m1n1
nixos-apple-silicon
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m1n1 | nixos-apple-silicon | |
---|---|---|
17 | 16 | |
3,376 | 681 | |
2.2% | - | |
8.9 | 9.0 | |
20 days ago | about 23 hours ago | |
Python | Nix | |
MIT License | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
m1n1
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Asahi Linux project's OpenGL support on Apple Silicon officially surpasses Apple
One of the coolest things (IMO) about the entire Asahi effort, and why I'm not at all surprised that they surpassed Apple, was the dedicated effort to build bespoke developer-friendly Python tooling early in the reverse engineering process.
https://asahilinux.org/2021/08/progress-report-august-2021/
> Since the hypervisor is built on m1n1, it works together with Python code running on a separate host machine. Effectively, the Python host can “puppeteer” the M1 and its guest OS remotely. The hypervisor itself is partially written in Python! This allows us to have a very fast test cycle, and we can even update parts of the hypervisor itself live during guest execution, without a reboot.
> We then started building a Python implementation of this RPC protocol and marshaling system. This implementation serves a triple purpose: it allows us to parse the DCP logs from the hypervisor to understand what macOS does, it allows us to build a prototype DCP driver entirely in Python, and it will in the future be used to automatically generate marshaling code for the Linux kernel DCP driver.
Code here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1/blob/main/proxyclient/m1n...
If you watch any of Asahi Lina's streams from the time before they had working drivers, she's able to weave together complex bitflag-manipulating pipelines at the speed of thought with self-documenting code, all in Python running on the host machine, all while joking with viewers via her adorable avatar. I've never seen anything like it before. The whole workflow is a tremendous and unprecedented accomplishment by the entire Asahi team.
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Strange (scheduling?) latency on the host when KVM guest runs something demanding
I wrote a m1n1 experiment to test IRQ delivery in EL1 and noticed something was weird. I already knew about that IRQ control register (3 masks IRQs entirely and is the default, that whole thing took like a day or two back when I first added M1 Pro/Max support), so I tried other values and 2 fixed it.
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Apple Silicon - iBoot
They have not dropped hardly any official documentation on iBoot. The best safe documentation is in: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1/ There's a lot of tainted docs out there because the source to iBoot was illegally leaked a while back, but marcan is known for being a bit of a hardass when it comes to legal reverse engineering (thankfully).
- Everything we know about the Apple Neural Engine (ANE)
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Dumb question - is it possible to install Windows on top of Asahi?
No its uefi boot manager “https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1 “
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Updates galore! November 2022 Progress Report
What makes you say there isn't community participation? The repo for m1n1, at least, has 42 contributors according to Github[1]. There's plenty more reporting bugs and such, and their IRC channel seems relatively active.
1: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1
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A Secret Apple Silicon (M1) Extension to Accommodate an Intel 8080 Artifact
I can confirm that’s pretty much exactly what happens. I did some digging with the help of m1n1 a while back, and essentially yeah, this is almost exactly what it does. The only difference is that, rather than tracking which cores are running emulated code, the scheduler keeps track of which processes are running in emulation mode, and prior to returning to userland after a context switch, the kernel sets control register bits for features like TSO (which is what I was interested in looking into at the time; I believe that specifically is controlled somewhere in the actlr_el1 register). Although only the P-cores actually implement the necessary x86 emulation behavior, the scheduler of course wants to ensure that a process is not pinned to any one core, and that native and emulated processes alike can preempt and interleave with each other on the P-cores just as they would if there were no emulation.
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Asahi Lina (Linux Developer VTuber) wants to write the new Apple Silicon GPU driver for Linux in Rust!
That shim/stub is m1n1. It is the bootloader for Asahi Linux, but also makes it possible to talk to the hardware over USB as just described by Lina. marcan even implemented a small hypervisor in m1n1, so it can be used to run MacOS and trace how MacOS is accessing the hardware.
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questions about the new architecture
Windows 11 ARM dualboot will come to M1 macs in the near future. See m1n1 for progress.
- First triangle ever rendered on an M1 Mac with a fully open-source driver
nixos-apple-silicon
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Hackintosh Is Almost Dead
I just used this: https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/blob/main/do...
I used one of their releases rather than building my own image. It’s a guide that merits careful reading, as some key steps are not specifically bulleted. Oh, and it’s not the NixOS graphical installer.
But it was dead simple, and 99% of the heavy lifting is from the Asahi team. The biggest downside is that updating the support files is a manual process, but NixOS of course makes it a breeze to rebuild into a new environment—and back out if it doesn’t work.
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Asahi Linux folks are doing us a solid with WPA3 fixes
I doubt it will ever have native support. NixOS doesn't do native support. For what it's worth I'm running NixOS on an M2 Max MPB using https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon.
- NixOS bare metal on Apple Silicon
- Lima: A nice way to run Linux VMs on Mac
- Resources to install NixOS bare metal on Apple Silicon Macs
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Nix-Powered Development with OCaml
Most hardcore Nix users/developers I have met have been suspicious for Flakes for several years, so your point rings true.
That said, it feels like they are slowly coming to terms with it and just accepting it as default. Here are two examples of maintainers eventually accepting flake support on their repos after initial hesitation [1][2].
[1] https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/pull/47
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ARM64 Linux Workstation
I do, no issues at all with the beta Asahi kernel, you basically have to git clone https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon in /etc/nixos/, include a file from that repo in the configuration.nix and configure as you like (beta gpu driver or not, which kernel, 4k pages or not, ecc). The experience then is exactly the same as a stock NixOS installation.
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chroot to existing Asahi installation
there is a NixOS iso for m1 you can use it https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon
- NixOS on M1
What are some alternatives?
HelloSilicon - An introduction to ARM64 assembly on Apple Silicon Macs
nixos-infect - [GPLv3+] install nixos over the existing OS in a DigitalOcean droplet (and others with minor modifications)
unix-history-repo - Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today
docs - Hardware and software docs / wiki
pdp7-unix - A project to resurrect Unix on the PDP-7 from a scan of the original assembly code
SwayM1 - A Guide on how to install and configure sway for M1 MackBooks.
freebsd-src - The FreeBSD src tree publish-only repository. Experimenting with 'simple' pull requests....
powertop - The Linux PowerTOP tool -- please post patches to the mailing list instead of using github pull requests
rss-proxy - RSS-proxy allows you to do create an RSS or ATOM feed of almost any website, just by analyzing just the static HTML structure.
linux - Linux kernel source tree
libimobiledevice - A cross-platform protocol library to communicate with iOS devices
ocaml-flake-example - An overly elaborate example of building a ‘Hello World’ package with Nix flakes, OCaml, and Dune