docs VS linux

marcan of the Asahi Linux project got into a discussion on reddit about this, and says that when it comes to hardware, you just can’t know.

> I can't prove the absence of a silicon backdoor on any machine, but I can say that given everything we know about AS systems (and we know quite a bit), there is no known place a significant backdoor could hide that could completely compromise my system. And there are several such places on pretty much every x86 system

(Long) thread starts here, show hidden comments for the full discussion https://old.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/13voeey/what_is...

I highly recommend reading this if you’re interested https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...

Depends on the box. In general if there is a hardwired HDMI port it works, if it's an alt mode it doesn't yet. The feature pages give detail by hardware, heres a direct link to the M2 page https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M2-Series-Feature-Su...

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M1-Series-Feature-Su...

According to this page it should work on M1 MBP, but there is also a note about a specific patch released next week.

I'm just refuting that OP's dot update problem on Sonoma was caused by the refresh rate bug. In all likelihood OP doesn't have a weird Sonoma/Ventura dual boot situation going on (or Ashai Linux for that matter, who wrote a great article about this). In all my testing (and with a large enterprise sample size) we had zero reports of the refresh bug impacting an Apple Silicon Mac running just Sonoma itself.

> They don't support variations of software at all. They support the hardware. [...] Asahi does not need to support applications at all.

From their FAQ page[1]:

> We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects. The distribution will be a convenient package for easy installation by end-users and give them access to bleeding-edge versions of the software we develop.

As distro maintainers, it is their job to make sure the applications they package work on the hardware they support. This includes submitting patches upstream when that is not the case, as application maintainers likely wouldn't want to support such a niche environment directly. So, yes, they rely on volunteers to fix issues, but they will likely have to support many applications themselves.

There is still a lot of broken software, as this list[2] is surely not exhaustive.

> Same deal for any other hardware manufacturer. [...] Really not much different to other hardware manufacturers since Linux started.

No, it's very different. First of all, the amount of Linux hackers who volunteered to reverse engineer the wide variety of hardware was orders of magnitude larger than the Asahi team. Even if they limit the amount of devices they support, modern computers are far more complex than in the early days of Linux. Regardless of how talented the Asahi team is, maintaining all the hardware of a modern computer is a sisyphean task for a project run by volunteers.

Secondly, hardware manufacturers could see the benefit of getting their hardware to run in Linux, and many eventually took over support from volunteers. Apple has shown no interest in doing so, and has historically been hostile to open source.

> Asahi devs have made it clear that Apple has chosen to avoid blocking installation of other operating systems.

The fact they allow installation of other operating systems today, doesn't mean that this decision couldn't change in the future. Services are a large part of their business, and allowing a group of hackers to use their hardware without being part of their software ecosystem may seem like a non-issue today, but if this group grows larger assuming projects like Asahi are successful, this might become a considerable loss of income which wouldn't be in their best interest.

> Apple has no issue with it.

Can you point me to an official ackgnowledgment of Asahi Linux by Apple? Or any indication that leaving this door open was a sign of good will, instead of a lack of interest in closing it? What makes you think they wouldn't eventually lock down Macbooks in the same way they do iPhones and iPads?

> ARM is a stable well supported platform for Linux

It's really not. A lot of software works, but when it doesn't, the user is SOL. As you can see on their Broken Software page[2], the major issue is precisely with AArch64 support. This should improve eventually, and Asahi is certainly a torchbearer in this scenario, but today it's yet another hurdle of using Apple hardware.

[1]: https://asahilinux.org/about/#is-this-a-linux-distribution

[2]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software

More information about the macOS Sonoma ProMotion bug here.

Here’s the actual issue for anyone that cares, fully documented : https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/macOS-Sonoma-Boot-Failures

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.

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-line areas with an explanation.

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 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...

You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/91