sandsifter VS docs

This has some background.

sandsifter

This is a really clever technique! I was impressed by sandsifter[1] when it originally came out, and this seems an awful lot faster and less prone to false negatives (since it's purely speculative and doesn't require sandsifter's `#PF` hack).

At the risk of unwarranted self-promotion: the other side of this equation is fidelity in software instruction set decoders. x86's massive size and layers of historical complexity make it among the most difficult instruction formats to accurately decode; I've spent a good part of the last two years working on a fuzzer that's discovered thousands of bugs in various popular x86 decoders[2][3].

[1]: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter

[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/mishegos

[3]: https://ww.easychair.org/publications/preprint_download/1LHr

Idea:

If any assembler/disassembler author/team out there wants to produce an assembler/disassembler which is authoritative (difficult to do on x86, because there are so many different possible combinations of instruction encoding, https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter : "Typically, several million undocumented instructions on your processor will be found, but these generally fall into a small number of different groups.") -- then what they'd do is to create a third program -- which "pits" the output of Assembler A vs. Assembler B, Disassembler A vs. Disassembler B...

That is, between any two assemblers (for the same CPU architecture/instruction set), or any two disassemblers, where are the anomalies?

If we think about an assembler as a simple function, y=f(x), that is, I give it a string of ascii bytes as input (x), and I get a string (1..n) binary bytes as output (y),

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