linux

Great job for bringing up new apple's silicon chip , m4 a18 to linux . I hope the project keep alive and maintained , and if you can't mainline it , remmber many other project do out-of-tree version well maintained [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] . [1]: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux Rust for Linux [2]: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ Android OS linux kernel [3]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs OpenZFS kernel module [4]: https://github.com/awemorris/linux-pc98 Linux pc98 / 32 bit x86 [5]: https://github.com/OpenDingux/linux Linux on retro gaming device [6]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux Linux on older apple silicon M1/M2/M3 chip [7]: https://github.com/microsoft/wsl2-linux-kernel Linux on Windows

For me https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/fairydust installed and worked without any tweeks. Don't think you can direct funding, but https://opencollective.com/asahilinux contributes to getting this fully officially supported.

Yes, with major tradeoffs. Asahi Linux is an amazing project, but they have not yet figured out how to get anywhere close to a Mac's power efficiency when it is running MacOS. For example, you will lose a lot of battery life[0][1] with the lid closed, whereas on MacOS you lose pretty much nothing. Also, note that thunderbolt not yet supported[2]. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241219125418/https://social.tr... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/262 [2] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...

My biggest blockers to switching to Asahi were mic and camera support, and video out (hdmi or usb c). Once all that was supported, I immediately switched over and it felt great to finally be running Linux again. But, it seems I totally glanced over the battery, battery performance is not great at all on Asahi, and unfortunately I'm back in macos again waiting for this issue to be resolved: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/262 Amazing work so far everyone!

IIRC it even reboots on its own after a power outage. While macOS presents a "Start up automatically after a power failure" option, and it works, the reality is…complicated. Intel Macs require a model-specific hardware register to be set after each reboot: https://web.archive.org/web/20230218203824/http://www.macfre... The analogous setting on Apple Silicon Macs appears to be nonvolatile: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/de1c5a8be0ee99602e4...

https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/ > Since this was going to be the first Linux Rust GPU kernel driver, I had a lot of work ahead! Not only did I have to write the driver itself, but I also had to write the Rust abstractions for the Linux DRM graphics subsystem. While Rust can directly call into C functions, doing that doesn’t have any of Rust’s safety guarantees. So in order to use C code safely from Rust, first you have to write wrappers that give you a safe Rust-like API. I ended up writing almost 1500 lines of code just for the abstractions, and coming up with a good and safe design took a lot of thinking and rewriting! Also https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/de1c5a8be/drivers/g... where "drm" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

You're missing on a lot of things Rust (or any language with non-toy types) can provide. Lock ordering, better accessible complex structures, enforcement of enumerated options, rich description of APIs, and many others. Atomic values are usable transparently https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/97c628055904a7f2ef1... and multithreaded reference counting is easily enforced https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/bd0a1a7d465fcb60685... also issues like type confusion https://www.vicarius.io/vsociety/posts/a-type-confusion-bug-... are less likely if you can easily use tagged unions checked by the compiler. The best Rust can do is enforce a number of invariants which people extremely experienced in writing "trivial C" still miss every day.

From the gpu issue tracker[0]: > For a bit of context -- Google Maps loads images to the GPU at.. inopportune times. While games would typically load their images during a load screen (so slow image loading just means longer loading screens), Google Maps loads when scrolling around I think (so slow image loading means the whole map stutters). I don't think there's a fundamental driver bug we can fix here, but we can make image loading a lot faster which makes the symptoms go away. [0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/72#issuecomment-1...

> Is this mostly just a thing to get more young people interested in kernel development...allowing them to start out in less important areas and in a language they are passionate about? Not likely. At the moment you need to do extra work to get Rust working well. It's not exactly beginner friendly and doing work in the kernel, you'll need to dig into C anyway. > Or is this a serious proposal about the future of operating systems and other low level infrastructure code? Serious code already exists, so... Yes? > Do you just program everything in unsafe mode? What about runtimes? Why would you? You need that only when interfacing with something that can't hold the Rust compiler assumptions. See for example https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/gpu/rebase-6.4/driv... The few places that need direct access / unsafe are almost all single-lin

I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited. I don't know how common this arrangement is in other laptops, but it's the kind of hardware/software integration that Apple is known for.

I am using Asahi Linux and the GPU driver works great, it even supports OpenGL 3.1 (https://asahilinux.org/2023/06/opengl-3-1-on-asahi-linux/). Definitely not alpha, I would say it's close to a "release candidate". Many bugs got resolved, nothing much left (besides newer OpenGL and Vulkan of course, but current state is very stable): https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/72

There aren't really any non-trivial mainline modules, since the Rust support is so new. There's the non-mainline Asahi M1 GPU driver though! It will eventually be mainlined, but IIRC some more Rust support code needs to be mainlined first. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/asahi/drivers/gpu/d...

Reminds me of Marcan trying to make Asahi not do that on MacBooks, and so far failing (https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53). I didn't know that Windows laptops also had speakers that would burn out with high-volume playback.