It was a nice time for me to learn Linux, compile kernels, install Gentoo. For me this was about 2004 btw.
Ok, this is pretty next level and way cooler than what I did, but my point is that people at this age are not to be underestimated, they are smart AND have resource ;) (Note that I'm also not claiming that this is what is happening here, but it could be).
(Congrats to Alyssa and everyone making this possible!)
Well, from what I've heard regarding the frontal cortex, adult decision making is fully crystallized on average around age 25. So it kind of makes sense why on average society these days doesn't trust kids with important stuff.
Though, you know, statistics. There are outliers :-)
The obvious issue is to pay someone to do the work, and I am, but I still can’t shake the fear.
They know very well how they became so big. It was in the early 2000's, because they had the support of many developers.
Additionally, M1 is currently best? platform when comparing performance with power usage, and (at least MBA) comes in a great form factor. AFAIK there is no comparable device that has decent support for Linux.
> I’m so worried this project will get 95% of the way there, and then all the fun issues will run out and the M1 will be just another MacBook with WiFi, Bluetooth and sleep issues.
No one cared that the old G3/G4 Macbooks couldn't run "X" at the time they were released.
AMD is also working on an Arm with RDNA2. I'm more excited about that chip than the M1 as it will be inside of more machines than the M1, even if outperformed by the M1. The M1 is boring as it just comes glued inside of Apple hardware that I have no interest in.
> The obvious issue is to pay someone to do the work, and I am, but I still can’t shake the fear.
If you want the M1 opened because you already bought one hoping it would become open then you counted your chickens before they hatched. The anxiety is your own fault.
AMD GPU on ARM is also likely going to be a good but since that RDNA2 is going to paired up with a Samsung CPU it's not as compelling as Samsung CPU's are not close to the M1 CPU. So far the rumours suggest RDNA2 is coming to Samsung phones. I don't about you but that's hardly exciting. For me to interested about RDNA2 on ARM it needs to come on laptop with a great CPU as well.
You are right to be worried. Getting all the nitty-gritty details about modern hardware without access to documentation is impossible. In the end this will somewhat work but will almost certainly have worse performance than MacOS with higher energy usage and be otherwise rough around the edges (like sleep problems, lack of support for fingerprint scanner and other issues typical to hardware that are not directly supported to run Linux by the vendor).
> The obvious issue is to pay someone to do the work, and I am, but I still can’t shake the fear.
I don't think just paying someone is going to help unless Apple provides documentation (which they won't do).
Fundamentally like many engineering things, it's a Pareto principle thing. You can have a "basically working" device but it's a surprising amount of (potentially dull) work to get every last thing working properly.
This is true for almost any random laptop, and has been since forever.
Its obvious the M1 and its successors have a chance of becoming a well known constant since its a SoC, and not a collection of random components from many vendors (that might or might not have good inline-Linux driver). Intel Macs, other laptops have had different hardware components even for the same model over its lifetime.
Not this old trope again.
I haven’t had WiFi and sleep issues with Linux for at least a decade (I don’t use Bluetooth on laptops so can’t comment there). And I do use random laptops, including MBPs.
People seem to hold on to the same old arguments about Linux that were true back when XP was released but things have unsurprisingly moved on since then.
For sone random hp or whatever crappy netbook maybe yes, but you can’t compare a MacBook to that. There are good laptops that don’t have those problems, I haven’t run into any issues with my Thinkpad.
Sounds like you’re already onboard, so this comment isn’t for you. For those who don’t know, you can donate to this project directly. Please sign up if you want to see this project succeed. I’m not affiliated, just a fan of the work.
Wi-Fi, well, it's still Broadcom. It's gonna work as well as it does on Intel macs.
Considering that the GPU is completely properietary, without specs, and only used in a couple models, it's highly unlikely you'll ever see any driver in a working state for it. I mean, etnaviv and the like do exist, but it's definitely NOT in the same state as say intel or amd.
And if there's any type of roadblock (say signed firmware like nvidia) then goodbye.
Your "highly unlikely" is my "I'm aiming for an accelerated desktop by the end of the year" ;)
* you know how to make HTTP requests (you know how to use I2C or PCI or ...)
* you know roughly what an SMTP-as-a-service should do (you know roughly what a display driver should do)
* you don't know the URLs (you don't know the addresses)
It's a fun exercise in collaborative reverse engineering.
Also there's survivorship bias. The reverse engineering that's most likely to succeed (and thus be written about) are the most approachable ones.
Bravo to all those doing this stuff!
But what marcan is doing is another level of awesomeness altogether. The m1n1 bootloader that runs the rest of MacOS in a VM for logging purposes is a hail mary move of such epic brilliance, it brings tears to my eyes.
Amazing progress - but I wonder if getting accelerated gui is 10x the current effort
No skin in the game, but can't wait to see how this progresses
It puzzles me how things like that go. Google and Microsoft improved their developer documentation in the last years
the problem with that is that the macbook hardware sucks. a lot.
I kid. Now what I really wanted to ask.. Is it using Wayland?
I haven't ruled out Mutter having a framebuffer backend, but I suspect she just ran it through X, which has one.
Edit: Looks like DRI is there after all: "Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now."(https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098).
What's there is a basic KMS driver, so rather than one single framebuffer, userspace can do pageflips. Mutter can run with a display-only KMS driver + llvmpipe for rendering by now I'm pretty sure. wlroots has landed this feature recently-ish too.
This is of course a harder and more pervasive problem than one might realize. macOS Finder RAM usage can explode catastrophically and take down the whole system if you have image previews enabled and click on a very large (gigabyte) TIFF.
I've experienced (and confirmed with a quick search) that Finder won't display a preview for any file that doesn't have the resources to show.
Hence this, don't expect graphical elements or graphics intensive software to be any faster than other systems using accelerated graphics right now.
"Up until now both the Asahi and Corellium kernels were on #1. Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now. #3 is the ultimate here be dragons, but will get us 4k display"
