Notable Developer Starts Patreon to Fund Apple Silicon Linux Port

[wood1208]

There will be linux version lite for M1 laptops and server version for M1 MAC Pros. Microsoft might just port Windows on M1 based MACs. In few years, M1 MACs will be everywhere including beefed up 64-128 cores version in Data center Cloud. Higher performance at lower energy cost.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

It's going to be difficult to maintain this, but I'm glad someone is trying it.

I’d think it’d be a lot easier than other distros primarily because the range of hardware it’s expected to run on will be far narrower. Successive generations should be a superset of what came before.

 

[Epicepoc]

Isn't MacOS based on Unix which came originally from Bell Labs?

I used linux for years but finally left it because it seems almost impossible to get everything one wants on a distro.

That market is so fragmented its a quagmire.

Same is true for macOS distro.
Nice thing is you can choose using Linux, not so with Mac.
I find it most important to get everything to run (sometimes finally), especially open source projects and server stuff (to be out of the cloud).
I recently bought a rock64 (arm 64bit) and got everything I intended to work, even porting of Handbrake for example. It now sits on a rail together with a twin rock64 and 1TB ssd and 1/2TB sd space, humming happily at 2.2 W serving my website(s) mail servers and supplying disk space via nfs and samba to all other (iOS) devices at my local (wireless) lan.
I myself find this very impressive.

 

[gridlocked]

Proton is for x86 Linux though, you'd need to add in an emulator to make games work.


Kind of. You can think of Unix as a conceptual framework for how an OS should be designed. macOS follows that framework, as does Linux.

I don't believe macOS contains any actual code from the original, Bell Labs version of Unix.

I like this answer! Thanks.

 

[WestonHarvey1]

Waste of time. Apple will more than likely lock down the ability to boot from other operating systems.

No they won't. They are very specifically not doing that.

 

[Epicepoc]

macOS is a cousin of Linux, not a descendant.

Like homo sapiens does not descend from apes.

 

[mr.steevo]

Of course the irony is that Macs ARE running Linux, just a heavily customized version.

Wow! You totally proved Cunningham's Law with this statement.

 

[rgbrock1]

Of course the irony is that Macs ARE running Linux, just a heavily customized version.

Ahhhh, no. macOS is based upon Darwin and the Mach kernel. Both have Unix roots. (As does Linux to some extent but the Linux kernel branched off on its own)

 

[Marshall73]

Some people have too much time on their hands. Good luck to him tho, plenty of neckbeards will chip in to pay for his time.

 

[ArPe]

Waste of time and energy.

 

[Epicepoc]

FreeBSD or as the statement reads "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved." As seen when booting in verbose mode on a macOS system. The copyright BS over it during that time was epic with group after group trying to lock up the code. But it was the FreeBSD variant of it Apple used as their base alnog with the code they got from Xerox for the GUI..

No macOS is based on BSD (eventually 4.4) at the foundation Of NeXTStep.
FreeBSD is also derived from BSD at a later time and later merged with NeXTStep (BSD) to create the foundation of Mac OS X.
Apples GUI code was not from Xerox, the system they saw at Xerox was completely dissimilar in that is was an application development windowing environment for Smalltalk. Apple invented this windowing paradigma for the OS, so for all applications running on it.
In fact it was a complete rethinking of what they saw (or thought they saw) and a completely new implementation not at all related to the smaltalk environment of Xerox parc.

 

[Epicepoc]

You remember incorrectly.

POSIX - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

True but only for a short while, and a specific version of POSIX.
‘Compliance’ is a tricky word because in posix terminology, it means that you can implement a stub function (doing nothing but only ‘comply’ to the function parameters and return types) to be compliant.
I found that out while porting a big project and needed certain posix functions ...
So posix compliance has no real meaning.
“Een wassen neus” (Dutch) so to say.

 

[glowplug]

I'm probably going to regret this but what would be the purpose of running Linux?

I tried it out years ago, before I switched to a Mac, and couldn't see the purpose of it.

Control. starting with Macos 11 Big Sur, Apple has exempted system network traffic from Firewalls and VPN. This is a huge-huge-huge privacy and security violation.

I'd love to have an M1, but refuse to use Big Sur unless and until Apple changes course on this.

Apple Lets Some of its Big Sur macOS Apps Bypass Firewall and VPNs

A new feature in macOS Big Sur that allows many Apple apps to bypass firewalls and VPNs.

thehackernews.com

 

[LeadingHeat]

That's like using parallels or VirtualBox, not same thing as directly running linux

I got confused by this article at first, because I thought I remembered Apple in the keynote saying that these new M1 chips had support for running Linux (and windows was obviously missing from that statement, which everyone focused on). But that makes sense that it’s just a virtualization of Linux running on macOS, and not building a Linux flavor to run directly from the M1. Thanks!

 

[guzhogi]

Forgive my ignorance, but how long does a project like this take?

 

[ddtmm]

It's going to be difficult to maintain this, but I'm glad someone is trying it.

What are you talking about??

 

[mannyvel]

What are you talking about??

Mac-on-Linux only came about because Apple did the work to get things to boot on the Mac. Custom chips are the real problem with Linux ports, and Apple has a ton of them. Reverse engineering a GPU? That's going to be really, really hard.

Maybe he could get a start by disassembling the video driver in EFI (or whatever the M1 uses to boot). For anything higher level, well, woof.

 

[name99]

That's like using parallels or VirtualBox, not same thing as directly running linux

The more important question is SO WHAT? What's so all-important about bare metal?
What I see here is the eternal human propensity to whine about SOMETHING.

The only question of interest here is the GPU. And I cannot get anyone in the Linux community to give me a non-BS answer about what they actually hope to achieve here with bare metal. The solution seems obvious: temporarily use Mesa on MoltenVK on Metal, with a longer term solution that runs Mesa directly on Metal bypassing MoltenVK. So why is that not acceptable? What are the technical aspects that I am missing?

 

[sg9]

Mac mini linux server would be nice, but linux distro as a main desktop OS, no thanks. I tested Ubuntu 20.10 yesterday, I couldn't set different scaling options for laptop screen and external monitor. Feels like there is always something missing.

 

[ojfl]

I thought the Linux they were running of Parallels in the demo was already ARM-based. Was it an x86 version of it? It ran very smoothly in the video.

 

[duervo]

Taking a huge wait and see approach to this. The Linux world is stuffed with single-person-led open source projects that have later been abandoned, even with the best of intentions at the start.

This one has the added hurdle of what Linus mentioned.

It’ll take more than a Patreon-backed funding of this to make it succeed.

 

[JesperA]

Forgive my ignorance, but how long does a project like this take?

Edit: Why on earth did it change a reddit link into a freaking picture

Edit2: gah, how do i stop macrumors from converting the link to a picture?.....

Edit3, okay, atleast i could put it into a spoiler tag...


Depends, took me a week to get Linux running on M1:

Spoiler: big hunking picture

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/k4srp5

But my implementation is a heaping pile of junk so to do it seriously would take months & months, then probably waste years on fixing bugs & pull your hair out with "customer" support

But, yeah, impossible to give an accurate timeline, depends on way to many factors, so everything between 1 week (if you already have a good foundation to start on) to years, give and take

 

[hot-gril]

Mac-on-Linux only came about because Apple did the work to get things to boot on the Mac. Custom chips are the real problem with Linux ports, and Apple has a ton of them. Reverse engineering a GPU? That's going to be really, really hard.

Maybe he could get a start by disassembling the video driver in EFI (or whatever the M1 uses to boot). For anything higher level, well, woof.

Also, I'll bet there will be breaking changes in every single chip generation. This is a reverse-engineering effort.

 

[hot-gril]

Guess who makes Proton for Valve? CodeWeavers. Guess what they also make for Mac...Crossover. Guess what Crossover is... just another version of Proton / Wine only with MoltenVK support.

Steam in Linux with Proton "just works" for average people, Steam in Crossover takes significantly more effort. Does it even support the same games as Proton?

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Marcan knows what he's doing, he ported Linux to the Wii, PS3, and PS4 (and many other devices besides). The version of Linux for the PS4 can run games from Steam.

He's made it clear that the Apple Silicon port will be much harder due to all the custom components, particularly the GPU. But, that's why he set up a Patreon!

I do wonder whether Apple might actually provide some minimal amount of assistance (namely documentation, and possibly making an engineer available to answer occasional questions). It's not necessary, but it would help a lot, and why not help developers who are working to make your hardware more capable?

I can tell you why not. Because Apple are control freaks.