Top
Best
New

Posted by todsacerdoti 8 hours ago

Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3(bsky.app)
427 points | 162 comments
internetter 7 hours ago|
I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.
iknowstuff 7 hours ago||
How many peaked with our curiosity and exploration software engineering as teenagers and subsequently got ground down by 9to5 corporate soul drain T_T
nout 5 hours ago|||
It's not business critical to answer your curiosity now. File it as a ticket, put it on a backlog and move on.
Aurornis 1 hour ago||||
Very, very few people came anywhere near this level of focus and execution at the same age.

People like this are truly extraordinary. You could give a lot of engineers infinite financial runway and no corporate job ever and they’d still never reach this level of performance.

Some people really are next level.

bsimpson 5 hours ago||||
I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.

Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."

banku_brougham 4 hours ago|||
This is an urgently dark pattern to avoid for parents, but I feel helpless as my own development was heckuv random
jack_pp 1 hour ago|||
Not sure I follow, you were afraid of being a "nerd" and dialed your ambitions to try to be "cooler"?

"because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in."

I think usually it's the other way around, or I'm not understanding this correctly. I was best at math in my class from grades 5 through 12 but never felt "awkward" because of it, rather I felt proud. Which is also wrong but I digress

benoau 7 hours ago||||
Just take the top ticket, thanks.
nnevatie 44 minutes ago||||
All aboard the soul tra…erhm…drain!
HumblyTossed 5 hours ago||||
But how much wealthier are you?
mid-kid 6 hours ago||||
It stings how much I relate to this.
fellowniusmonk 7 hours ago||||
I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.

The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.

Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.

VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.

Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.

AndrewDucker 6 hours ago|||
Or you could have universal healthcare. Which everyone else seems to manage and would untie a lot of people from specific jobs.
musictubes 31 minutes ago|||
Abortion is currently too divisive in the US to get a national health care system going. One side will absolutely refuse to include it and the other will absolutely require it. If one side brute forces it there will be immense backlash.

Along similar lines it isn't clear that having the federal government controlling healthcare at a more fundamental level is a good idea. Many (most?) would shudder at the thought of this administration controlling healthcare.

zozbot234 5 hours ago||||
Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons. It's not about the model of provision, it's about whether the sector itself is sustainable. U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.
Muromec 1 hour ago|||
>Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons.

coughs in Ukrainian

Noaidi 4 hours ago|||
> healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation

Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

And regulation is lacking in Health Insurance and enforcement is lacking in healthcare. (So many doctors that have committed malpractice just switch hospitals.

> U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.

Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

So please stop with these right wing baby bird food regurgitation.

Aurornis 1 hour ago|||
> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

There’s a crazy amount of corruption in the healthcare space. Some of the medical fraud busts that come out every year have staggeringly large sums attached. In some areas there are still schemes that openly recruit poor people to use their information to bill for medical care that is not actually necessary or provided. It’s wild.

> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Sorry, the world isn’t so simple that you can pick your villains (insurance companies and private equity) and declare everyone else to be free from blame. There’s a lot of bad behavior in these systems at every level. Yes, including some doctors.

If we removed insurance overhead entirely, your healthcare costs wouldn’t change more than a few percent. It’s amazing that everyone united against insurance companies as the cause of high healthcare costs when they barely take a few percent of the overall spend.

jorvi 1 hour ago||||
> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

It is actually the opposite.

UnitedHealth, one of the 'worst' insurers in terms of denials, has a profit margin of ~5% [0]. It is mainly the providers that overcharge, under the guise of "the less and lower we bill, the less and lower insurance pays us".

Insurance only works if there is at least as much going into the pot as is going out. What do you think would happen if insurances weren't denial hawks?

Get angry at your doctor for overcharging you whilst using insurance companies as the heel.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

Detrytus 1 hour ago||
As a person who moved to US from Europe recently I can say that prices charged by US healthcare providers are ridiculous - all overpriced 10-20x compared to my home country.
zozbot234 3 hours ago|||
> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

¿Por qué no los dos? Guess what, it's a lot more likely that insurance companies will go corrupt if what they interact with - healthcare - is corrupt.

> private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Guess what is limiting private equity's ability to compete amongst themselves in expanding the effective provision of healthcare and driving costs lower for the ultimate stakeholders i.e. patients? That's right: doctors, hospitals (including those that are nominally not-for-profit, but where the profits just turn into salary for those who can control that flow of money) and government regulation throughout the sector.

fellowniusmonk 6 hours ago||||
I can't think of any credible reason not to have universal healthcare at this point.

Maybe 20 years ago but there is too much empirical data across multiple countries and environments now.

Assuming our cost for care drops commiserate to what's been seen in other countries we could use the saving to increase merit scholarships for the contributing young as a introductory form of UBI.

nozzlegear 1 hour ago|||
Strictly from a realpolitik standpoint, universal healthcare like the systems found in Europe is unlikely to happen because too much of the American economy is tied up in healthcare and healthcare services. People trying to improve the system here in the US would be better served by looking for a fix that's uniquely American (ACA, all-payer rates, public option, etc.), rather than trying to tear out what we have and replace it with universal healthcare.

Mandatory disclaimer that I don't like our health insurance or healthcare prices any more than anybody else does, and in a perfect world I'd love to have universal healthcare instead.

scns 6 hours ago||||
> I can't think of any credible reason not to have universal healthcare at this point.

When you grab em by their Amygdala, the naked monkeys will do what you want. Even to their own detriment.

As soon as they are in fight-or-flight-mode, (most) people cannot be reasoned with.

Sad but true

throw0101a 5 hours ago||
> When you grab em by their Amygdala, the naked monkeys will do what you want. Even to their own detriment.

Even to their own death (and the death of friends/family):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697553-dying-of-whiten...

giancarlostoro 6 hours ago|||
It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.
throw0101a 5 hours ago|||
> It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

Single payer / universal healthcare ≠ doctors/nurses are government employees (necessarily).

You go to your local health care provider, show your card, and received treatment. The single payer (government) then gets billed and money is transferred to the providers account.

If the government is shutdown, there could be a delay in payment in outstanding bills, but that does not mean health care providers shutdown. Medicare ran during the last shutdown:

* https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/government-shutdo...

* Telehealth was: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/medicare-patients-go-wit...

Social Security cheques went out too:

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-security-government-shut...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_gov...

Lots of stuff can potentially be automated, and so continue to run.

9x39 4 hours ago||
It's possible for some of that to continue, but we really don't know what would happen if we directly connect payrolls and finances of the healthcare industry to the federal government in the US. It's a fair question how such a big connection would suffer when the government is punitively closed in a faustian bargain as part of a political struggle, as seems to be common recently.

There might be a few top-down emergency provisions to ensure checks go out to keep the system from toppling, but I wouldn't work if my pay is frozen and neither would my plumber, electrician, lawyer, etc. The last few shutdowns have run over a month - that can easily exceed the cash reserves of most businesses (that would be providers) and large businesses would shutter or have layoffs before burning that much cash.

We can't be so confident in how a $5T/year system would react if its primary cash flow valve is turned off, is all. Handwaving away the scope and complexity doesn't help anything.

PygmySurfer 3 hours ago||||
> It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

How about fixing the government so it can’t be shut down because a few hundred politicians can’t agree on the next budget?

t-3 1 hour ago|||
Neither party is interested in amending the Constitution, which would be necessary, and even if they were, the country is so deeply divided that it would likely be unsuccessful except maybe to knock a few inalienable rights off the list.
nozzlegear 2 hours ago|||
> How about fixing the government so it can’t be shut down because a few hundred politicians can’t agree on the next budget?

"Thanks I'm cured" material. You're not the first person to think of that, and the fact that it hasn't been done yet probably means it can't be done very easily.

spease 3 hours ago||||
Just because the fed exists doesn’t mean the entire economy shuts down with the government.

It depends on how it’s structured.

lotsofpulp 5 hours ago||||
> Or you could have universal healthcare.

No, they could not have, based on the voting records of the previous 30 years of the federal US Congress. Even what they have passed only by the skin on their teeth.

The only federal wealth redistribution policy in the US in my lifetime of almost 4 decades only had a 6 month window of passing in 2009. And half the population still hates it, and has worked and succeeded at gutting major parts of it.

christkv 5 hours ago|||
Even better you can have both like a lot of countries in Europe. The access to public healthcare also keeps the premium down. Extensive cover for a family of four is less than 200 in Spain a month out of pocket.
cladopa 5 hours ago||
Actually in Spain Social Security is 30 to 40% of what you earn. From the remainder 60% it is up to 50% in IRPF taxes, so you could pay 70% of what you earn.

The trick is that Franco hid the social security tax in the company side so normal people don't see it, but it is there.

Over that there is IBI for your house, there is IVA on anything you buy, and there are central bank inflation taxing anything you own in absolute terms.

avadodin 3 hours ago||
Europe always overcharging and underdelivering.

I am forever thankful for the Socialism that allowed me to get a degree for $3k, though.

The downside is of course over-enrollment but at least the bartenders didn't come out $50k into debt. I hear it is different now.

jacquesm 5 hours ago|||
What surprises me - even after decades of wondering about this - is how rare the intrinsically motivated people are.
varispeed 5 hours ago||||
If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.

If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.

You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.

sysworld 5 hours ago|||
Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF). Don't sell investments when the market crashes, just ride it out (assuming you bought diversified fund). Don't stock pick, it's largely gambling and 99% of people can't beat the market doing it. If you must stock pick, do at most, 5% of your investments. Avoid actively managed/high fee mutual funds/ETFs. Research clearly shows, long term they do worse then the market. (And if there is an active fund that does end up beating the market long term, you have no way of knowing which fund that would be ahead of time)

The Millionaire Next Door is a great book, and gives a good perspective on money.

If anyone here is interested, Google the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Even just doing the first 2 letters, Financial Independence, would be huge, and give you way more flexibility.

When/if you retire early, keep doing things to keep your mind and body active. Most people who retire stop doing the things that kept them healthy, and there body deteriorates quickly (with xyz illnesses).

The sad true is that, for many, work forces them to do the basics to keep your body running ok.

zozbot234 4 hours ago|||
> Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money

This is great advice anyway, even if you were born poor/working class. With the added proviso that you should be paying down your debt, highest interest rate first, since that will have far higher returns than your average investment. Also make sure that you have enough liquid cash set aside that you'll be able to deal quickly and completely with any issues that might come up; this makes a significant difference to your ability to live and work stress-free.

erxam 4 hours ago|||
But what's the point of it being long-term? I want fuck-off money right now. What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house and everyone and everything I cared about is long gone?

Why do I want to have a million in the bank by age 70 if I'm going to kill myself by age 30-35?

nick__m 3 hours ago|||
How old are you ? I used to espouse similar view but now that I am past 40, I regret not starting investing in my 20 and see myself living well into my 80's.

That punk-ish no future mentality usually dampen past 30-35!

hunter-gatherer 12 minutes ago||
This is true. On the other hand, I've found myself lately starting to wane a little bit the other way. Let me explain. I'm doing ok, because I got involvednin the FIRE movement early and invested early. Now about to be 40, and having a couple kids, I've realized that so long as I have no debt and good security (enough to see my kids into adulthood) then what is the money for??? To be clear, I haven't started spending my retirement money yet, but I already know I'm never going to quit working. So.... I don't know, you know?
tdhz77 3 hours ago||||
Take out your retirement early. Live on it for 5 years and then back to the grind for 5. Live your best life and die with zero not a million.
nntwozz 3 hours ago|||
70 is the new 30 didn't you get the memo?
banku_brougham 4 hours ago|||
Adding my voice of concurrence, I would say 'Comrade' but people take it the wrong way.
preisschild 7 hours ago||||
Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.
mistrial9 5 hours ago||||
How many went ChaosKlub and found themselves on the run?
PlatoIsADisease 4 hours ago|||
Why not start your own software company?

I made big money in my 20s, I can retire. Now I just play and gamble on my company to go from ~2M to 100M.

xeonmc 6 hours ago|||
If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.
mid-kid 6 hours ago|||
They used to go work on homebrew for nintendo consoles instead. Times change.
fragmede 6 hours ago|||
It's genuinely nice hardware, and everyone's gotta have a hobby. But it's not all of them. Geohot did some hardware stuff and hasn't (afaik) been working on Asahi. Linus was 21 when Linux was first released. Of course, Apple silicon ARM laptops didn't exist in the wild then, so we can let both of those pass.
matthewfcarlson 5 hours ago||
My personal conspiracy theory is that they're actually the same person, perhaps with some time traveling hijinks?
kamranjon 4 hours ago||
Asahi is one of the projects I support monetarily cause I really hope that one day I can run linux natively on my M4 max with GPU acceleration. They did an amazing job with M1 and M2 - great to see they are still pushing forward after the departure of Alyssa Rosenzweig, who did a lot of the work on the GPU support for those.

Edit: Here is their donation page if you're interested in chipping in as well: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux

storystarling 2 hours ago|
It is worth noting the distinction between display acceleration and compute support here. While the desktop rendering is impressive, for local AI or LLM inference the Linux stack on M-series is still significantly behind Metal/MPS on macOS. I tried to switch my local dev environment over recently but without a mature compute stack it is hard to justify leaving macOS if you need to run models locally.
jsheard 7 hours ago||
Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.
adgjlsfhk1 7 hours ago||
The main reason M3 took a long time isn't related to m3 itself, but rather that the asahi project took on a ton of tech debt to get M1/M2 working. M3 wasn't too difficult, but before taking on the additional tech debt, the Asahi team focused on getting all of their changes upstreamed to the linux kernel.
monocasa 6 hours ago|||
The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide. That took almost all of their energy for the last year and they ended up quitting.
xattt 6 hours ago||

   > The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide.
Is this the Torvalds/Hector dispute that comes on the Google AI summary, or was this a three-letter agency type of harassment faced by Aaron Swartz?
gpm 6 hours ago|||
Neither actually... It was an anti trans/kiwi farms brigade...

The Torvalds dispute probably came about in part because of defensive behavior triggered this brigade but was really unrelated.

alright2565 6 hours ago|||
Anti-trans hate.
ggljejejj 5 hours ago||
Trans hate.
OJFord 4 hours ago||
GP definitely meant the same thing, i.e. 'hate [that is] anti-transsexualism' to your 'hate [against] transsexualism'.
nrabulinski 43 minutes ago||
FYI, transsexual is an outdated term, with transgender being generally preferred instead :)
tgtweak 7 hours ago|||
Prognosis is then that work for m4/m5 should be relatively straight line now that refactoring is done?
OGEnthusiast 7 hours ago|||
M4 is apparently even harder because of some new hardware-level page table protections.

Source from Asahi contributor: https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/114278224116678776

eddyg 6 hours ago||
Memory Integrity Enforcement, perhaps?

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

worldsavior 6 hours ago||
It's "Secure Page Table Monitor". https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/security/sec8b776536b/.... The kernel requires it so they need to emulate SPTM.
nrabulinski 32 minutes ago|||
This is not exactly correct. They wouldn’t need to emulate SPTM, since SPTM is already running. And to be very correct, SPTM is a “process” running in a separate privilege level to the regular privilege levels found on arm processors. The reason it’s a pain is because pre M4 the bootloader gave you complete control over the CPU, including the Apple-exclusive extensions like GLx, the special privilege levels e.g. SPTM is running at. Since M4 the bootloader handles that, so asahi team has to either cope with being dropped after GL is already initialized and locked down, or running in a mode with all of Apple extensions disabled. So it’s not a problem for running Linux, but it’s a problem for running macOS with a thin abstraction layer to intercept talking with devices like the GPU, which made reverse engineering for them significantly easier.
eddyg 4 hours ago|||
Thanks!
zozbot234 7 hours ago||
The M5 reportedly has a newer generation GPU compared to the M3/M4. For one thing, the GPU-side Neural Accelerators are obviously new to the M5 series. Other stuff is harder to know for sure until it gets looked into from a technical POV.
mananaysiempre 6 hours ago||
It’s not like neural accelerators on non-Apple consumer hardware get much use on Linux, either, so that does not sound like much of a dealbreaker.
wtallis 6 hours ago||
The matrix/tensor math units added to GPUs do see widespread use, both for running LLMs and for the ML-based upscaling used by most video games these days (eg. NVIDIA DLSS). The NPUs that are separate from the GPU and designed more with efficiency in mind rather than raw performance are a different thing, and that's what's still looking for a killer app in spite of all the marketing effort.
bsimpson 5 hours ago||
Related but not:

I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?

I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).

I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.

troad 3 hours ago||
You can try to remap KDE keybindings but it won't affect Gnome applications, games, etc.

Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)

This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)

Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)

neobrain 1 hour ago|||
Given that you're already using Home Manager: Make sure to also take a look at plasma-manager! [1]

It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.

(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager

terhechte 3 hours ago|||
KDE has a setting to switch the cmd & command keys so that e.g. command+c copies instead of ctrl+c. This works in all KDE apps (it will not work if you install any Gnome/GTK app, though). I forgot the setting but its something in advanced and used to be called Emacs key binds, but now I think it just refers to the keys.

Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

bsimpson 3 hours ago||
Thanks. I've also seen a derivative called Toshy. They both appear to be surprisingly invasive.

I want something like Sublime Text's keybindings, where I can just iterate over all of KDE's system defaults and ask Gemini to convert them to their Mac equivalents. Can deal with individual applications separately, but since basically the only things I use are Chrome, Ghostty, Sublime, and the KDE shell, it seems like it ought to be pretty straightforward.

weikju 1 hour ago|||
> What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?

My recommendation is to get used to the KDE keybindings, and individual applications' keybindings. You'll never be able to fully replicate the macOS keybinding experience, so better get used to it. (Same when people use macOS, I recommend to get used to their keybindings and not try to replicate Linux/Windows)

cies 3 hours ago||
There's a folder where KDE stores your user's settings. Shortcuts are in their own file...

For me it's `/home/$USER_NAME/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc`

bsimpson 2 hours ago||
Interesting! That might be the file I was looking for.

I see 260 lines (some of which are whitespace). I wonder if that's all of the default keybindings, or if there are more hiding somewhere.

weinzierl 6 hours ago||
Relevant 39C3 talk from three weeks ago:

Porting Linux to Apple Silicon

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM

jojomodding 3 hours ago|
This talk in particular explains the challenges with M4 and M5 chips, but also a lot more.
SirMaster 6 hours ago||
Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.
thfuran 6 hours ago||
Because Intel/AMD regularly contribute kernel changes to maintain support for their own hardware, whereas Apple keeps making undocumented changes that Asahi has to reverse engineer.
saurik 5 hours ago|||
I don't think that's it, as we usually don't even have to update the kernel: when I get a new PC, my old software still boots and runs. The answer has to also provide some analogous note that, unlike new x86 hardware having an interest in still being able to run old versions of Windows, new Apple hardware (maybe... one must presume for the story to be consistent) must not really care about being able to boot old copies of macOS.
mschuster91 4 hours ago||
> unlike new x86 hardware having an interest in still being able to run old versions of Windows

The "secret sauce" is... we're not speaking about "x86" systems, at least as long as UEFI doesn't enter the game. In fact what we're talking about is "IBM PC-compatible x86" and its BIOS that provides ultra-low-level interfaces for input and output (including a very very basic USB stack). These can then be used to continuously load higher level systems.

Basically what you start with in the BIOS land is the boot sector, you got barely enough code capacity that you have input from the disk and text console output. That you can use to load a second stage bootloader (e.g. GRUB, NTLDR) which now has better knowledge of filesystems, maybe even enough of the driver to bring the GPU up with the basic VESA interface. And that then loads the actual operating system which brings up the rest of the system - proper GPU, a full featured USB stack, you name it. And layered in between that is ACPI for dynamic hardware discovery.

UEFI based systems can skip a lot of the slow early code used to boot in BIOS - it hands over directly to the OS itself in the best case, or to a high-level bootloader such as the modern Windows bootloader that can do all sorts of magic.

In contrast, the ARM world sucks hardcore - there are no standards for board bringup and boundaries, there is only DeviceTree which replaces a very small part of the wonder/hellscape that is ACPI. And that is something even Apple couldn't get rid of. Hell, you can't even be sure it's the CPU that brings everything up - there are weird systems like Broadcom's VideoCore architecture that underpins the Raspberry Pi, where the video chip part of the SoC handles bringing up the ARM CPU.

Basically, x86 has a ton of legacy and warts but for that, backwards compatibility and to a degree even forwards compatibility is a thing. ARM in contrast... it's like if you let a bunch of drugged up monkeys loose.

pzmarzly 2 hours ago||
> In contrast, the ARM world sucks hardcore - there are no standards for board bringup and boundaries

There are standards for ARM, and they are called UEFI, ACPI, and SMBIOS. ARM the company is now pushing hard for their adoption in non-embedded aarch64 world - see ARM SBBR, SBSA, and PC-BSA specs.

hu3 1 hour ago|||
Yes but these standards are clearly far from enough to run Linux on M chips otherwise the support wouldn't lag so far behind.
bigyabai 1 hour ago|||
They should have pushed for it years ago, ARM's devicetree clutter and bootloader "diversity" has been a curse on the end user. At this point it's too late, and doubtful that they even have the influence to make OEMs adopt it.
SirMaster 5 hours ago|||
I've definitely ran older kernels of Linux on new Intel/AMD CPUs where the kernel release vastly pre-date the CPU release.
yonatan8070 4 hours ago||
I've found that doing this on laptops is often more problematic, the OS itself will usually boot fine, but you might have issues with drivers for supporting hardware like the GPU, audio, etc.
sroussey 6 hours ago|||
M1/M2 were pretty similar.

M3 had gigantic GPU changes.

M4 had some security stuff added, and M5 much more so. Not sure how/if those can be disabled. Others can be explain why this matters better than I can.

worldsavior 6 hours ago|||
They change the arch and add new features all the time. In M4 they added new kernel protections which now they need to somehow emulate.
zer0zzz 6 hours ago||
1) Intel and AMD help to implement support in Linux before their chips even ship. Actually a sanitized version of the Intel graphics ISA bspec is actually available to the OSS community too.

Apple on the other hand provides no support. The one nice thing they did do is allow their bootloader to boot non-apple signed OSes. They do not do this on iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Watches, or homepods btw.

2) The GPU ISA changes drastically and often. Its not entirely uncommon for the entire instruction set to change entirely within one generation. Every change to the ISA would require an entire round of new reverse engineering (I suspect, ive never reversed).

yonatan8070 4 hours ago||
I do wonder why Apple chooses not to lock down the Mac to just Mac OS like all their other hardware? I'm sure the sales from people who intend to run something other than MacOS look like a floating-point error on the scales Apple operates.
musictubes 26 minutes ago|||
I don't think it is possible to have a locked down development machine. You have to be able to run arbitrary code on a development machine so they can never lock it down like iOS is.

There are plenty of other ways they can be less open and hackable than Linux but it can never get to the point of the iPhone.

prmoustache 4 hours ago||||
You replied to your own question. Locking down the system for 3 users worldwide and making sure it stays locked is not worth the effort.

Just not publishing the specs is enough to delay so much the effort that those machines are out of warranty and have depreciated so much by the time they are supported that they aren't competitors to the mac ecosystem anymore.

intrasight 4 hours ago|||
They don't because it's a floating-point error now. But with the continued enshitification of MacOS, it likely won't be in the future, and they just may lock it down. But being so hostile to the hacking community would do more harm than good, so I doubt that they would do so even if Linux use on Macs grew to >1%.
viraptor 2 hours ago||
This is awesome, but we'll still need to hear the full support status. Which subsystems are covered by existing development, which need new drivers. Can't wait for the update on https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
jaredcwhite 4 hours ago||
I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!
ashirviskas 1 hour ago|
Apple made lower than 16GB M3 models? Man, can't wait till the cheapest model is at least 128GB.
jaredcwhite 31 minutes ago||
Yeah, M4 was the generation when the minimum got bumped up to 16GB.
throw0101a 5 hours ago||
Is there any kind of multi-boot support if someone wants to mainly run macOS but checkout Linux on M-chips 'part time'?
treesknees 5 hours ago||
Yes, in fact deleting the MacOS install is not a supported way to run the system.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/faq/#can-i-dual-boot-asa...

Encounter 5 hours ago||
Yes, it installs into a separate partition and you choose whether to boot into macOS or Linux.
dralley 8 hours ago|
Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.
More comments...