My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
Sure you can
> You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
No
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers.
or are you saying apple devices are loss-leader prior the app store revenue ?
that's the model taken to the extreme
It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing.
Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
They just don't care.
They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent
> is laughabe
And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting.
Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website.
It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.
Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.
If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.
You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.
Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
just my $0.02.
For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines
You can run any flavor of Linux you like in a virtual machine, while booted into the native OS.
You can still boot Linux natively on it.
the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware).
This isn't about running VMs.
> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...
Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.
That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it.
Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...
This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.
It is trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Apple makes money selling hardware.
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
Hell, I was given a bunch of old iphones recently, all of which are newer and better hardware than my phone. I wiped them and donated them to charity.
Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.
Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.
[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
This is a shocking development.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
From Wikipedia:
One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
b) it's useful in a comment thread like this so people can quickly see what the 'caveats' mentioned in the title of the post are
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
But Intel and AMD post documents to explain how to use their hardware. Apple doesn’t. So it’s not an equivalent effort by any stretch.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar