Linux on Apple Silicon with Alyssa Rosenzweig

I haven't listened to this podcast yet so I don't know if this comes up, but a particularly scary part of running a custom OS on Apple Silicon machines is that the internal speakers temperature is regulated in software. The Asahi devs have had to painstakingly reverse engineer and reimplement the safety DSP that macOS uses on each device, and add some safety margin, because if they get it wrong they could literally destroy the speakers (and IIRC at least one of their own MacBooks did have its speakers sacrificed along the way).

I wonder if there will be a similar issue with the displays when Asahi gets around to supporting HDR on machines equipped with FALD mini-LED backlights (or XDR, as Apple calls it). HDR displays usually regulate their brightness to keep the panel from getting too hot, and if Apple does that in software too then Asahi will need to replicate it.

Reverse engineering the first bit of Apple's flagship M1 CPU, which was implemented in the original iPhone released back in '08, through an ARM-based architectural analysis, and integrating it into Linux kernel system calls is an extreme measure. This reduplication of the original dump, checking its hex value, then altering it to see if the application is functional. Doing x,y, and z, then seeing if it works inside VM hypervisor-space.

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What would be possible if everyone interested in Linux-on-macOS chipped in $5 each month? I wonder if this could fund a big enough team to make this super-polished.

its insane to me that people are working so hard on reverse engineering apple silicon. like, the diagrams are right there in cupertino. it just seems like such a waste. its like during some kind of economic depression there are people starving and struggling while a bunch of food and resources are just sitting around not being used. existential grid-lock.

Does anyone have experience running Asahi on a home server? Does the silicon’s power efficiency when running macOS translate to Asahi? I’d also be really curious to hear if there are any gotchas and/or reliability issues. For example, features such as hardware video decoding do not seem to be supported (yet).

the negative comments in this thread are frankly disappointing especially for a place called "hacker news". like Linux doesn't have roots in reverse engineering and continued reverse engineering and people here constantly "advocating" for open source drivers from likes of Nvidia instead of the close source binary blobs.

yet here someone makes great effort and most comments are negative Nancy's asking why it's being done or bringing up support issues with newer hardware revisions from a 1-3 person outfit that everyone said would be impossible to do.

Godspeed to the Asahi team, but as much as I envy the performance and efficiency of Apple silicon, I could never depend on a small group of hackers to reverse engineer every part of a closed system and to maintain it in perpetuity so that I can run free software on it. As brilliant as this team is, and as much progress as they've made, fighting against a trillion-dollar corporation that can decide to shut it down at any moment is a sisyphean endeavor. Spending thousands of dollars on that bet is a hard sell, even for tech nerds.

Not to mention that you'd be supporting a corporation that has this hostile stance towards their customers to begin with.

Meanwhile, other x86 and ARM manufacturers are making substantial improvements that are shortening Apple's lead. You're not losing much by buying a new CPU from them in 2024 or 2025, but you gain much more in return. Most importantly, the freedom to run any software you choose.

What they've been able to accomplish in such a short time is nothing short of amazing, and I applaud them for their efforts.

That said, I've been using Asahi for a month, and I'm ditching it. Maybe in a year or two it'll be stable, but for now it's got too many bugs and unsupported features. A lot of the problems come down to Wayland and KDE/Gnome, as you literally have to use Wayland. But there's plenty of other buggy or challenging parts that all add up to a very difficult working experience.

One of the biggest challenges I see is support for hardware and 3rd party apps. Not only do all the apps need to support this slightly odd Arm system, but so do hardware driver developers. I never realized before just how much of a Linux system works because most people had an incredibly common platform (x86_64). Even if Linux on Mac became incredibly popular, it would actually take away development focus on x86_64, and we'd see less getting done.

(This kind of problem is totally common among Linux laptops, btw; there's a ton of hardware out there and Linux bugs may exist in each one. Adding a new model doesn't add to the number of developers supporting them all. If anything, the Mac is probably benefited by the fact that it has so few models compared to the x86_64 world. But it's still only got so many devs, and 3rd party devs aren't all going to join the party overnight)

For those who didn't get my joke, she commonly dresses up as a witch at XDC :)

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