from the Penguin-believed-to-be-ARM'd-and-dangerous dept.
Initial Patches Posted for Bringing up Linux Kernel on Apple Silicon M1 Hardware
Initial Patches Posted For Bringing Up The Linux Kernel On Apple Silicon M1 Hardware
It was over the weekend that Corellium began posting their work of Linux booting on the Apple M1. It's now to the extent they can get Ubuntu's Raspberry Pi ARMv8 desktop image booting on Apple M1 hardware to a GUI albeit without any hardware acceleration. The Apple M1 graphics support will remain the big elephant in the room given the big challenges involved in bringing up an entirely new OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack and needing to carry out all of that reverse engineering first under macOS.
Apple M1 Open-Source GPU Bring-Up Sees An Early Triangle
The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle.
Alyssa Rosenzweig of Panfrost fame has been working to reverse engineer the Apple M1 graphics as part of the Asahi Linux effort with developer Marcan.
This week the milestone was reached of drawing a triangle using the open-source code. It's an important first milestone but important to keep in mind that this isn't an initial driver triangle but rather hand-written vertex and fragment shaders with machine code for the M1 GPU. Those hand-written shaders are submitted to the hardware via the existing macOS IOKit kernel driver. If not clear enough, this was done on macOS and not the early Linux state as well.
Previously: Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
Linus Torvalds Doubts Linux will Get Ported to Apple M1 Hardware
ARM-Based Mac Pro Could Have 32+ Cores
Apple Pulls the Plug on User-Found Method to Sideload iOS Apps on M1 Mac
Apple pulls the plug on user-found method to sideload iOS apps on Mac:
Apple has plugged a hole that allowed users to sideload iOS and iPad applications to M1 Macs that were never intended to run on desktop, 9to5Mac reports. The server-side change ensures that only applications that app developers have flagged as optimized for Mac will run.
Since those [new, M1-based] machines now share an architecture with iPhones and iPads, which also have closely related ARM-based chips, it became possible to run iOS and iPadOS apps natively on Macs that were equipped with the M1 chip. Apple supported this by listing iPhone and iPad apps that passed an automated test on the Mac App Store, provided developers did not opt out of having the app listed.
[...] In those cases [that developers did opt out], the apps did not appear on the Mac App Store. But a couple of months ago, a Reddit user shared a way of sideloading those apps on M1 Macs by fetching the app's IPA file from a connected iOS or iPadOS device using third-party software, like iMazing, for Macs.
According to 9to5Mac, though, Apple has now "flipped the necessary server-side switch" to block this method. The change already affects Macs running macOS Big Sur 11.1, and it also applies to Macs running the 11.2 beta. In fact, it even offers an error message on the latter: "This application cannot be installed because the developer did not intend for it to run on this platform."
‘Completely Usable’ Version of Linux for M1 Macs Released
[Corellium CTO] Chris Wade announced the [Ubuntu] Linux port for M1 Macs on Twitter earlier today. While there are certain limitations, Corellium has been able to boot Linux over USB. The USB-C dongle will cater to network functionalities, support for USB, 12C, and DART. As mentioned earlier, there are certain limitations that you should know of. For instance, there is no support for GPU acceleration and all rendering needs will rely on software.
The company was working on making port available for the M1-powered Macs since earlier this month and last weekend, the company made striking progress on the project. Here's what the CTO stated:
Linux is now completely usable on the Mac mini M1. Booting from USB a full Ubuntu desktop (RPI). The network works via a USB c dongle. Update includes support for USB, I2C, DART. We will push changes to our GitHub and a tutorial later today. Thanks to the @CorelliumHQ team.
Corellium is a software virtualization company that aims to offer tools for security research and caters to Arm. It also deals in testing apps and much more. Apple and Corellium don't go hand in hand these days due to the latter's work on iOS emulation software. Nonetheless, we're glad that Linux for M1 Macs support is here.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
Related Stories
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn't realize this, because it's silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you're offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn't hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone's apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings: Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash
Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever.
This means that Apple knows when you're at home. When you're at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend's house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.
Linus Torvalds doubts Linux will get ported to Apple M1 hardware:
In a recent post on the Real World Technologies forum—one of the few public internet venues Linux founder Linus Torvalds is known to regularly visit—a user named Paul asked Torvalds, "What do you think of the new Apple laptop?"
If you've been living under a rock for the last few weeks, Apple released new versions of the Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and Mac Mini featuring a brand-new processor—the Apple M1.
The M1 processor is a successor to the A12 and A14 Bionic CPUs used in iPhones and iPads, and pairs the battery and thermal efficiency of ultramobile designs with the high performance needed to compete strongly in the laptop and desktop world.
"I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux," Torvalds replied. "I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new [Macbook] Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS."
[...] In an interview with ZDNet, Torvalds expounded on the problem:
The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up... [that] seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope.
[...] It's also worth noting that while the M1 is unabashedly great, it's not the final word in desktop or laptop System on Chip designs. Torvalds mentions that, given a choice, he'd prefer more and higher-power cores—which is certainly possible and seems a likely request to be granted soon.
Previously: Apple's New ARM-Based Macs Won't Support Windows Through Boot Camp
Apple Claims that its M1 SoC for ARM-Based Macs Uses the World's Fastest CPU Core
Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
New report reveals Apple's roadmap for when each Mac will move to Apple Silicon
Citing sources close to Apple, a new report in Bloomberg outlines Apple's roadmap for moving the entire Mac lineup to the company's own custom-designed silicon, including both planned release windows for specific products and estimations as to how many performance CPU cores those products will have.
[...] New chips for the high-end MacBook Pro and iMac computers could have as many as 16 performance cores (the M1 has four). And the planned Mac Pro replacement could have as many as 32. The report is careful to clarify that Apple could, for one reason or another, choose to only release Macs with 8 or 12 cores at first but that the company is working on chip variants with the higher core count, in any case.
The report reveals two other tidbits. First, a direct relative to the M1 will power new iPad Pro models due to be introduced next year, and second, the faster M1 successors for the MacBook Pro and desktop computers will also feature more GPU cores for graphics processing—specifically, 16 or 32 cores. Further, Apple is working on "pricier graphics upgrades with 64 and 128 dedicated cores aimed at its highest-end machines" for 2022 or late 2021.
New Mac models could have additional efficiency cores alongside 8/12/16/32 performance cores. Bloomberg claimed the existence of a 12-core (8 performance "Firestorm" cores, 4 efficiency "Icestorm" cores) back in April which has not materialized yet.
The Apple M1 SoC has 8 GPU cores.
Previously: Apple Announces 2-Year Transition to ARM SoCs in Mac Desktops and Laptops
Apple Has Built its Own Mac Graphics Processors
Apple Claims that its M1 SoC for ARM-Based Macs Uses the World's Fastest CPU Core
Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
Linus Torvalds Doubts Linux will Get Ported to Apple M1 Hardware
Apple has announced two new Arm SoCs for its upcoming MacBook Pro laptops. Both share the same CPU, but differ in GPU and RAM size.
The Apple M1 SoC for Macs has 8 CPU cores: 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The newly announced M1 Pro and M1 Max have 10 cores: 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores. CPU performance (multi-threaded) is about 70% faster, at around a 30 Watt TDP (M1 Pro) instead of 15 Watts for the M1. The 16-core "neural engine" with 11 TOPS of machine learning performance is unchanged from the M1.
While the M1 has an (up to) 8-core GPU with 2.6 TFLOPS FP32 of performance, the M1 Pro doubles that to 16 cores and 5.2 TFLOPS, and the M1 Max doubles it again to 32 cores and 10.4 TFLOPS. The M1 Pro is comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti discrete laptop GPU, while the M1 Max is comparable to an RTX 3080 laptop GPU. These levels of performance are achieved at around 30 Watts for the M1 Pro and 60 Watts for the M1 Max, compared to around 100-160 Watts for laptops with discrete graphics.
The M1 Pro has around 33.7 billion transistors fabbed on TSMC "5nm" in a 245 mm2 die space, while the M1 Max has 57 billion transistors at 432 mm2. The M1 Pro will include up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and the M1 Max will include up to 64 GB.
Also at Wccftech.
See also: Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up
Previously: Apple Has Built its Own Mac Graphics Processors
Apple Claims that its M1 SoC for ARM-Based Macs Uses the World's Fastest CPU Core
Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
Why is Apple's M1 Chip So Fast?
ARM-Based Mac Pro Could Have 32+ Cores
Booting Linux and Sideloading Apps on M1 Macs
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @07:44PM (7 children)
fuck mapple hardware
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @08:03PM
Comment above was posted from my iPhone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @08:57PM
Agreed
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday January 25 2021, @09:33PM (1 child)
Jews promoting Jews. It's no different than being at a Jew-bar when they are all actually laughing at Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars and then ask you to check out Modern Family on the TV. Oh, and have you seen the new Marvel movie! The only White guys in it are either gay or evil nazis, the only "White" women are Jewish, all relationships are interracial, with some preachy kindergarten-tier morality message worthy of bad 80's cartoons, and all the jokes really suck! It even got a 95%* rating on Rotten Tomatoes!
* 95% site rating, 4% viewer rating
This comment is totally 100% on-topic because everytime PC's are depicted in TV/Hollywood, they just happen to be Macs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @11:15PM
Thank you for logging-in to post.
See, regular people, Anonymous Cowards are the good guys.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @12:07PM (2 children)
I'll never buy an Apple product from Apple. But right now I have a laptop from 2009 that still works well because of Linux. In 2027 or so, when Apple stops supporting the first generation M1 devices, this project will enable me to pick one up and put Linux on it. Since I favor relatively lightweight programs, it will still be a viable machine for me. For that reason, I'm happy this project to put Linux on it exists.
In general, the proprietary software world loves planned obsolescence and doesn't give a shit about software bloat. When your Samsung Galaxy S(N) can't run new stuff and you need to buy a Samsung Galaxy S(N+K), Samsung laughs all of the way to the bank. I don't mean to single out Samsung, all of the tech giants are just as bad. If Linux/BSD/etc... has any chance to win the attention of the average person (and I mean no disrespect to the common person), I think the fight against planned obsolescence and software bloat is the place. "You can't do anything with your five year old device? If I put (some distribution/LineageOS/whatever) on it, you can probably use it for another five years."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @08:02PM (1 child)
i understand that but FOSS devs should make shit like this 3rd tier. Not jump to play with it when it's new with this rationalization. Prioritize the most open hardware possible. We need to force the Suited Whores in the hardware world to get some fucking integrity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @08:51PM
1. You're giving whores a bad name. Selling sex is a fine tradition, much more noble and moral than what the software industry does or the hardware industry and its planned obsolescence.
2. I'm not going to tell other FOSS devs what to work on. I'm thrilled they have the time and interest for anything not proprietary. I agree, I think it makes more sense to work on existing open hardware. But they're still contributing to FOSS, that's great.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 25 2021, @08:37PM (1 child)
next they'll want a glass of milk.
If you give a corporation a glass of milk, next they'll want complete control of your entire life to squeeze a tiny fraction more profit out of you.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 25 2021, @08:49PM
Corporations are people too!
And Big Brother is a person too!
Corporations want to make your life easier so you don't have to work. Towards that end, they'll replace your job with AI or a robot.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @09:16PM (1 child)
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(Score: 2, Offtopic) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday January 26 2021, @04:37AM
How dare you sully the words of the great Randy "Macho Man" Savage!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @09:34PM (3 children)
Six comments so far in this thread, and not a single intelligent one.
I just don't get it. Do you people actually like being fucking worthless losers ? Is posting cluless stupid posts on Internet forums really what your miserable empty lives are all about ?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday January 25 2021, @10:08PM (2 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @11:49PM (1 child)
that makes eight....no nine, off topic worthless comments.
(Score: 5, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday January 26 2021, @12:05AM
Ten! Ten, ten off topic worthless comments!
Count, from Sesame Street.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zoward on Monday January 25 2021, @09:47PM (4 children)
My hope is that someone will come out with an ARM chip/motherboard like the M1, made with the desktop in mind, that isn't just a low-power also-ran for the Chromebook market, but also isn't locked to someone's vertical integration market the way Apple has it. The more I think about it, the more I realize it's a big ask. Desktop isn't as lucrative a market as mobile has been. If you don't already have one for other reasons, ARM licenses aren't cheap. A lot of the secret sauce around the M1 deals with having lots of co-processors, implying you're going need some serious chops in ARM design to attempt this. Apple has tons of experience with both the hardware and software ends of the ARM platform, a very liberal ARM license, very deep pockets ... and good reasons to keep the internals of the M1 nailed shut. There aren't a lot of companies well-positioned to build something like this, with a good reason for doing so. I'm starting to wonder if I'm waiting for the wrong bus, and RISC-V will end up occupying that niche.
(Score: 2) by zoward on Monday January 25 2021, @10:03PM (2 children)
Yeah, replying to myself. The more I think about it, one of the best candidates for this would be ARM themselves. They have money, and obviously the design chops. They could create a desktop reference chip as a kind of showcase for the platform. It might be a good pre-emptive strike against a decent RISC-V desktop design entering the market. Or not.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 25 2021, @10:12PM
More like NvidiARM.
Let's see some ARM single-board computers with 16 cores.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 26 2021, @04:26PM
I would like to think the popularity of the Raspberry Pi, along with the ubiquity of ARM, contributed to Apple's decision to go with ARM for their newest hardware. The giant pile of security bugs
featuresthat Intel has gone through the last few years, just gave Apple even more reasons to hop off that band wagon.The biggest reason not to go with ARM CPUs in the past was, because they didn't have the power that Intel/AMD had. They just weren't competitive, because they couldn't get the same performance. They made their bread and butter from lower power applications, but over the years, they've grown. With the Apple M1, they've proven, that an ARM CPU can compete head to head with Intel/AMD. The main trouble is that 99.99999% of consumer PCs use x86/x64 software. Apple fixed that problem for themselves. It's not an insignificant hurdle, but people that use Apple computers are used to the Upgrade cycle.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @05:05PM
I think it will happen eventually. Amazon cloud computing has ARM parts and Microsoft and Oracle have announced that their clouds will too. Ampere Computing sells ARM servers that are performance-per-watt competitive with x86_64. Microsoft is trying for Windows on ARM again with the Surface Pro X. Nvidia has ARM development boards that are well behind high end x86_64 laptop parts, but much more power-efficient, and that was before they bought ARM.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @09:58PM (3 children)
For amazing battery life while not sacrificing performance, I would love to have one of the new M1 macbook airs running Linux. In a few years if these end up cheap enough on the used market, I'll probably pick one up if Marcan and Rosenzweig are successful.
And, props to Alyssa Rosenzweig who reverse engineered arm's mali GPU, and wrote the free panfrost mali driver while she was still in high school!
I used to worry about all the grey hair among free software developers, but it looks like there will be extremely capable younger folks to take over and carry the torch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @11:44PM (2 children)
Over on that other place they posted an article comparing serious programmers with serial killers. I didn't read the comments, but I hope they said that real programmers smell bad, live on pizza and Jolt Cola, and don't stop until they have found that elegant solution.
I haven't written a line of code I'd be proud of in 15-years. I had figured that the real programmers were slipping away, to be replaced by arrogant script kiddies. Maybe there is a chance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @11:51PM (1 child)
And, Real Programmers cried on the day Lynard Skynyrd died.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @11:58PM
It's Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Steve Jobs would have caught that error in the next release.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @11:27PM (1 child)
I'm looking at a Mac for the first time, when my 7yo Win7 laptop gives out. And my even older Win7 Netbook, too. I'd love to move to a newer platform after using X86 for... wow, it's over 34 years, now! It was an adventure in its day, but its day has long passed.
As long as free software still runs on the old Win7 machine, I'll coast until something breaks. And the Samsung 850Pro still has 4-years on its warranty.
Something like a Dell XPS 13 with Linux and a maybe 2 CPUs, should make the transition easier. But short of that, the Macbook Air is attractive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @08:08PM
https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-personal-computer.html [mntre.com]
or system76
or maybe even lenovo
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @03:07AM
Apple is teh Gay, and Microsoft is teh big, bruiser-bulldyke.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday January 26 2021, @04:45AM (2 children)
The chip appears to be pretty badass but it also comes with the Apple Tax. The price:performance ratio still ain't competitive with AMD in my opinion, so I just don't much care.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 26 2021, @04:30PM (1 child)
So long as you're paying normal prices for AMD, not the e-bay scalper prices. Otherwise, there's not much difference in the costs.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 27 2021, @03:22PM
Don't buy from scalpers and there's suddenly no money in scalping and they stop doing it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.