Barbs exchanged over Linux for M1 Silicon ... lest Apple's lawyers lie in wait

Porting a workable Linux to Apple's new silicon is a modern-day Holy Grail for some. Sadly, it's not all sunshine and rainbows for those undertaking the quest. Two outfits having a crack at it are Asahi Linux, which has the goal of getting a Linux functioning well enough on the silicon to the point where it could become a …

[Rich 2]

What am I missing here?

There seems to be some animosity between the two parties, but the story doesn't really say why.

Re reverse engineering practice - implying that Wade's team have not followed best practice? Dunno!? The Twatty links didn't say much, but maybe that's because I've disabled all the spy-scripts and stuff

[Dan 55]

Re: What am I missing here?

The products they've released over the past few years mean they've had to break Apple's special top-secret security several times over which makes Apple look bad and they won't let themselves be bought by Apple either, so the only thing Apple can do is release the lawyers to try and stop them.

[CRConrad]

Re: What am I missing here?

I think what was meant was the less-than-cordial tone between Corellium and Asahi, not Apple.

[bombastic bob]

Re: What am I missing here?

Apple makes HARDWARE. Their software (in theory) only runs on THEIR HARDWARE.

So WHY would they be AGAINST this? Wouldn't 'droid-clone on an iPhone SELL MORE PHONES?

They're apparently NOT thinking with PROFIT on their minds...

[Doug 3]

Re: What am I missing here?

but remember, each iDevice keeps you playing in the iWorld and purchasing more iProducts. So there is a motivation to keep said iDevice hardware running iSoftware.

[needmorehare]

Re: What am I missing here?

Linux could be repaired and kept going for as long as the spec of the hardware and the will of the community permits it. Beyond that, the only limitation is potential unfixable firmware security bugs at some point. However, Red Hat shows that 10 years isn’t unreasonable as a potential support lifecycle for just one major OS version. On the other hand, macOS gets around 3 years of support per major release and will typically support upgrading to new major versions on any given bit of kit for 5 years, giving a total lifecycle of somewhere around 8 years.

Installing Linux on bare metal would mean that some folks could skip buying a new Apple device and double the lifetime of their hardware. That is a lot of lost sales. I doubt Apple would stop people using the hypervisor to run Linux though, as that doesn’t interfere with their business. I can see them encouraging this path especially since one could theoretically run an XQuartz server on the host for GUI apps.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A lot of lost sales?

While I have an iPhone and a MacBook(3 actually), I've never spent a bent penny on any Apple Software for the last 10 years or so.

One of those MacBooks (2012 15in MBP) runs Linux very, very well.

Apple makes LOADSAMONEY on the hardware purchase and that's ok by me.

It is my choice not to spend money on things in the App Store. All the apps I need are free and don't contain in-app purchases. Yes, I'm strange like that.

I don't think Apple really minds or even cares if you don't spend any money in the App Stores.

When we see Linux running on an M1 (or later) device then I'll probably buy a Mini to replace an

Intel Nuc for my WordPress hosting. If there are other Arm based servers around then I'll take a look at them. I tried it on an Raspberry Pi 3b but it was a bit of a kludge. The Pi is not my firewall.

[TechHeadToo]

Re: A lot of lost sales?

Well then, that's two of us that are strange.

I no longer 'Have' to use windows on a daily basis, and I'm so much happier to be able to use PC stuff that just works, doesn't install crap or updates without asking me, and doesn't install drastic interface changes. When I have to use W10 to support other people, I find I'm increasingly annoyed by the absence of standards across the user interfaces and the weirdly unintuitive and confusing hidden configuration settings.

Apple stuff just works.

An old mac mini that must be a version 1 still works - no updates available for anything of course, but it just keeps going, doing what it does. Bit like my IBM as/400 - way past end of life as far the OS is concerned - but it keeps doing what it does.

It's all only 0's and 1's - so until a 0 or 1 wears out it should all still work. Eventually I'll maybe want the extra speed of the M1, but until then..

[anonanonanonanonanon]

Re: What am I missing here?

That's not the only motivation such tactics might be employed, protecting a brand is also another reason. Apple can vet all the software they run on it.

Lots of devs confuse iDevices for computers, but your grandma might not want their nephew to install the latest kewl hacks, and should somthing like that happen, it wouldn't be the hcker nephew that gets the blame but grandma blaming apple

[zuckzuckgo]

Re: What am I missing here?

>They're apparently NOT thinking with PROFIT on their minds...

Apple's most successful products - in terms of ongoing revenue - are walled gardens.

No software, service or hardware is allowed in without Apples getting their cut. They can't maintain that walled garden if they allow just anyone to install software on their hardware. The MacOS still allows users to install software from outside the garden but I am sure Apple wants to eventually apply the same restrictions to MacOS as iOS.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Re: What am I missing here?

This is Apple being Apple. They have always (since the 1980s) been bad about having restrictive systems and sue-happy lawyers. They maintain profit by maintaining the tightest possible control over their products and maintaining high prices and high profit margins. Don't like it, do what I do and don't buy any Apple products.

[Rockets]

Re: What am I missing here?

"others pondered the apparent lack of a GNU General Public Licence (GPL)" I think this was the source. The code that was released wasn't GPL despite the originators of the code stating they want to upstream it to the Linux kernel eventually.

[don't you hate it when you lose your account]

Good if

Your the small percentage of the population who both buy this kit and need linux. But for me it seems expensive indulgence. Horses for courses

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good if

Perhaps the lower power requirements would make it suitable for ARM-based clusters. Of course you'd have to work out if the higher purchase cost would be recouped in savings before they became obsolete...

[Len]

Re: Good if

The Mac Mini has been popular for build farms for a while now. Thousands of Mac Minis running macOS, Windows or Linux. It means you can natively build your code for that environment but only need to support one hardware type. I don't know if they still do but Mozilla used to have a Mac Mini server farm to produce the three 'Tier 1' flavours of Firefox.

Any build farm worth their salt will probably also be able to change the composition on the fly. Trouble with the Windows build? Just take 10% of the Mac and Linux builders and reboot them into the Windows build process for the day.

Now, obviously I don't expect those users to jump on a Linux distro hacked together by a slightly fly-by-night operation in one week but this is a start. In due course we will probably see mainstream distros running on Apple Silicon and they will have learned from these guys what works and what doesn't.

[DS999]

Re: Good if

You wouldn't need to boot Linux to run Linux on M1 Mac Minis that were part of a build farm, it could build them in a VM environment - connect to one IP/hostname for the native Mac, another for Linux running in a VM and a third for Windows/ARM running in yet another VM. Obviously you'd want to do something to lock the other two out when one was used so you don't have multiple builds competing with each other - especially since the currently available M1 Mac Minis have only 16 GB.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Good if

it has been my experience that builds take longer when running in a VM. Native would, in theory, cost less than VM.

[DS999]

Re: Good if

It shouldn't be more than a few percent penalty. Pretty much all cloud computing is done in VM, and seems to work just fine. The small performance penalty would be worth it for the flexibility of not having hardware dedicated to only building with a single OS.

[John Robson]

Re: Good if

Given the cpu and gpu grunt you get - you need to compare with equivalent non Apple laptops, which are generally substantially more than a thousand dollars - and that's before you look at the battery life.

Yes it's more expensive than the cheapest laptop you can buy, but would you really want to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look forward to this coming to fruition

Will this be the most performant silicon you can get to run a Linux program on?

[ThomH]

Re: Look forward to this coming to fruition

The M1 won't be, being Apple's low-end offering. It's extremely competitive within its price segment both in terms of performance and power usage, but you don't have to get to the top of AMD's range before a Threadripper is doing what its name promises.

To put it another way: no, Apple has not bested processors that cost $4,000 standalone with one that comes with an entire computer around it for $700.

That being admitted, I have an M1 Mini and — for a regular, home computer — it's glorious.

[sw guy]

Re: Look forward to this coming to fruition

Oh, and there are some not cheap chips involved in running Linux and cited in the TOPxxx of high-performance computers

[DS999]

Re: Look forward to this coming to fruition

Those are just a bunch of computers running software that lets them work together on certain HPC problems, not special CPUs. Basically thousands of individual CPUs like a Xeon or Threadripper installed in blades across dozens of rows of racks in a datacenter.

[kat_bg]

Re: Look forward to this coming to fruition

Actually was not even the plan. M1 goal was to fix the poor performance/thermals of low end Intel Macbooks and/or Macbook Air. This goal was exceeded and some. I own a Macbook Pro with the M1 SOC and beats the hell out of a Asus gaming laptop in terms of usability and battery life.

Next gen of ARM SOC from Apple will focus on performance (not that M1 is a slouch but in GPU need some extra grunt) and the next target would be the 16 inch Macbook Pro and IMacs.

[DS999]

Re: Look forward to this coming to fruition

They also need to fill in the "high end" version of the stuff the M1 is in. They have always offered more than one performance level for the Mac Mini, Macbook Air etc. The higher performance SoC that goes in the 16" MBP and iMac will most likely also be offered in higher priced versions of the Mac Mini, Macbook Air, and MBP 13".

The fan in the Mac Mini was designed for 65W TDP Intel CPUs, so it could easily handle many more CPU and GPU cores. The Macbook Air, with its passive cooling, might not though, at least not for long before it had to throttle.

[Anonymous Coward]

By the looks of it ...

... There's No Such Thing As Bad Publicity.

[Anonymous Coward]

UNIX 03 certified

Good enough for me. No need for Linux.

[ThomH]

Re: UNIX 03 certified

I think the advantage with Linux support would just be more options: some people prefer certain package managers, or subscribe to certain support packages, or just can't afford to tie themselves to a single supplier.

For those people, bringing Apple's new systems into the fold as an additional choice could be a win because they are ahead in some very tangible ways: battery life relative to performance being possibly the least ambiguous.

I get a lot of personal mileage out of macOS also being a UNIX but I would be very unlikely to build a corporate plan upon it. And not just because I'm orders of magnitude below that pay grade.

[Jason Hindle]

Re: UNIX 03 certified

Not having a native package manager is a surprising omission from Apple. Brew is alright but not fully supported on M1 (yet).

[ReaddyEddy]

FFWIW I’ve successfully installed Ubuntu Arm server under Parallels beta for M1 so visualisation is possible.At present or at least the last time I looked Docker isn’t supported yet. Tensorflow runs native on M1 so that’s one attraction, another is the video encode capability though Linux isn’t a core prerequisite for either. The key issue here is clearly drivers for the GPU, and what that might mean in terms of the future of ARM.

[Jason Hindle]

It’ll happen

For no other reason than it will sell more Macs. I think Bootcamp will rise again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hector Martin is out of his mind..

>"they are free to submit their Linux changes for upstream inclusion directly to kernel subsystem maintainers, or to contact us to contribute."

Why the hell would they need to contribute through Asahi.. Hector isn't a maintainer of anything in the kernel so why would they bother to send anything through his team? He's hurt because they beat him to it after he made a big song and dance but hadn't done much except get a pretty logo made up.

Actual maintainers of the areas that need to be changed are already reviewing their patches and he won't get a say.