Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointless.
In some cases all companies would have to do is not actively hide or obfuscate things. In others it may take more effort but still just a drop in the huge bucket compared to developing a system in the first place.
I love Apple's hardware, I even (mostly) love the OS. If they too believe that it is solid - why prevent people from running what they want? The majority will come back anyway - I've run Linux for years and still ended up on MacOS for simplicity. I'll still buy Macs and run MacOS because it works for me, it's not like letting me run Linux will cost them money or something. The vast majority of people don't know what Linux even is, there is no threat there.
Please note that this comment is not directed at people who choose to spend their time on projects like this. You're awesome, I just wish you didn't have to put so much effort in.
It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else.
While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors.
Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw interface.
Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks, special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp. Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it properly, it will be quirked. This goes all the way to simple things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces you'd brick the laptop.
Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable open platform, especially open source boards, because making an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically built for the device is that people complained about lack of upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.
Apple did put in the effort to cooperate when they added support to boot other OSes. Apple hasn’t prevented anyone from running Linux, they simply haven’t written Linux drivers for their hardware or provided a manual to do so.
Most of the effort in Asahi Linux is going to be writing drivers for hardware that hasn’t had Linux drivers written for it. It makes sense that a Linux driver doesn’t exist, because this hardware is new and no one has tried to run Linux on it before.
Also in a similar idea, I think PostMarketOS, LineageOS, /e/ foundation, etc. are nice for privacy minded people on the short-term, but on the long term if we want things to truly change, we have to take both hardware & software independence like PinePhone & Librem 5 are doing.
If the foundations you build upon are too hostile towards you, on the long run you'll spend all your time & money fighting them instead of achieving you original goal.
However sometimes it becomes near impossible to do your own thing. Google has infected the whole manufacturing world with their own Android HAL & specific drivers and now it's impossible to find any competitive modern SOC running standard Linux decently (with GPU, Linux drivers, etc.). Which is why PinePhone has an old crappy chip and Purism took an automobile chip for their phone. And even that might disappear as IoT/Cars/Planes/etc. are using more&more Android instead of Linux. Even Microsoft is moving to their own chip.
The situation is very sad and extremely anti-competitive, but soon, the only way to run your own platform on some modern hardware might be reverse Eng (if that's even still legal by then)
Yeah, it sucks. Why are these companies so uncooperative? I have a Clevo laptop and I actually emailed them asking for documentation or some kind of help. They replied with an Ubuntu help page. I had to reverse engineer it in order to implement some features on Linux and I didn't manage to figure out everything.
It's very hard work and I have immense respect for people who are able to reverse engineer entire systems. There would be no need for this activity if companies just played nice but since they don't I'm glad that there are people out there doing this work.
I would say that I wouldn't use Apple hardware if it didn't have an OS that doesn't prevent developers from working properly - like Linux.
But really, the state of their support is so garbage I don't care what the performance of their systems is like. I know their warranties aren't worth anything and their disregard for consumer laws is absolute.
in this perspective, I'm saddened of all the electricity Bitcoin burns for futile intents. Imagine putting all these electricity for good purposes rather than making people rich.
I am quite saddened by I also see it as highly challenging and reverse engineering is one of those excruciating tasks. Sadly, I am not a good C programmer and I just can't get myself to write C code.
That said, with the rise of RISC-V architecture, I believe there will be viable alternatives to Apple silicon which are much more open. Building a new linux variant for those computers might be a lot less excruciating than reverse engineering Apple silicon. However, the timeline for RISC-V computers is a huge unknown.
Did Apple ever try to prevent people from running Linux on Macs? It sounds like that is what you're saying, but my impression is quite the opposite, the made Bootcamp etc.
It's like with iPhones. There was someone who run Linux with a framebuffer on iPhone 3GS. It worked but was useless. Additional security added in newer iPhones made it impossible to do again. And users are happy, saying that their locked out iPhone is secure and they want only apple-approved software to run on their devices...
"Oh, there's this hardware where the vendor tries actively to lock people out of other platforms and lock them into their own, they're real nasty guys.. Know what we should do? We should spend a lot of time making their product better, so more people will buy it, so they can continue their policies."
I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside of Apple's labs.
> In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it.
This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. After the street cred of getting a marginally usable OS up and running evaporates, why continue to take the effort of great engineers and waste it developing an ecosystem that doesn't care? It makes no sense to me.
> This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple.
I think marcan has proven he has the chops for pieces like that. The ps4 linux port had him reverse engineering the ISA for the custom risc cores that are some of the deepest firmware of a pretty modern AMD GPU. Like even the open source drivers just treat this stuff as blobs and moves on with their life, but he had to port a fix over and showed off more publicly than anyone else had.
This Apple stuff is for sure more work, but it all seems within his wheelhouse. Hence the patreon I think, attacking the size of the problem with some funding to make it more viable than a side project.
Apple sells hardware and now services. Software seems to be a cost center. So I doubt a third party OS like Linux will ever be a priority for them in their consumer products.
I don’t think there is any rush at all for Apple to do anything to support Linux on macs that are only a couple of months old.
However I absolutely think they should produce a Bootcamp equivalent designed to support Linux on all Macs and iOS devices that Apple no longer supports with MacOS.
Several mobile GPUs have been reverse-engineered so it's not as hard as you think. As for the ecosystem, if users care enough to pay for it then it doesn't matter how little Apple cares.
They could offer an equivalent to Nvidia's PTX ISA for compute, and possibly documentation like Intel and AMD offer for their GPUs. Offcourse, the first thing the latter would do is undermine Metal, so I don't think that's likely.
Nvidia PTX-level openness for GPU-compute would be nice though.
It was not different for PC for many years. Most of drivers were reverse-engineered, including GPU ones.
That said, hardware was simpler back then. Implementing drivers for modern GPU is a hard task, may be an impossible one. It’s like writing a second OS.
Well put, it's very confusing that Apple is willing to reduce the matter of Windows on M1 to a matter of licensing, but Linux on M1 is somehow seen as competition. I was gonna buy an M1 Mac Mini to replace my aging desktop, but Apple can forget my patronage if I can't control the hardware I own.
Just a reminder, the Patreon is not fully funded. If people really want to see this happen, dropping a couple dollars a month to help support the project is the best way.
Why there is VAT on every pledge? Using Patreon is not buying (that is what I believe, that is how similar services work in my country, they don't add extra tax).
No, Apple actually supporting it (in the same way that Intel, AMD, ARM/Linaro et. al. staff resources to support their hardware on Linux) is the best way. But paying productive engineers via crowdfunding isn't an awful workaround.
> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.
Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight?
> Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it.
This looks like the major bullet point. The wiki is currently empty, but while it's WIP, it would be nice to see some of the major milestones or breakdown of the goal mentioned above.
First of all the feature wasn't available in the initial Big Sur release and it only got available during the Betas for the first minor patch. Second of all, some Apple developer stated on Twitter that (during M1 unveil) he's finally able to show all the boot policy work they worked on the past year(s) to allow users to boot foreign OSes and without opening up holes for attackers.
Basically it boils down to: they could have just used iBoot without changing it at all to keep it as a brick like the iPhone/iPad/Watch, but instead they invested plenty of resources to allow it.
With all that work done to allow it, I'm sure there'll be plenty of people inside of Apple who'd protest if someone changes their mind and decides all this has to go away.
It's a feature because it's literally a whole set of command line options and settings in their boot policies, which is documented in man pages, with all the warnings about normal users not having to use any of this that you'd expect.
It's a whole pile of code that Apple doesn't need, and could've just removed or never written in the first place, that was written explicitly and only so people could run unsigned kernels on Apple Silicon macs.
Yup, the wiki is almost empty - I was hard at working getting the site/IRC/branding/etc worked out. Expect things to pick up steam on that front starting tomorrow, as I will now focus on hardware documentation and getting things through low-level boot bring-up.
> Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight?
I would point out that Apple has permitted booting alternative operating systems throughout their m68k (at least the m68ks that could meaningfully boot Linux or a BSD derivative) [1], PowerPC [2], and Intel [3] phases. It's only on Intel they actively made this a feature, because Windows Bootcamp probably allowed to sell them a certain percentage more Macs.
The only reason to believe they would change this is that the Apple Silicon architecture changes would have Apple be interested in the Mac being some sort of equivalent to an iPod Touch. I don't really see Apple being interested in that, and Apple reps have gone on record to argue similar points as well.
A lot of time, money and effort invested to support a platform whos creator is unwilling to provide support.
I think it's part of the Linux ethos to run on everything, but I also think this kind of effort is ... not wasted, but I feel like it could be spent more efficiently.
Still looking forward to hear about the first successful boots and the epic reverse engineering feats.
Just wish this kind of stuff wouldn't be needed anymore and companies would just release their specs already.
Everyone keeps saying this is "a lot" of wasted resources... AFAICT it's just one guy right now, and even if it were a small team that still sounds like a bargain. I would expect it to take at least a small team within Apple to get Linux running on their new hardware.
I worked on SoC chip bring-up at Qualcomm for a few years and it's literally hundreds of engineers working for weeks to get Linux running, and that's with not only technical documentation but direct access to the hardware engineers who designed the stuff. That was 5 years ago but I assume not much has changed.
If this one guy (or a small group) ports Linux to the new MacBooks on a "Patreon salary" I'd say we got a smoking good deal. I'm rooting for them and happily donating.
It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story.
Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there.
We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.
The initial target of the M1 Mini is probably the smart choice, I'd imagine all the power management stuff in the laptops might be a big task to reverse engineer
Does anyone know why a similar project doesn't exist currently using the open source distribution of Apple's Darwin operating system? It has always seemed strange to me that their open source BSD OS does not have an official distribution channel with a built in package manager like macports, pkg-src, gentoo prefix, etc.
OpenDarwin and PureDarwin existed for awhile, but seem to have both been abandoned now.
X11 (including thousands of open source and graphical x11 programs), plan9port, and other open source software projects already compile and run fine on macOS, so this has always seemed like something that _should_ be possible but has never gained traction due to what I guess is lack of documentation and Apple's lackluster open source website.
> Asahi means “rising sun” in Japanese, and it is also the name of an apple cultivar. 旭りんご (asahi ringo) is what we know as the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name.
If for no other reason than how cool and fitting this name is I hope it succeeds.
I hope this and projects like it spearhead a movement of ARM laptops outside of the Apple-sphere.
I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. Seems right up their alley.
Also worth noting that I understand that System76 and Apple are not comparable companies. One is a humble operation installing a custom Linux build on rebranded hardware, and the other is a vertically integrated powerhouse building it’s own hardware.
Do the cons of open sourcing device drivers really outweigh the pros? Good / popular hardware will end up benefitting from all kinds of contributions from interested folks. Plus the recruitment pool and onboarding of new talent expands by a reasonable amount, in theory.
Is it really the case that somewhere in the drivers there is some secret sauce that is so ingenious that if the competition got wind of it, it would give them free access to a lot of hard work and research, and enable them to catch up?
I guess I've never really dealt with super secret proprietary magic beans before so I can't relate.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure if Apple did provide documentation, people would complain that it's incomplete, or would complain when it changes. I'd love a world where all tech documentation is open, but there are competitors etc etc.
Apple is a remarkably focused company with a lot of experiments that never see the light of day. They don't sell their chips or motherboards to anyone else.
Qualcomm/Broadcom etc exist to make their chips for other companies to use and still getting real documentation from them is often not possible unless you are a giant OEM, commit to millions in orders and sign lots of NDAs.
Apple's not only created a pretty great integrated CPU/GPU and nearly seamlessly transitioned CPU platforms (AGAIN!) but they are at the very beginning of this roadmap.
I'd LOVE them to empower/support Linux on Apple Silicon (as they seem to be saying they will for Microsoft) but I expect a generation of two of chips before things solidify/stabilize enough for them to open up the platform.
And, it's not like this is something within their business model or is going to give much value back to them.
Lots of people say Apple "Needs" to do whatever... Clearly they don't as they seem to be surviving OK doing things how they want.
>However, no modern device is “fully open” - no usable computer exists today that has completely open software and hardware (as much as some companies want to market themselves as such)
Doesn't RaptorCS[1] offer a fully open modern device? Or is there a closed part I'm not aware of?
Given the seemingly unbeatable performance of Apple Silicon (judging by reviews), this would remove one of the bigger pain points of having a Mac. Some projects just don't run on macOS - either due to a community lack, or due to political reasons (e.g. CUDA). I wonder why Apple does not seek to support projects like this.
Will be interesting to see how hard it is to bring this to a useable state. Thanks for the effort and looking forward to hearing more about the project!
> As long as no code is taken from macOS in order to build the Linux support, the end result is completely legal to distribute and for end users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS. Please see our Copyright & Reverse Engineering Policy for more information.
This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour? Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific, driver-y bits excluded?
[+] [-] somehnguy|5 years ago|reply
In some cases all companies would have to do is not actively hide or obfuscate things. In others it may take more effort but still just a drop in the huge bucket compared to developing a system in the first place.
I love Apple's hardware, I even (mostly) love the OS. If they too believe that it is solid - why prevent people from running what they want? The majority will come back anyway - I've run Linux for years and still ended up on MacOS for simplicity. I'll still buy Macs and run MacOS because it works for me, it's not like letting me run Linux will cost them money or something. The vast majority of people don't know what Linux even is, there is no threat there.
Please note that this comment is not directed at people who choose to spend their time on projects like this. You're awesome, I just wish you didn't have to put so much effort in.
[+] [-] p_l|5 years ago|reply
While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors.
Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw interface.
Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks, special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp. Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it properly, it will be quirked. This goes all the way to simple things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces you'd brick the laptop.
Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable open platform, especially open source boards, because making an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically built for the device is that people complained about lack of upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.
[+] [-] nindalf|5 years ago|reply
Apple did put in the effort to cooperate when they added support to boot other OSes. Apple hasn’t prevented anyone from running Linux, they simply haven’t written Linux drivers for their hardware or provided a manual to do so.
Most of the effort in Asahi Linux is going to be writing drivers for hardware that hasn’t had Linux drivers written for it. It makes sense that a Linux driver doesn’t exist, because this hardware is new and no one has tried to run Linux on it before.
[+] [-] tmpUserA|5 years ago|reply
Also in a similar idea, I think PostMarketOS, LineageOS, /e/ foundation, etc. are nice for privacy minded people on the short-term, but on the long term if we want things to truly change, we have to take both hardware & software independence like PinePhone & Librem 5 are doing.
If the foundations you build upon are too hostile towards you, on the long run you'll spend all your time & money fighting them instead of achieving you original goal.
However sometimes it becomes near impossible to do your own thing. Google has infected the whole manufacturing world with their own Android HAL & specific drivers and now it's impossible to find any competitive modern SOC running standard Linux decently (with GPU, Linux drivers, etc.). Which is why PinePhone has an old crappy chip and Purism took an automobile chip for their phone. And even that might disappear as IoT/Cars/Planes/etc. are using more&more Android instead of Linux. Even Microsoft is moving to their own chip.
The situation is very sad and extremely anti-competitive, but soon, the only way to run your own platform on some modern hardware might be reverse Eng (if that's even still legal by then)
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
It's very hard work and I have immense respect for people who are able to reverse engineer entire systems. There would be no need for this activity if companies just played nice but since they don't I'm glad that there are people out there doing this work.
[+] [-] anothernewdude|5 years ago|reply
But really, the state of their support is so garbage I don't care what the performance of their systems is like. I know their warranties aren't worth anything and their disregard for consumer laws is absolute.
Never will I buy their garbage.
[+] [-] mister_hn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepGem|5 years ago|reply
That said, with the rise of RISC-V architecture, I believe there will be viable alternatives to Apple silicon which are much more open. Building a new linux variant for those computers might be a lot less excruciating than reverse engineering Apple silicon. However, the timeline for RISC-V computers is a huge unknown.
[+] [-] Grustaf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|5 years ago|reply
We should work on what matters: free software, open hardware.
[+] [-] neop1x|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusted|5 years ago|reply
"Oh, there's this hardware where the vendor tries actively to lock people out of other platforms and lock them into their own, they're real nasty guys.. Know what we should do? We should spend a lot of time making their product better, so more people will buy it, so they can continue their policies."
[+] [-] gorkish|5 years ago|reply
I think it's patently ridiculous that we have to enlist the assistance of console hackers in order to have a chance at porting the most used operating system in the entire world to run on hardware that in all likelihood already happily runs it inside of Apple's labs.
> In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it.
This is all a noble goal, but I can't see this as being anything other than a complete and total non-starter with zero cooperation from Apple. After the street cred of getting a marginally usable OS up and running evaporates, why continue to take the effort of great engineers and waste it developing an ecosystem that doesn't care? It makes no sense to me.
[+] [-] monocasa|5 years ago|reply
I think marcan has proven he has the chops for pieces like that. The ps4 linux port had him reverse engineering the ISA for the custom risc cores that are some of the deepest firmware of a pretty modern AMD GPU. Like even the open source drivers just treat this stuff as blobs and moves on with their life, but he had to port a fix over and showed off more publicly than anyone else had.
This Apple stuff is for sure more work, but it all seems within his wheelhouse. Hence the patreon I think, attacking the size of the problem with some funding to make it more viable than a side project.
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|5 years ago|reply
However I absolutely think they should produce a Bootcamp equivalent designed to support Linux on all Macs and iOS devices that Apple no longer supports with MacOS.
[+] [-] bluepizza|5 years ago|reply
Why? There have been several success cases of reverse engineering in the past, for all sorts of popular and fringe hardware.
[+] [-] wmf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ece|5 years ago|reply
Nvidia PTX-level openness for GPU-compute would be nice though.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|5 years ago|reply
That said, hardware was simpler back then. Implementing drivers for modern GPU is a hard task, may be an impossible one. It’s like writing a second OS.
[+] [-] smoldesu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
https://www.patreon.com/marcan
[+] [-] my123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gitowiec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alex_duf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libria|5 years ago|reply
> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.
Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight?
> Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it.
This looks like the major bullet point. The wiki is currently empty, but while it's WIP, it would be nice to see some of the major milestones or breakdown of the goal mentioned above.
Best of luck to Hector and the contributors!
[+] [-] Bluerise|5 years ago|reply
Basically it boils down to: they could have just used iBoot without changing it at all to keep it as a brick like the iPhone/iPad/Watch, but instead they invested plenty of resources to allow it.
With all that work done to allow it, I'm sure there'll be plenty of people inside of Apple who'd protest if someone changes their mind and decides all this has to go away.
[+] [-] marcan_42|5 years ago|reply
It's a whole pile of code that Apple doesn't need, and could've just removed or never written in the first place, that was written explicitly and only so people could run unsigned kernels on Apple Silicon macs.
Yup, the wiki is almost empty - I was hard at working getting the site/IRC/branding/etc worked out. Expect things to pick up steam on that front starting tomorrow, as I will now focus on hardware documentation and getting things through low-level boot bring-up.
[+] [-] DCKing|5 years ago|reply
I would point out that Apple has permitted booting alternative operating systems throughout their m68k (at least the m68ks that could meaningfully boot Linux or a BSD derivative) [1], PowerPC [2], and Intel [3] phases. It's only on Intel they actively made this a feature, because Windows Bootcamp probably allowed to sell them a certain percentage more Macs.
The only reason to believe they would change this is that the Apple Silicon architecture changes would have Apple be interested in the Mac being some sort of equivalent to an iPod Touch. I don't really see Apple being interested in that, and Apple reps have gone on record to argue similar points as well.
[1]: e.g. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/ [2]: e.g. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/ [3]: Uh, anything that boots on x86 EFI will probably boot.
[+] [-] chpmrc|5 years ago|reply
Apple gives the chance to disable these limitations to power users: "they should be disabled by default!"
Apple disables limitations: "temporary convenient oversight?"
...
[+] [-] Klonoar|5 years ago|reply
Considering the level of GUI work that outright supports this feature in recovery mode on an M1, I'm inclined to think it's not an oversight.
[+] [-] turbinerneiter|5 years ago|reply
I think it's part of the Linux ethos to run on everything, but I also think this kind of effort is ... not wasted, but I feel like it could be spent more efficiently.
Still looking forward to hear about the first successful boots and the epic reverse engineering feats.
Just wish this kind of stuff wouldn't be needed anymore and companies would just release their specs already.
[+] [-] mgalgs|5 years ago|reply
I worked on SoC chip bring-up at Qualcomm for a few years and it's literally hundreds of engineers working for weeks to get Linux running, and that's with not only technical documentation but direct access to the hardware engineers who designed the stuff. That was 5 years ago but I assume not much has changed.
If this one guy (or a small group) ports Linux to the new MacBooks on a "Patreon salary" I'd say we got a smoking good deal. I'm rooting for them and happily donating.
[+] [-] actuator|5 years ago|reply
Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there.
We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.
[+] [-] codetrotter|5 years ago|reply
Announcement post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/website-launch-45852093
[+] [-] djhworld|5 years ago|reply
The initial target of the M1 Mini is probably the smart choice, I'd imagine all the power management stuff in the laptops might be a big task to reverse engineer
[+] [-] jd3|5 years ago|reply
Does anyone know why a similar project doesn't exist currently using the open source distribution of Apple's Darwin operating system? It has always seemed strange to me that their open source BSD OS does not have an official distribution channel with a built in package manager like macports, pkg-src, gentoo prefix, etc.
OpenDarwin and PureDarwin existed for awhile, but seem to have both been abandoned now.
X11 (including thousands of open source and graphical x11 programs), plan9port, and other open source software projects already compile and run fine on macOS, so this has always seemed like something that _should_ be possible but has never gained traction due to what I guess is lack of documentation and Apple's lackluster open source website.
[+] [-] mikece|5 years ago|reply
If for no other reason than how cool and fitting this name is I hope it succeeds.
[+] [-] corytheboyd|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. Seems right up their alley.
Also worth noting that I understand that System76 and Apple are not comparable companies. One is a humble operation installing a custom Linux build on rebranded hardware, and the other is a vertically integrated powerhouse building it’s own hardware.
[+] [-] reikonomusha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickelcitymario|5 years ago|reply
Well, this is exciting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would take on this challenge, but it's exciting all the same.
[+] [-] fareesh|5 years ago|reply
Is it really the case that somewhere in the drivers there is some secret sauce that is so ingenious that if the competition got wind of it, it would give them free access to a lot of hard work and research, and enable them to catch up?
I guess I've never really dealt with super secret proprietary magic beans before so I can't relate.
[+] [-] iseanstevens|5 years ago|reply
Apple is a remarkably focused company with a lot of experiments that never see the light of day. They don't sell their chips or motherboards to anyone else.
Qualcomm/Broadcom etc exist to make their chips for other companies to use and still getting real documentation from them is often not possible unless you are a giant OEM, commit to millions in orders and sign lots of NDAs.
Apple's not only created a pretty great integrated CPU/GPU and nearly seamlessly transitioned CPU platforms (AGAIN!) but they are at the very beginning of this roadmap.
I'd LOVE them to empower/support Linux on Apple Silicon (as they seem to be saying they will for Microsoft) but I expect a generation of two of chips before things solidify/stabilize enough for them to open up the platform.
And, it's not like this is something within their business model or is going to give much value back to them.
Lots of people say Apple "Needs" to do whatever... Clearly they don't as they seem to be surviving OK doing things how they want.
[+] [-] miguelr2201|5 years ago|reply
On the claim:
>However, no modern device is “fully open” - no usable computer exists today that has completely open software and hardware (as much as some companies want to market themselves as such)
Doesn't RaptorCS[1] offer a fully open modern device? Or is there a closed part I'm not aware of?
[1] https://www.raptorcs.com/
[+] [-] depablo|5 years ago|reply
Given the seemingly unbeatable performance of Apple Silicon (judging by reviews), this would remove one of the bigger pain points of having a Mac. Some projects just don't run on macOS - either due to a community lack, or due to political reasons (e.g. CUDA). I wonder why Apple does not seek to support projects like this.
Will be interesting to see how hard it is to bring this to a useable state. Thanks for the effort and looking forward to hearing more about the project!
[+] [-] Badfood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JosephRedfern|5 years ago|reply
This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour? Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific, driver-y bits excluded?
[0] https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html