will hear me because I am just so astounded by what they've accomplished so far.
I say all of this as a former Apple-stan. I had macbooks every year since college until now. That's some 15 years. I've since gone full time on Fedora and Thinkpads (currently a P14s but maybe an X1 Carbon in the future).
Edit: I don't think there will be a huge wave of sales because of this for Apple but it will mean that i can get a used M1 and run my favorite distro of Linux because the Asahi team is working with upstream to get their changes up-streamed -- they're amazing like that. It really is how open source work thrives.
Apple produces consumer hardware. You can't build anything hardware-wise using the M1 or M2 processors. There are hackers and startups who love to build new hardware. They now see Apple buying entire supply chains and dominating the market. If this continues, then after a while these hackers will not be able to fully depend on technological progress because it will all be locked up.
There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. The M1 and M2 chips are proprietary to Apple and so be it; the Asahi folks are allowing us to run Linux on them at full acceleration. What’s not to love?
It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node.
> Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines.
There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.
> What’s not to love?
You sound like the people preaching the Nouveau drivers right now. "we reverse-engineered this proprietary GPU and got it working at 50% speed and 3x power consumption, what's not to love?"
Nvidia's first-party drivers are far-and-away the more popular (and faster, more power-efficent, more well-supported, etc.) option. What's "not to love" is the fact that we're cheering for someone doing thankless and redundant work that wouldn't exist if the multi-billion dollar corporation dedicated a couple engineers to Linux support. You can't even consistently control the brightness on these machines more than a year after they've launched, it's obvious that there are significant problems WRT reverse-engineering the hardware.
“ > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm...
It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node.
> Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines.
There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.”
AMD and Nvidia and Apple are going to be buying from the new plant.
Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company.
Given what is possible and what’s possible is what you can control and what you can control is what you do, so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened. What’s easier? Getting apple to make like Intel and have a Linux division? Haha. So they took it upon themselves and that effort is laudable nay it’s worthy of lots of praise. Heaps of it.
The Noveau argument is a false flag. Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side.
I just don’t understand what people want? Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. Instead people would rather whine and moan or write apology pieces about hardware that sucks in comparison.
Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. Give me a 14 inch MacBook Pro with 32GB or ram and Asahi Linux any day of the week.
> Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company.
ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to pay ARM money. It's literally their entire business model, I'm not sure how you could miss it.
> so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened
Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple has the proper implementation specs available internally. It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple engineers.
> Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side.
That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can have that, on any recent Nvidia card.
> Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on.
They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on these machines, not because they're incapable of it but because Apple never documented the control interface for each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it from the community because of how horribly sensitive it is. Real security issue, yunno.
It's really tragic to consider all the engineering hours lost trying to figure out how Apple's hardware works. It's been 2 years since the M1 was released and it still doesn't have the same level of Linux support as a HP or Lenovo machine would have on Day-1.
> I just don’t understand what people want
A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't suck.
> Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison.
And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point, though.
"> Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company.
ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to pay ARM money. It's literally their entire business model, I'm not sure how you could miss it."
What did I miss? Show up, pay the license, build chips. That's the business model. Are you upset about how business models work? Are you advocating all hardware ISAs be open a la RISCV? That's insane. ARM's whole model is to make money and to do so they'd welcome licensees.
"> so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened
Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple has the proper implementation specs available internally. It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple engineers."
Do you have this same take on the Homebrew project and its many competitors? One could make the same argument that Apple should run their own package manager. Why allow some third party project to add value to the system by allowing end users to be able to run open source software easily on Apple hardware and software? I find this line of reasoning nonsensical.
"> Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side.
That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can have that, on any recent Nvidia card."
Nvidia is finally working on first party open source-ish drivers. So that's a win I guess. But that's only because the IP owner -- Nvidia -- deemed it necessary to do so. I am not sure what army of Stallman-stans you command but I am not sure Nvidia or Apple or any other enterprise is going to bend to some FOSS ideal. So given that very real reality intrepid hackers like the Asahi folks took it upon themselves to reverse engineer the hardware and it has been a win for Linux/BSD enthusiasts the world over, how is this bad?
"> Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on.
They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on these machines, not because they're incapable of it but because Apple never documented the control interface for each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it from the community because of how horribly sensitive it is. Real security issue, yunno."
Smart hackers -- again, in the truest sense of the word -- chose to spend their time doing this. In fact Hector Martin when he embarked on this asked for donations and plenty of folks are donating with their cash to fund this effort. There's clearly a market for this. It's not the fault of Martin or his friends in the Asahi world that Apple doesn't see this. And Apple may never see it. So what? The Asahi team will have brought the ability to run Linux to the M1 and increased the choice amongst Linux enthusiasts, it's a huge win.
"> I just don’t understand what people want
A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't suck."
If Apple isn't going to give that to you as we just settled above (unless you want to buy a few board seats, or march on Cupterino with some sort of army...) then how else is that going to get accomplished if not by the Asahi team?
"> Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison.
And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point, though."
While not 100% easy people have been running Linux on x86 Macbooks for a long time. Not sure what you're getting at here.
> While not 100% easy people have been running Linux on x86 Macbooks for a long time. Not sure what you're getting at here.
Linux support on x86 MacBooks was pretty bad for recent models, and moved along really slowly compared to Asahi. There was definitely less interest in those porting efforts.
Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in the CPU space, and Apple being closed about everything isn't helping. If you want to see open, have a look at Microsoft Research. Apple is nowhere near that. FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support them.
“ Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in the CPU space,”
Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up. Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it’s paid off. Why should they “help” the industry out when they’re so far ahead?
They also have no incentive to spend billions on R&D only to open it up to competition. That makes no sense. They’re not a platform like Microsoft is. MS wants an open platform hardware wise so they can sell more licenses of Windows. They’re different business models. Surely you see that?
“ FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support them.”
Of course. And nowhere was I saying “FOSS” folks to support them just celebrate the work of your fellow hackers doing the equivalent of reverse engineering some Empire tech for the Rebellion. Does that metaphor work for you?
And now it's Apple's turn to fuck up. The M2 isn't even 20% faster than the M1, it's like a Skylake situation all over again.
> Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it’s paid off.
Apple bet big on the 5nm node (bought the exclusive rights to use it) and it paid off. Your marketing copywriting doesn't mean anything if you don't back it up with evidence.
> They’re different business models. Surely you see that?
They both make hardware. Shouldn't they both get held to the same standards, to encourage healthy competition? They certainly have the financial means to do it.
I think your technical perspective on this situation is horribly maligned, you should spend more time researching the technologies Apple used rather than repeating the words from their announcement event.
And those would be...? Keep in mind absolutely everything in life has downsides, so listing only minor things is for all intents and purposes, worthless.
they could ... but doing so would likely cost far too many billions even for Apple. Maybe they could justify it by saying instead of paying AWS and GCP and Azure for services they could just do it all in house on Apple hardware -- and boy howdy that'd be really cool -- I don't think they REALLY think that is a useful use of their time and resources and would rather instead focus on devices and services.
Someone working on the re effort mentioned how Apple runs their own testing on those machines on Linux while macos support is being developed. I don't know where they got the information from. (It was posted on Twitter, but can't dig out the link now)
I don't think the grandparent is saying that people are wasting their time; they're saying that it's a shame that they even have to do this, and that public hardware documentation isn't the norm.
