m1n1
unix-history-repo
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m1n1 | unix-history-repo | |
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17 | 51 | |
3,376 | 6,434 | |
2.2% | - | |
8.9 | 0.0 | |
20 days ago | almost 2 years ago | |
Python | Assembly | |
MIT License | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
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
unix-history-repo
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F/OSS Comics: 8. The Origins of Unix and the C Language
There is also https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo (Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today)
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Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
FWIW, ls in Research-V6 back in 1975 had 10 options. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...
By BSD 3 in 1980 it had 11 options. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-S...
The thing is, we can see even from the 1970s 'ls' how the Unix model doesn't meet the goal "to chain these simple programs together to create complex behaviors".
There is no option to escape or NUL terminate a filename, making it possible to construct a filename containing a newline which makes the output look like two file entries.
The option for that was added later.
There's also the issue that embedded terminal codes will be interpreted by the terminal.
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The original source code of the vi text editor, taken from System V
This is what it looked like about 7-8 years earlier: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1/e...
- Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today
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50 Years in Filesystems: 1974
RA92 (1989): 16 ms / 8.3 ms.
Note that the RL02 (and V7) and RA92 mentioned in the article are separated by about a decade.
[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...
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Unix: An Oral History
The earliest version I could find [1] is already written in C.
[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...
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Linux is not as smooth as windows
Here's a 1997 citation for "top cpu processes." It's not as close to the original 1984 release as I would like, but it's better than Wikipedia. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commit/aee34003d7964653c44c31f5bf6bcf136b32c4f3
- GitHub was Founded in 2008 But...
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GPT based tool that writes the commit message for you
> The “why” goes into the PR and more importantly, engineering documentation and inline comments
This just ensures that the “why” is lost when someone comes looking years later.
From experience, SCM metadata is far more durable than just about any other work product we produce. Five decades later and RCS commit info was still available for the Unix sources, and history could be reconstructed: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
I’ve used 35-year-old commit messages to help understand a long-standing issue, decades after all other related organization tooling and data had disappeared.
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What should be included in a history of the Rust language?
P.S. I remember I looked into early versions of C (they survived in Unix historic releases) and that, finally, revealed to me why C does something really stupid and conflates arrays and slices (pointers). Initially C had no arrays! Or, rather, what it called arrays were, actually, pointers. “Normal” arrays were added at some point, but because these weird slices/pointers were already there that caused endless confusion. It wasn't resolved before C became popular and after that it was too late. Go repeated that mistake with slices, of course.
What are some alternatives?
HelloSilicon - An introduction to ARM64 assembly on Apple Silicon Macs
PySyft - Perform data science on data that remains in someone else's server
pdp7-unix - A project to resurrect Unix on the PDP-7 from a scan of the original assembly code
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.
freebsd-src - The FreeBSD src tree publish-only repository. Experimenting with 'simple' pull requests....
intellij-rainbow-brackets - 🌈Rainbow Brackets for IntelliJ based IDEs/Android Studio/HUAWEI DevEco Studio/Fleet
typos - Source code spell checker
nixos-apple-silicon - Resources to install NixOS bare metal on Apple Silicon Macs
insect - High precision scientific calculator with support for physical units
libimobiledevice - A cross-platform protocol library to communicate with iOS devices
Ruby Units - A unit handling library for ruby