What an end to an era. It's crazy to think she started this journey at 18 and now finished 5 years later. Not many people believed they would be able to make the GPU work in Asahi linux. Kinda curious what her "Onto the next challenge!" link means. Is she working for Intel Xe-HPG next?
Wish her the best with this. Intel staying competitive in GPUs can only benefit the consumer. Those who want a mid-tier graphic card, without paying to compete with AI use cases, may not a huge group, but we do exist! Those who use desktop Linux may be a small group among that small group, but we do exist!
Thanks Jesus it's Intel and not Apple, Intel has been extremely good at working upstream and has immense contributions in the Linux kernel, mesa, and elsewhere. Wasting such talent on Apple would make the world worse for us all.
There are a myriad of companies that have thrived in "IP locked" environments, a host that have failed too. Equally there are heaps that have thrived and failed in "IP open" environments.
I think at best you could say it's more challenging or perhaps risky being a bit restricted with IP, but I'd call it miles away from a "graveyard".
You can hardly call Intel/amd/qualcomm etc all struggling due to the architectures being locked down.
Look at powerpc/Isa. It's (entirely?) open and hasn't really done any better than x86.
Fundamentally you're going to be tied to backwards compatibility to some extent. You're limited to evolution, not revolution. And I don't think x86 had failed to evolve? (eg avx10 is very new)
Apple doesn't have any contributions to the Linux kernel or other parts of the Linux graphics stack. They are unlikely to hire someone who wants to work on open source.
To be fair they don't have anything to do with Linux so there is nothing to contribute back towards. They use BSD licensed software for a reason.
Apple does have open source projects. https://opensource.apple.com But the scope is rather limited. For someone of Alyssa's skillset there really isn't anything there.
From what I recall, Apple forbids its employees from participating in open source work it doesn't approve of. And given Apple's culture of secrecy, its agenda of maintaining a walled garden with their products, and her work basically contradicting the two, I doubt her being hired by Apple would benefit anyone other than Apple.
Apple is too much about beeing closed and creating barriers not sure that would have been a good fit. Plus that's a good way to flee a country quickly degrading.
Honestly if Apple had embraced Linux, the Apple Silicon CPUs would have been amazing for all sorts of server, scientific, and AI/LLM work. Too bad they are clamping down on the walled garden to focus on consumer toys instead.
The real shame is the longevity, M1 Pro and M1 Max got discontinued two and a half years ago so they're on their way to the vintage list and could be entirely obsoleted by the end of this decade! Linux support is the only thing that will keep these machines usable after that.
I do have an M2 Macbook running Asahi, which works amazingly well for my casual use, but I think that there is no way that anyone will use last last gen hardware on a volunteer-developed OS for any actual work, server use cases, and so on.
My point was that the graphics division itself will still be around, as integrated mobile SoCs are basically the only revenue stream Intel still has a good handle on. That requires a graphics core, and all of the other usable options are either not for sale to Intel, have burned Intel in the past, or are owned by Arm.
Intel’s core competence is squandering talent by having finance managers and outside consultants make technology business decisions. Something happened to their culture a few decades ago and they forgot that revenue is a trailing indicator of good decisions and you can’t just decide you want to make a lot of money and trust the product strategy to materialize from that.
From "draw a triangle" to upstream Vulkan on M1. Practically, this makes the Venus/virtio path viable for guests on Apple Silicon (no passthrough in VZ), which is what many people actually need.
This is an incredible achievement... not just for the technical depth, but for what it represents. Alyssa's work is nothing short of inspiring. The way she combined deep technical insight with years of dedication has not only brought open-source graphics to Apple Silicon, but also lit a fire under reverse engineers and open-source developers.
She has shown a whole new generation that curiosity and persistence can break barriers. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the developments these past several years. Massive respect to her and everyone who made this possible, and kudos on her new position at Intel.
It is walking away from her user base. (I’m not complaining — I’m an open source dev too and recognize I have no right to put demands on her time. But what is the future for Asahi Linux after this? I don’t see one.)
Although most likely she’s well compensated, and doesn’t have to waste time on useless efforts at work, this level of discipline and striving towards a goal is just very rare in general.
Possibly also no family, limited social life and no other hobbies.
For myself, when I lived on a different continent to my family, had limited social life and job with strictly set hours, it was much easier to have the time needed to make significant progress on a hobby.
However, discipline is an enormous factor too, actually using that extra available time on something “productive” is no easy feat.
Now I have kids and live in the same area as my parents and siblings again, entirely happy, but less free time.
2021 and 2022 was also when many places were only just coming out of COVID lockdowns. I remember how much dead time I had back then. I used it to watch lots of series and youtube videos. I wish I had the discipline and motivation to work like she did during that area with all that free time.
Yeah same. I made a dent in my gaming backlog and TV shows and built a gaming computer that has only ever been used to play Factorio (notably, a game that can probably be played without a GPU).
Half of me kinda wants another lockdown so I can do more discipline-y stuff but the other half is like, dude you're just gonna waste it playing more games. I just gotta face the music - I'm just not disciplined and I just don't have the drive.
She does a bunch of social media stuff with her girlfriend on top of that, so “limited social life and no other hobbies” may not be a good description.
Just to say a big thank-you to the Asahi team, and especially for the GPU work. It is still on my list to get back to some OpenGL dev work. Especially since I recently made fedora-asahi remix my daily driver, and I have to say it is amazing. It feels like I once again own my computer.
Their work has inspired me to continue bashing away at my Zig PinePhone code, although I'll never have the skills to get it's GPU running anything beyond a poke'd framebuffer.
That checklist of supported APIs in Asahi is mind blowing, especially in such a short timeframe. Again, well done, thank-you, and best of luck at intel.
Inspiring stuff! I didn't even expect basic Linux support on M1 to be so good in such a short time-span, leaving graphics aside. I was very pleased when I tried booting up Asahi on M1 a couple months back and went on to get work done in it and even enjoy some games.
Thanks for all your amazing contributions Alyssa and all the best for the road ahead!
What a project. Of all of the IT work that I'm aware of I have a hard time choosing between this and Fabrice Bellard's output, both are - for me at least - equally impressive.
They seem closely aligned with the Free Software Foundation (FSF), so I could very well imagine that being a major ideological reason not to want to work with Apple. Yes, Apple sometimes upstream patches and they do contribute to open source here and there, but they certainly are no FSF poster child. Intel on the other hand are about as open as it gets when it comes to their track record in the graphics space. I personally have nothing but admiration for Rosenzweig's work and I hope they will continue to find environments where they can flourish and do great things in the years to come.
Alyssa's post mentions how lots of the work she's done has at least started as side projects while she's working on something else (Panfrost while at high school, M1 drivers while at Collabora). Obviously I'm not her so I can't say anything specific to her. In general, Apple doesn't allow its developers to work on open source projects on the side while employed at the company. I think this is a stupid idea that costs them a lot of talent, but I doubt Apple cares what I think. I've seen multiple cases where an active open source contributor gets hired by Apple, then their presence in open source communities vanishes. Based on all the open source work she's done so far, I think it would take a lot to make her stop all contributions like that.
You do have to wonder how that kind of interview would go. Hopefully it would be actual engineers that created what she reverse engineered instead of some gatekeeper trying to one up her somehow.
May I ask something, I want an apple silicone MacBook Air and I am probably just be running Linux on it, what are pros and cons of getting an m1 vs m2? Except for more ram or so.
Thx
Agreed, it is not that stable/usable.
I tested it on M1 Pro and was hopeful, but after some years I realized it is not viable for daily use. Many things still don't work and I doubt that they will any time soon.
Last year I was given M4 Pro at work and it is not supported at all.
Looking at the drama and people stepping down, I don't think MacBooks will be properly supported on Linux in this decade.
On the other hand, I have an M2 Air and it's stable, fast, and I haven't thrown anything at it that it doesn't handle perfectly. But the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
(The M3/M4 are in progress but not supported. That's public on the project's compatibility chart.)
The biggest deal breaker for me was no support for external displays (through DP alt mode/thunderbolt).
Also the infrequent random OS crashes were annoying. And sometimes WiFi would stop working after sleep (wold not show any access points) and would require a reboot.
M1 is 5 years old already and is still not fully stable and lacks features. It seems like the overall development effort started slowing down a couple years ago and while we did get the amazing audio daemon and graphics driver, development of other things seem to be stuck.
If I remember correctly, there were also some comments from Marcan (?) on social media about issues with supporting newer chips (M3/M4), hinting that M3 and M4 are vastly different and require significant effort to add Linux support.
So if M3, M4 and other future versions are too different to get supported in decent time frame, then that means that Asahi is all about supporting years old hardware. That reduces interest by Linux users looking to buy a laptop now, and thus potentially reducing available donations, developer pool, interest, etc.
I love what Marcan, Alyssa, James and others have achieved and how they have pushed Linux further. I think that their contributions will stay relevant and be useful for other hardware for many years to come.
Sorry but I just can let it, I bought a Microsoft dev kit 2023 just to test hundreds of gigabytes of windows software I’m responsible for would deploy on it with the system center :D
If that software would also Work ofcourse is another thing. :D
Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.
Sorry to hijack, but since the topic is related: is the development of Asahi Linux still actively ongoing, or has slowed down a lot? The progress for M1 and M2 was steady and now almost everything is done, but the M3+ work still seems to not have started. And with major contributors leaving the project I'm kind of worried for the future of Asahi (on newer Apple hardware).
The new leadership team set a short term goal of getting their existing work upstreamed, which seems to be going well.
> Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term.
> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
While we still have quite a way to go, this progress has already made rebases significantly less hassle and given us some room to breathe.
> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
So if the discussions are true, it can take years for the developers to finish M1/M2 upstreaming with all the Linux kernel bureaucracy. That is, unless they decide to start working on M3 before finishing the upstreaming
Makes sense, every patch they upstream is less maintenance and forward-porting work that they have to do. Keeping a downstream kernel up to date is very painful, even one that's "near mainline" as with Asahi's.
I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel. Forget the hostile nature Apple has proven to possess when consumers dare treat their hardware as if paying for it makes it their own.
Qualcomm has been beating the marketing drum on this instead of delivering. Ampere has delivered excellent hardware but does not seem interested in the desktop segment. The "greatest Linux laptop around" can not be some unmaintained relic from a hostile hardware company.
As somebody that has worked in a company that did Qualcomm devices in the past - Qualcomm just cares about money grabbing, and is not any less hostile to developers than Apple.
If you want to do a device, and your only chip option is Qualcomm I'd recommend not doing a device at all.
FLOSS stacks for Qualcomm-based devices are actually a lot more feature complete than some other brands like MediaTek or Exynos. Still nowhere near any kind of "daily driver" status but at least getting somewhere, whilst others have yet to even get started.
> I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel.
Can you see any other machine coming close to a Mac in terms of hardware quality and performance? Obviously the cost is silly, but while I agree with your sentiment, it seems optimistic to hope.
Networking is going to be another major issue. Even on the Intel MacBook Pro this is still a problem. The instructions for getting it to work are so bizarre that I ended up with a network dongle with a supported chipset instead.
I can recommend it! I've been daily driving M1 for a few months now, it's working really well. Parent poster is raving about a potential "greatest linux laptop", but depending on your use case it's already there.
IME the Asahi support page is spot-on: There are a couple of yet-unsupported features (DP-alt mode being a big one), but any feature listed as supported will just work without hidden gotchas. I find this a big contrast to other devices, which will often "work" but have annoying little quirks here and there that are workable but can feel like a downgrade compared to Windows.
On macOS, I never worried about battery life when leaving the house even when doing compute-heavy work. On Asahi, that is equally much true. I couldn't tell you how many hours it lasts because I never have to carry a charger unless I'm out for more than a regular workday.
There's some room for improvement, but that is purely relative to macOS. Asahi still solidly beats other x86 devices (other than the low end ones you wouldn't do development work on).
One issue is that idle battery consumption is higher than on macOS (an active area of improvement though [1]), which you'll notice by an M1 laptop discharging by about 12% overnight when macos would've eaten maybe 2-3%. Not a big issue normally, but can be inconvenient if the device shuts down due to empty battery overnight.
During more passive uses at daytime (e.g. playing music), the display tends to be the biggest power hog. Not really Linux-specific, but I actively turn off the screen when not needed hence (KDE lets you configure the power button to do so).
I'd pay easily let's say $100-200 a year to have linux running on modern apple laptops with full features. I'm sure I'm not alone. Their hardware, "our" OS would be perfect. Well, except notch and lack of OLED - but, reportedly that's in the works too.
Most likely, they have more mini-leds and/or more ability to independently control them. Of course the localized "blooming" of mini-leds is a lot easier on the eyes regardless than the all-around bloom of a backlit display.
(Better for the battery too, if you can keep most of the screen dark.)
The M3+ GPU is also very different. So while it may be true that the driver development for M1/M2 is now more or less complete as OP says, future work along the same lines will very much be needed.
This is a pretty well known thing; the M3/A17 generation GPU was a ground-up redesign that added things like dynamic caching and hardware ray tracing [1] which are highly nontrivial to simply extend an existing architecture to support. Unfortunately I can’t find where I read this, but IIRC at the time M2 came out there were expectations that M2 would have a new GPU architecture with hardware ray tracing but this wound up being delayed to M3 because it took longer than expected to do a ground-up redesign of the GPU.
So, you are not going to unflag, undead the comment you killed, right? The one you are sorry about, claiming you misinterpreted them. Just curious, not trolling.
"Moderation is guesswork" means that we can't always know what someone's post means, or was intended to mean, nor can we know for sure what effects it will have. We can only make guesses (i.e. interpretations), and those are inevitably wrong sometimes.
We can't not make mistakes. The best we can do is acknowledge when we make a mistake and do what we can to fix it.
> I censor whatever I like (dislike), I guess
If you knew how many comments I dislike on HN, you would no longer have that perception.
They’re significantly different GPU architectures. They added support for hardware features like mesh shading, raytracing and better shader occupancy/dynamic caching.
Beyond that, each M series generation also brings more of the system into the SoC. For example, the entire storage controller is part of the SoC in the M1, but the M2 brought in the trackpad controller as well.
Bringing more functionality into the SoC has many advantages but it does make it more difficult to target because you can’t just make use of existing off the shelf controller knowledge to apply to it.
I'm curious, why are not these people hit with C&D from Apple?
And other great projects, like Corellium (Actual iOS VM, not that crap Apple makes) are hit hard with lawsuits etc.
(You know, great project for these people who is still RE iOS for 0days and report them to Apple, which is behind me long time ago, reporting 0days for peanuts, yeah right :) )
If I had to guess. One seeks to reverse engineer hardware to run an open source OS. The seeks to emulate a platform to run a proprietary closed source OS.
If I remember correctly, Apple at the introduction of M1 made some explicit statements about the hardware not being locked down. Something along the lines of nothing preventing Linux to run on it.
Biggest thing is Asahi project is not a for-profit venture. It also mutually benefits Apple since that encourages hardware sales from non-traditional customers.
Genuine question: is she a once-in-a-generation prodigy? We forget this class of people indeed exists. As fellow professionals are we inspired or deeply ashamed of ourselves?
Honestly kind of heartbreaking to see her leave asahi Linux. She has done insane work building the vulkan driver from scratch. I wish her well working at Intel. If I ever buy an Intel GPU I can rest much easier it will work well on Linux. If she is working on the Linux driver stack that is.
There isn't really anything left to do for her - everything missing (including work on the newer graphics chips) can be somewhat easily done by less talented people, building on her work.
She did the challenging stuff she cares about. One aspect of nerd brain often is that you can hyperfocus on challenging stuff, but can't get the motivation to work on stuff you don't care about - and even what would be a 20 minute task can end up taking days because of that. It's great that she has the self awareness to set goals, and step away once they're done.
I didn't have that in that age - and still sometimes struggle. I was lucky enough that my employer back then recognized my issues, and paired other people with me for doing the stuff I was not interested in, and now usually manage to load those issues onto other co-workers by myself.
This is of course great as long as you can find enough "challenging" work to perform, but any successful project is going to involve a whole lot of seemingly "boring" work. A big part of true maturity and professionalism is being able to find the interesting challenge even in these more run-of-the-mill tasks and successfully engage with them.
(Mind you, I'm not talking about a matter of inborn temperament or character, much less a moral flaw! Rather, finding the compelling challenge even in "boring" tasks is a valuable skill and situational tactic that anyone should explicitly learn about and aim to acquire as part of becoming a mature professional, not a matter of morality or somehow being dismissed as "lazy"!)
M3, M4 and soon to be M5 are ready to be cracked open :). From what I understand they are actually different somewhat hardware wise. So it's really not like there would not be a continuations of this work. But of course it's natural to want something else after years of working on the project.
Take into account that she's focusing on the 3D stack, not the overall hardware. Even with hardware differences there's a good chance it's not different enough to make it an interesting new challenge.
Yes I meant the GPU specifically not the hardware in general. An example is the support for hardware ray tracing in M3 and beyond. In some now deleted french fediverse post Alyssa indicated M3 has a new architecture.
Given the features that have been advertised for the M3+ graphics and compute stack, there's rather a good chance that it is different enough to create big, new challenges for third-party support.
Because I have it, untreated. And I couldn't even finish university because of it.
I'm unable to do certain things, like at all, I'm nearly physically ill when doing these things. Hard to explain it, to someone without these problems :)
Luckily enough, it's not that important here / Idc about money, career etc.
Ideally, society would be aware of such people and actually use their potential. AR struck it lucky and so did a few others (cough Richard Stallman cough), but most don't and end up burned out by rigid megacorp structures and processes that don't respect that people, even those one might call "neurotypical", aren't cogs in a machine.
I've said it before and I will keep saying it again: the financialization of everything and the utter dominance of braindead, long-since disproven MBA ideology is going to seriously impede our societies in the next decades.
I never understood this project. Maybe I'm missing something, but the timescale is such that by the time they're done the product isn't even being sold anymore
At least with Panfrost it made more sense bc it still being used
M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point
I believe Walmart has a deal[1] with Apple to sell[2] M1 MacBook Airs. This has been the case for a year or so, so I don't think it's old stock. They have been in stock for since that date, and slowly getting cheaper.
They’ve always been available at Best Buy, BH Photo, and other authorized partners in the US.
The Walmart deal is a total mystery. It started, seemingly, as dumping new old stock without selling it on Apple.com, but they’ve even updated the machine I think so clearly it’s an ongoing concern.
Nothing like it I know of for Apple, ever. I’d love to know the story.
I would guess Apple’s goal is increasing the number of people buying recurring Apple services, such as icloud and tv+.
It has been a long time since people have needed cutting edge laptops, so an M1 bought today will still work for 90% of people for the next 5+ years. Even if Apple doesn’t earn a large profit margin on the sale of the laptop, they could earn a decent amount on monthly services revenue, plus increased odds of that person buying a watch/airpods/phone/etc.
For what purposes will the RAM and storage not hold up?
I see most people around me watching media, using a web browser to shop, maps, look at photos/videos (small storage is great for Apple, then more people buy icloud), fill out pdfs, and maybe some email or light excel.
Presumably, those are the people likely to buy a laptop at Walmart.
Storage can at least be expanded externally, if at a cost of speed, reliability, and convenience.
For the RAM, 8GB is not enough, but in fairness, when the system can page out at 200GB/s, paging out doesn't hurt nearly as bad. Its only when things have to thrash the page file that it becomes readily apparent on these (say, an application needs to have more than a few GB of stuff resident in memory all the time).
Why would the product have to be available new for the project to be worth it? There are still many M1 chips out there, and this helps prolong the usefulness of those chips.
> M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point
New M1 Macbook Airs are still available at Walmart (maybe elsewhere). But even if not, who cares? People are still writing code for computers that haven't been sold since the 1980s.
Yeah, I get if it's just a for-fun kind of thing. I didn't mean to knock it. I guess generally people want their work to end up being used. The time-line is such that that seems semi-impossible.
As the other replies show, you can still buy this machine, but it sounds like it likely won't be for too much longer
The developers involved must be acutely aware of it. Maybe they have some sense that the work will easily update to current M chips. Or maybe they don't really care about that. It was just an interesting exercise and they move on
Im glad she stepped away from Asahi linux. Its absolutely great from a techincal perspective and the progress that team has made, but talented people like her shouldn't be trying to reverse engineer software/hardware from shitty anti-consumer company that can make the entire project work in a heartbeat by publishing documentation, in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up.
Reverse engineering requires a different mindset and somewhat different skill set than “forward” engineering. I’ve met people who were happy to only do reverse engineering (to figure out what make things “tick”) without building anything new.
If it was up to me, 2 years of successful reverse engineering (of a variety of projects/products) would be a requirement to be called an engineer. You learn a lot from working things that you can’t learn from a book (and without having to do the mistakes yourself first…)
Just to make it clear: I am not implying anything about Alyssa - just stating an observation based on my own experience.
> in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up
To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.
That is correct. In my previous comment, for the sake of brevity, I deleted what I had written about Intel also being able to "call TSMC and have them doing a run of it's latest design", but it felt like that would have been belaboring the point that Intel isn't a rinky-dink chip operation, despite losing their commanding lead.
Ultimately we didn't need Jon Lech Johansen's work (and Derek Fawcus's, and others') on cracking DVD DRM or cracking Apple's FairPlay DRM, as there have always been alternatives. But their efforts did push the fight against DRM in our favour, and who knows what the world would be like if we had done nothing?
Creating things is a gamble, as mass adoption is almost never by technical merits, but by marketing. So you could make open documented everything but still end up with nobody benefiting from that openness, because a competitor (whether open or not) wipes you out. You saw this happen even in the era where electronic devices were expected to come with full schematics -- there were winners and losers even then.
But, if something has become widespread and well adopted, and it's not open, that's a problem. It absolutely should be opened up and documented. Especially if it's not because the money-grubbing creators of the something are deliberately hiding how it works and locking down control in order to extract more money from everyone else's pockets. The sooner you put an end to that, and the more often you fight against that, the sooner society itself becomes more efficient and fairer for everyone.
Even with proper documentation, there still would have been loads of work to get M1/M2 GPUs working on Asahi Linux. Writing GPU drivers worth a damn is about as difficult as targeting a compiler to a new CPU architecture. It would not be "in a heartbeat".
Im not talking about chip level documentation. Apple could take their source code for drivers and compile the kernel level for linux (since its all just C code) while open sourcing the user space.
Amazing work! Panfrost driver was very impressive to me before, and now just know the lady also solved the GPU driver on Mac. Not sure Intel will be a good career path for her. :)
Interesting that it cuts off at the M2, I guess the M3 was a massive enough shift that it did not transfer over as nicely. I certainly hope that the M3s and M4's are supported by the time Apple EOL's my M4 laptop so I can still slap Linux on it. The M4 series of Macbooks is one of the nicest laptops I've ever had the pleasure of owning and using.
Very cool and what an amazing way to learn so much beyond what you do in those years at university (at least in the engineering sense). I wish we had software and hardware open to be able to run custom setups whether its NVIDIA on x64 or Ampere/arm64 with MacOS.
The Apple GPU stuff is amazing, but I wish the rest of linux-on-apple work did better.
For example neither suspend nor hibernate works in Apple hardware, which means if you put the laptop away for a day or two the battery will die and you'll lose everything you were doing.
> I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans. If all you care about is Linux, resist the attacks on trans people.
> If you have any decency, fight back.
By the way, out of pure curiosity, why does it seem that there are a disproportionately high amount of super talented trans programmers? I mean, trans people make up for a relatively small percentage of the general populace so it would be unlikely for half of any random group, even if it's only 7 people, to be trans. There are even memes like programmer socks etc. I also personally know several very proficient programmers who are trans.
I am nowhere near an expert or even a particularly well-informed person here, but my idle speculation is that online technical spaces are a place where you can have much more freedom in comfortably choosing the outward persona you wish to present. In meatspace, if your physical appearances and your chosen persona don't match up in ways that some people find disagreeable, many people will go out of their way to let you know it.
Edit: I'm proposing a selection effect here, where people with these challenges gravitate towards spaces and communities where they don't feel confronted by them as often.
But by this logic roughly half of the population is trans, but the vast majority are afraid to present as such. The actual number of trans people is surely impossible to know due to these societal pressures but I find it hard to believe that almost half of the population is trans. I suspect there are other factors.
My read is that post is not arguing what you think (that it's caused by freedom to present how they feel and that it's a representative population) but instead that it's caused by a selection effect. But this argument is implied so I see why you mistook it.
That's correct. I suspect there's a selection effect where people who struggle with these challenges in their lives find comfort in a space where they can present as the person they want to be without constantly being questioned, attacked, or otherwise made uncomfortable. And that's not because this industry is more enlightened, but because it's much easier to contribute and participate only with an online persona that can be divorced from your physical characteristics.
I hope it's clear that I am not trying to speak authoritatively and that this is more or less a total guess on my part based on some pretty superficial analysis.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. I think your logic is backwards. Parent isn't saying the freedom of online technical spaces turns people trans, but that trans people in those spaces are more likely to make themselves obvious because of the freedoms.
There's also high overlaps between trans and non-neurotypical types. I'd suggest there's the same crossover between non-neurotypical and tech circles so makes sense there's a higher instance of trans in tech.
I'd also suggest that on some level coming out as trans is basically hacker mentality. "This hardware/wetware doesn't look/perform correctly. Let me get a soldering iron/rewrite some code/clothing/hormones/surgery and change that."
> disproportionately high amount of super talented trans programmers
Could it be that they also happen to be autistic? There appears to be a pattern I've noticed where a large number of trans developers are also autistic. This may be responsible for a lot of the passion and dedication required to work on projects like this. (Mostly video game) Emulation is another field that seems to have a similar overlap. Some might say Rust is another one.
The author is incredibly talented, and has done the community with a valuable service; one that the HN crowd especially is likely to benefit from.
Many people in her situation are not lucky enough to be in a mental or physical position to be able to pursue this sort of work or take advantage of their talent, and that is in large part due to the persistent and long-standing discrimination trans people face.
Even if one is totally self-interested, it pays not to discriminate. Even if one can't muster up even a little decency to not discriminate because, ya know, it's wrong.
I agree. But I wouldn't have known that the author was trans had the commenter not pointed it out. My thoughts about the original article are unchanged, but if the goal is to not discriminate, then pointing out a feature that many people would discriminate against seems counterintuitive imo.
If the original commenter said something like "it's inspiring that a trans person could overcome all odds and have such an accomplishment" then that comment has value. Randomly pointing out that the author is trans with zero context has no positive value.
“Asahi Linux wouldn’t exist without trans people. No one realizes how much Linux progress, and especially how much Linux graphics/gpu progress, hinges on trans people. Perhaps the selfish motivation of wanting Linux to succeed will make HN readers less placidly tolerant of trans hate in the future.”
But, as one of those “wait, you’re trans?!” people who silently contributes to projects without labeling myself, I get how it could be confusing. Hope that helps!
Thanks! I understood the quote in itself, but the OP quoting it with no additional context could have had two connotations: one nefarious (don't bother with this article because it was written by a trans person with an agenda) or one of positivity (Linux wouldn't be where it is now without trans people).
I always hope for the latter, but context and mood are impossible to communicate easily online which is why I was asking for clarification.
There’s a lot of value in selecting the best faith interpretation and then replying in that context; for those silent readers who might be confused, it helps clear up their confusion to the disfavor of any underhandedness — which is then forced to either identify itself plainly (and promptly get flagged) or lose the battle and move on.
Not the OP but my guess is that they want to raise awareness that people who are making significant technical contributions in our field are affected by the actions of the US administration. Not that exceptionally talented people deserve more legal protections, but the reality is that our industry would be worse off without people like Alyssa.
I know it can be at times grating to constantly hear about stuff like this, but I can assure you folks like Alyssa would rather focus on techie stuff rather than have to ask for help so they can stay safe. For them that worry is now always present and it’s not something they can ignore.
Thanks. I agree with your sentiment. But the OP just posted a random quote from one of her blog posts with no context. It could have either been to raise awareness about her being trans (honestly I'd have never known had it not been for the comment), or to discount the original article because she is trans.
I hope it was the former, but that's why I didn't want to just assume the OPs intention.
> I’m 21 now. I’ll be blunt: if not for gender-affirming care, I don’t know if I would be around. If there would be FOSS graphics drivers for Mali-T860 or the Apple M1.
What an end to an era. It's crazy to think she started this journey at 18 and now finished 5 years later. Not many people believed they would be able to make the GPU work in Asahi linux. Kinda curious what her "Onto the next challenge!" link means. Is she working for Intel Xe-HPG next?
Yes I think so. Her resume says she started working for Intel on open source graphics driver this month.
Wish her the best with this. Intel staying competitive in GPUs can only benefit the consumer. Those who want a mid-tier graphic card, without paying to compete with AI use cases, may not a huge group, but we do exist! Those who use desktop Linux may be a small group among that small group, but we do exist!
Too bad it was not Apple who hired her for M4, but in business leaders are always the most closed ones.
Thanks Jesus it's Intel and not Apple, Intel has been extremely good at working upstream and has immense contributions in the Linux kernel, mesa, and elsewhere. Wasting such talent on Apple would make the world worse for us all.
Intel seem to be pretty good in the .Net framework too, pushing a bunch of performance upgrades.
I don't see a future for intel, frankly, but I'm very happy she found a good paying job.
There was a time when people said that about AMD.
Don't get me wrong, Intel's outlook is IMO currently indeed rather bleak, but I would not completely write it off just yet.
> There was a time when people said that about AMD.
And Apple, to complete the circle.
AMD is equally fucked. Building off of IP-locked architectures is just a graveyard. Even apple will hit a wall one day.
There are a myriad of companies that have thrived in "IP locked" environments, a host that have failed too. Equally there are heaps that have thrived and failed in "IP open" environments.
I think at best you could say it's more challenging or perhaps risky being a bit restricted with IP, but I'd call it miles away from a "graveyard".
You can hardly call Intel/amd/qualcomm etc all struggling due to the architectures being locked down.
Look at powerpc/Isa. It's (entirely?) open and hasn't really done any better than x86.
Fundamentally you're going to be tied to backwards compatibility to some extent. You're limited to evolution, not revolution. And I don't think x86 had failed to evolve? (eg avx10 is very new)
Why? Apple makes good products. It seems, unlike Intel.
Apple doesn't have any contributions to the Linux kernel or other parts of the Linux graphics stack. They are unlikely to hire someone who wants to work on open source.
To be fair they don't have anything to do with Linux so there is nothing to contribute back towards. They use BSD licensed software for a reason.
Apple does have open source projects. https://opensource.apple.com But the scope is rather limited. For someone of Alyssa's skillset there really isn't anything there.
Sure but linux isn't necessary. Legacy software can be virtualized
Apple hiring her would essentially prevent her from doing it again on other models keeping the moat intact
Apple doesn’t contribute back to the community.
From what I recall, Apple forbids its employees from participating in open source work it doesn't approve of. And given Apple's culture of secrecy, its agenda of maintaining a walled garden with their products, and her work basically contradicting the two, I doubt her being hired by Apple would benefit anyone other than Apple.
Apple is too much about beeing closed and creating barriers not sure that would have been a good fit. Plus that's a good way to flee a country quickly degrading.
Honestly if Apple had embraced Linux, the Apple Silicon CPUs would have been amazing for all sorts of server, scientific, and AI/LLM work. Too bad they are clamping down on the walled garden to focus on consumer toys instead.
The real shame is the longevity, M1 Pro and M1 Max got discontinued two and a half years ago so they're on their way to the vintage list and could be entirely obsoleted by the end of this decade! Linux support is the only thing that will keep these machines usable after that.
> Honestly if Apple had embraced Linux, the Apple Silicon CPUs would have been amazing for all sorts of server, scientific, and AI/LLM work.
You can already do this work on M1/M2 using Asahi. A compute server doesn't need fully working peripherals and external displays.
I do have an M2 Macbook running Asahi, which works amazingly well for my casual use, but I think that there is no way that anyone will use last last gen hardware on a volunteer-developed OS for any actual work, server use cases, and so on.
How would GPGPU work in such a scenario?
The M1/M2 GPU is supported via Vulkan Compute. (Or OpenCL/SYCL, going through rusticl.)
Thank you!
Really a matter of perspective, tbh. Linux is also quite toy-like in its mess.
Good luck to her. That's one of the pieces of Intel I think will survive its slow motion implosion.
Hardly, Phoronix has a few reports from Linux driver folks being layed off at Intel.
Everywhere in Intel will be subject to layoffs.
My point was that the graphics division itself will still be around, as integrated mobile SoCs are basically the only revenue stream Intel still has a good handle on. That requires a graphics core, and all of the other usable options are either not for sale to Intel, have burned Intel in the past, or are owned by Arm.
I just hope that Intel doesn't squander the talent like they did with Jim Keller.
Intel’s core competence is squandering talent by having finance managers and outside consultants make technology business decisions. Something happened to their culture a few decades ago and they forgot that revenue is a trailing indicator of good decisions and you can’t just decide you want to make a lot of money and trust the product strategy to materialize from that.
Intel still has all the same short sighted bosses, the board of directors at Intel hasn’t changed.
From "draw a triangle" to upstream Vulkan on M1. Practically, this makes the Venus/virtio path viable for guests on Apple Silicon (no passthrough in VZ), which is what many people actually need.
This is an incredible achievement... not just for the technical depth, but for what it represents. Alyssa's work is nothing short of inspiring. The way she combined deep technical insight with years of dedication has not only brought open-source graphics to Apple Silicon, but also lit a fire under reverse engineers and open-source developers.
She has shown a whole new generation that curiosity and persistence can break barriers. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the developments these past several years. Massive respect to her and everyone who made this possible, and kudos on her new position at Intel.
The author basically speedran modern graphics APIs on 'impossible' hardware and then just... walks away. Total mic drop.
Switching to work on Intel GPUs is not walking away.
It is accepting a new challenge.
It is walking away from her user base. (I’m not complaining — I’m an open source dev too and recognize I have no right to put demands on her time. But what is the future for Asahi Linux after this? I don’t see one.)
1. student at uoft 2. a lead in a job at Collabora 3. very succesful and ambitious hobby project
how tf does she juggle and managed to do all this? I can barely do one of the above properly.
One of the few people who are actually competent.
Although most likely she’s well compensated, and doesn’t have to waste time on useless efforts at work, this level of discipline and striving towards a goal is just very rare in general.
Possibly also no family, limited social life and no other hobbies.
For myself, when I lived on a different continent to my family, had limited social life and job with strictly set hours, it was much easier to have the time needed to make significant progress on a hobby.
However, discipline is an enormous factor too, actually using that extra available time on something “productive” is no easy feat.
Now I have kids and live in the same area as my parents and siblings again, entirely happy, but less free time.
One of the unspoken benefits of being young, you're unlikely to have grown into a management position and can focus on not-management stuff.
This is what managers tell themselves to feel better about their idleness, but in the end it’s just another excuse.
Every person is different of course, there might be this one brilliant engineer forced to manage against his will somewhere.
Forced by financial concerns, a decent bunch I'd say.
Fair, fair. I’d take a salary bump, because it affords an illusion of being able to escape the Cage faster.
2021 and 2022 was also when many places were only just coming out of COVID lockdowns. I remember how much dead time I had back then. I used it to watch lots of series and youtube videos. I wish I had the discipline and motivation to work like she did during that area with all that free time.
Yeah same. I made a dent in my gaming backlog and TV shows and built a gaming computer that has only ever been used to play Factorio (notably, a game that can probably be played without a GPU).
Half of me kinda wants another lockdown so I can do more discipline-y stuff but the other half is like, dude you're just gonna waste it playing more games. I just gotta face the music - I'm just not disciplined and I just don't have the drive.
She does a bunch of social media stuff with her girlfriend on top of that, so “limited social life and no other hobbies” may not be a good description.
Many people are competent. She's exceptional.
Ignorant comment. I'll happily be incompetent if it means I have those things
Sounds like one of those mythical 10x engineers!
Perhaps, "Deep Work" by Cal Newport can explain that.
Pretty cool. She’s achieved more at 23 than I have after over a decade in the industry. What a talented engineer.
No clue who you are, but real talk she’s achieved more than I will in my entire life. I’ve been in the industry for decades.
She just started working at Intel in August and has already accomplished more than most would in a year[1]. Incredible!
[1] https://rosenzweig.io/resume-en.pdf
Just to say a big thank-you to the Asahi team, and especially for the GPU work. It is still on my list to get back to some OpenGL dev work. Especially since I recently made fedora-asahi remix my daily driver, and I have to say it is amazing. It feels like I once again own my computer.
Their work has inspired me to continue bashing away at my Zig PinePhone code, although I'll never have the skills to get it's GPU running anything beyond a poke'd framebuffer.
That checklist of supported APIs in Asahi is mind blowing, especially in such a short timeframe. Again, well done, thank-you, and best of luck at intel.
Not much to say beyond a hearty “well done, you!” That, and looking forward to see what’s next.
Inspiring stuff! I didn't even expect basic Linux support on M1 to be so good in such a short time-span, leaving graphics aside. I was very pleased when I tried booting up Asahi on M1 a couple months back and went on to get work done in it and even enjoy some games.
Thanks for all your amazing contributions Alyssa and all the best for the road ahead!
Alyssa is such an inspiring individual. I'm glad she's working on the things that interest her.
What a project. Of all of the IT work that I'm aware of I have a hard time choosing between this and Fabrice Bellard's output, both are - for me at least - equally impressive.
Kind of amazing Alyssa didn’t end up working at Apple (instead of Intel).
They seem closely aligned with the Free Software Foundation (FSF), so I could very well imagine that being a major ideological reason not to want to work with Apple. Yes, Apple sometimes upstream patches and they do contribute to open source here and there, but they certainly are no FSF poster child. Intel on the other hand are about as open as it gets when it comes to their track record in the graphics space. I personally have nothing but admiration for Rosenzweig's work and I hope they will continue to find environments where they can flourish and do great things in the years to come.
Alyssa's post mentions how lots of the work she's done has at least started as side projects while she's working on something else (Panfrost while at high school, M1 drivers while at Collabora). Obviously I'm not her so I can't say anything specific to her. In general, Apple doesn't allow its developers to work on open source projects on the side while employed at the company. I think this is a stupid idea that costs them a lot of talent, but I doubt Apple cares what I think. I've seen multiple cases where an active open source contributor gets hired by Apple, then their presence in open source communities vanishes. Based on all the open source work she's done so far, I think it would take a lot to make her stop all contributions like that.
Maybe she didn’t pass a leetcode interview. :p
You do have to wonder how that kind of interview would go. Hopefully it would be actual engineers that created what she reverse engineered instead of some gatekeeper trying to one up her somehow.
Maybe she doesn't want to.
You set an ambitious goal and executed beautifully despite a very busy schedule.
Well done.
May I ask something, I want an apple silicone MacBook Air and I am probably just be running Linux on it, what are pros and cons of getting an m1 vs m2? Except for more ram or so. Thx
The short answer is that it's just a stupid idea (and a waste of money). Asahi only works somewhat ok on M1.
Agreed, it is not that stable/usable. I tested it on M1 Pro and was hopeful, but after some years I realized it is not viable for daily use. Many things still don't work and I doubt that they will any time soon. Last year I was given M4 Pro at work and it is not supported at all.
Looking at the drama and people stepping down, I don't think MacBooks will be properly supported on Linux in this decade.
On the other hand, I have an M2 Air and it's stable, fast, and I haven't thrown anything at it that it doesn't handle perfectly. But the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
(The M3/M4 are in progress but not supported. That's public on the project's compatibility chart.)
The biggest deal breaker for me was no support for external displays (through DP alt mode/thunderbolt).
Also the infrequent random OS crashes were annoying. And sometimes WiFi would stop working after sleep (wold not show any access points) and would require a reboot.
M1 is 5 years old already and is still not fully stable and lacks features. It seems like the overall development effort started slowing down a couple years ago and while we did get the amazing audio daemon and graphics driver, development of other things seem to be stuck.
If I remember correctly, there were also some comments from Marcan (?) on social media about issues with supporting newer chips (M3/M4), hinting that M3 and M4 are vastly different and require significant effort to add Linux support.
So if M3, M4 and other future versions are too different to get supported in decent time frame, then that means that Asahi is all about supporting years old hardware. That reduces interest by Linux users looking to buy a laptop now, and thus potentially reducing available donations, developer pool, interest, etc.
I love what Marcan, Alyssa, James and others have achieved and how they have pushed Linux further. I think that their contributions will stay relevant and be useful for other hardware for many years to come.
Sorry but I just can let it, I bought a Microsoft dev kit 2023 just to test hundreds of gigabytes of windows software I’m responsible for would deploy on it with the system center :D If that software would also Work ofcourse is another thing. :D
Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.
macOS as UNIX is pretty fine for anyone that is happy with UNIX, and isn't looking for yet another Linux distribution.
Now anyone that treats it with the attitude that whatever Linux distros do is UNIX, there are enough surprises in there.
m2 has magsafe
M2 Air has magsafe. M1 Air does not.
yes, that's spelt out in the context above.
My M1 Pro has MagSafe.
GGP was asking about the air though.
Ah, my mistake.
What is this, quora ?
Sorry to hijack, but since the topic is related: is the development of Asahi Linux still actively ongoing, or has slowed down a lot? The progress for M1 and M2 was steady and now almost everything is done, but the M3+ work still seems to not have started. And with major contributors leaving the project I'm kind of worried for the future of Asahi (on newer Apple hardware).
The new leadership team set a short term goal of getting their existing work upstreamed, which seems to be going well.
> Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term.
https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
While we still have quite a way to go, this progress has already made rebases significantly less hassle and given us some room to breathe.
https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/
Found out from some Reddit discussions that the developers aim to first upstream everything for M1/M2 to the kernel, and as of https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/:
> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
So if the discussions are true, it can take years for the developers to finish M1/M2 upstreaming with all the Linux kernel bureaucracy. That is, unless they decide to start working on M3 before finishing the upstreaming
Makes sense, every patch they upstream is less maintenance and forward-porting work that they have to do. Keeping a downstream kernel up to date is very painful, even one that's "near mainline" as with Asahi's.
i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around
I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel. Forget the hostile nature Apple has proven to possess when consumers dare treat their hardware as if paying for it makes it their own.
Qualcomm has been beating the marketing drum on this instead of delivering. Ampere has delivered excellent hardware but does not seem interested in the desktop segment. The "greatest Linux laptop around" can not be some unmaintained relic from a hostile hardware company.
As somebody that has worked in a company that did Qualcomm devices in the past - Qualcomm just cares about money grabbing, and is not any less hostile to developers than Apple.
If you want to do a device, and your only chip option is Qualcomm I'd recommend not doing a device at all.
FLOSS stacks for Qualcomm-based devices are actually a lot more feature complete than some other brands like MediaTek or Exynos. Still nowhere near any kind of "daily driver" status but at least getting somewhere, whilst others have yet to even get started.
> I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel.
Can you see any other machine coming close to a Mac in terms of hardware quality and performance? Obviously the cost is silly, but while I agree with your sentiment, it seems optimistic to hope.
Networking is going to be another major issue. Even on the Intel MacBook Pro this is still a problem. The instructions for getting it to work are so bizarre that I ended up with a network dongle with a supported chipset instead.
Good news for you: Networking (ethernet/wifi/bluetooth) on M1/M2 have been working perfectly fine for a while and don't require any special tinkering.
Oh that is good news. I'm almost tempted to try that out.
I can recommend it! I've been daily driving M1 for a few months now, it's working really well. Parent poster is raving about a potential "greatest linux laptop", but depending on your use case it's already there.
IME the Asahi support page is spot-on: There are a couple of yet-unsupported features (DP-alt mode being a big one), but any feature listed as supported will just work without hidden gotchas. I find this a big contrast to other devices, which will often "work" but have annoying little quirks here and there that are workable but can feel like a downgrade compared to Windows.
How is battery life?
On macOS, I never worried about battery life when leaving the house even when doing compute-heavy work. On Asahi, that is equally much true. I couldn't tell you how many hours it lasts because I never have to carry a charger unless I'm out for more than a regular workday.
There's some room for improvement, but that is purely relative to macOS. Asahi still solidly beats other x86 devices (other than the low end ones you wouldn't do development work on).
One issue is that idle battery consumption is higher than on macOS (an active area of improvement though [1]), which you'll notice by an M1 laptop discharging by about 12% overnight when macos would've eaten maybe 2-3%. Not a big issue normally, but can be inconvenient if the device shuts down due to empty battery overnight.
During more passive uses at daytime (e.g. playing music), the display tends to be the biggest power hog. Not really Linux-specific, but I actively turn off the screen when not needed hence (KDE lets you configure the power button to do so).
[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@chaos_princess/11498433865...
Ok. Will definitely look into this, thank you for all the time you put into the reply.
I'd pay easily let's say $100-200 a year to have linux running on modern apple laptops with full features. I'm sure I'm not alone. Their hardware, "our" OS would be perfect. Well, except notch and lack of OLED - but, reportedly that's in the works too.
https://opencollective.com/asahilinux
the great thing is, you can!
"with full features"
the macbook pro uses MiniLed, in term of contrast, it's quite good, much better than ips.
Macbook pro display is one of the best laptop display.
And somehow it has way less blooming than other mini-led displays I have used. Not clear how they pull that feat off exactly
Most likely, they have more mini-leds and/or more ability to independently control them. Of course the localized "blooming" of mini-leds is a lot easier on the eyes regardless than the all-around bloom of a backlit display.
(Better for the battery too, if you can keep most of the screen dark.)
It is not even close. Pretty much any OLED is so much better
The M3+ GPU is also very different. So while it may be true that the driver development for M1/M2 is now more or less complete as OP says, future work along the same lines will very much be needed.
>The M3+ GPU is also very different.
Any sources for that? I'd be quite surprised if Apple had radically altered the architecture.
This is a pretty well known thing; the M3/A17 generation GPU was a ground-up redesign that added things like dynamic caching and hardware ray tracing [1] which are highly nontrivial to simply extend an existing architecture to support. Unfortunately I can’t find where I read this, but IIRC at the time M2 came out there were expectations that M2 would have a new GPU architecture with hardware ray tracing but this wound up being delayed to M3 because it took longer than expected to do a ground-up redesign of the GPU.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375/
>For years I juggled my courses with my part-time job and my hobby driver
Man I wish i had half of the energy of this author.
> I wish i had half of the energy of this guy
Trolling will get you banned here, so please don't.
i swear i'm not trolling, i had no idea the author is woman.
Sorry for misinterpreting you! All we can do is pattern-match, and sometimes the pattern doesn't match.
So, you are not going to unflag, undead the comment you killed, right? The one you are sorry about, claiming you misinterpreted them. Just curious, not trolling.
Ah good point. Normally I do that, but I forgot to do it here. Fixed now.
not your fault, she is trans so sensitive subject. She generally hides references to it, but her picture is on her site linked by others.
[flagged]
Moderation is guesswork.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That means … what? I censor whatever I like (dislike), I guess.
"Moderation is guesswork" means that we can't always know what someone's post means, or was intended to mean, nor can we know for sure what effects it will have. We can only make guesses (i.e. interpretations), and those are inevitably wrong sometimes.
We can't not make mistakes. The best we can do is acknowledge when we make a mistake and do what we can to fix it.
> I censor whatever I like (dislike), I guess
If you knew how many comments I dislike on HN, you would no longer have that perception.
https://rosenzweig.io/
i think it's a woman?
(Why) are the M3 and M4 really that different from M1 and M2?
They’re significantly different GPU architectures. They added support for hardware features like mesh shading, raytracing and better shader occupancy/dynamic caching.
Beyond that, each M series generation also brings more of the system into the SoC. For example, the entire storage controller is part of the SoC in the M1, but the M2 brought in the trackpad controller as well.
Bringing more functionality into the SoC has many advantages but it does make it more difficult to target because you can’t just make use of existing off the shelf controller knowledge to apply to it.
I'm curious, why are not these people hit with C&D from Apple?
And other great projects, like Corellium (Actual iOS VM, not that crap Apple makes) are hit hard with lawsuits etc.
(You know, great project for these people who is still RE iOS for 0days and report them to Apple, which is behind me long time ago, reporting 0days for peanuts, yeah right :) )
The Asahi team had made comments that it’s clearly Apple is ‘silently encouraging’ what they’re doing.
With all of Apple’s secure boot stuff they had more than enough ways tot totally squash running alternate OSes on the machines like a bug.
Instead they seem to have gone out of their way in a few places to make it not only possible but secure.
They’ll NEVER say anything publicly, or give documentation, but they’re leaving doors open on purpose.
If I had to guess. One seeks to reverse engineer hardware to run an open source OS. The seeks to emulate a platform to run a proprietary closed source OS.
If I remember correctly, Apple at the introduction of M1 made some explicit statements about the hardware not being locked down. Something along the lines of nothing preventing Linux to run on it.
I remember apple even made some change that asahi devs were really happy and said "this is for us" (marcan's tweet iirc)
Completely different projects in terms of what they’re providing.
Correlium was selling and distributing access to Apple’s software along with security bypasses.
Asahi is not redistributing any Apple IP, are using Apple sanctioned methods to run, and are not commercial.
Biggest thing is Asahi project is not a for-profit venture. It also mutually benefits Apple since that encourages hardware sales from non-traditional customers.
Corellium being a commercial product (and thus a company you can sue) probably made it easier.
Huge respect for her. I consider myself a talented software engineer. I can’t get anywhere close to this accomplishment.
Genuine question: is she a once-in-a-generation prodigy? We forget this class of people indeed exists. As fellow professionals are we inspired or deeply ashamed of ourselves?
Honestly kind of heartbreaking to see her leave asahi Linux. She has done insane work building the vulkan driver from scratch. I wish her well working at Intel. If I ever buy an Intel GPU I can rest much easier it will work well on Linux. If she is working on the Linux driver stack that is.
There isn't really anything left to do for her - everything missing (including work on the newer graphics chips) can be somewhat easily done by less talented people, building on her work.
She did the challenging stuff she cares about. One aspect of nerd brain often is that you can hyperfocus on challenging stuff, but can't get the motivation to work on stuff you don't care about - and even what would be a 20 minute task can end up taking days because of that. It's great that she has the self awareness to set goals, and step away once they're done.
I didn't have that in that age - and still sometimes struggle. I was lucky enough that my employer back then recognized my issues, and paired other people with me for doing the stuff I was not interested in, and now usually manage to load those issues onto other co-workers by myself.
This is of course great as long as you can find enough "challenging" work to perform, but any successful project is going to involve a whole lot of seemingly "boring" work. A big part of true maturity and professionalism is being able to find the interesting challenge even in these more run-of-the-mill tasks and successfully engage with them.
(Mind you, I'm not talking about a matter of inborn temperament or character, much less a moral flaw! Rather, finding the compelling challenge even in "boring" tasks is a valuable skill and situational tactic that anyone should explicitly learn about and aim to acquire as part of becoming a mature professional, not a matter of morality or somehow being dismissed as "lazy"!)
M3, M4 and soon to be M5 are ready to be cracked open :). From what I understand they are actually different somewhat hardware wise. So it's really not like there would not be a continuations of this work. But of course it's natural to want something else after years of working on the project.
Take into account that she's focusing on the 3D stack, not the overall hardware. Even with hardware differences there's a good chance it's not different enough to make it an interesting new challenge.
Yes I meant the GPU specifically not the hardware in general. An example is the support for hardware ray tracing in M3 and beyond. In some now deleted french fediverse post Alyssa indicated M3 has a new architecture.
Given the features that have been advertised for the M3+ graphics and compute stack, there's rather a good chance that it is different enough to create big, new challenges for third-party support.
Sounds like ADD to me. Easy to be labeled as "Lazy" etc.
ADD is an old term -> ADHD. Nvm.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge someone for ADHD.
Because I have it, untreated. And I couldn't even finish university because of it. I'm unable to do certain things, like at all, I'm nearly physically ill when doing these things. Hard to explain it, to someone without these problems :)
Luckily enough, it's not that important here / Idc about money, career etc.
Yeah, no way there’s any evolutionary fitness to having a brain that only works on problems it finds worthwhile. /s
Ideally, society would be aware of such people and actually use their potential. AR struck it lucky and so did a few others (cough Richard Stallman cough), but most don't and end up burned out by rigid megacorp structures and processes that don't respect that people, even those one might call "neurotypical", aren't cogs in a machine.
I've said it before and I will keep saying it again: the financialization of everything and the utter dominance of braindead, long-since disproven MBA ideology is going to seriously impede our societies in the next decades.
I never understood this project. Maybe I'm missing something, but the timescale is such that by the time they're done the product isn't even being sold anymore
At least with Panfrost it made more sense bc it still being used
M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point
I believe Walmart has a deal[1] with Apple to sell[2] M1 MacBook Airs. This has been the case for a year or so, so I don't think it's old stock. They have been in stock for since that date, and slowly getting cheaper.
[1]https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/16/walmart-m1-macbook-air-launch...
[2]https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...
Oh interesting! I for some reason thought Apple devices can only every be purchased from Apple (maybe that was only during the Steve Jobs era)
But 8GB of RAM.. that's unfortunately completely unusable by most developers. (Panfrost drivers you can at least use on RPi-like devices)
Maybe in another 5 years it'll work on the M3/4 and I'll revisit this. Good to know the devices are still being built so long after release
They’ve always been available at Best Buy, BH Photo, and other authorized partners in the US.
The Walmart deal is a total mystery. It started, seemingly, as dumping new old stock without selling it on Apple.com, but they’ve even updated the machine I think so clearly it’s an ongoing concern.
Nothing like it I know of for Apple, ever. I’d love to know the story.
I would guess Apple’s goal is increasing the number of people buying recurring Apple services, such as icloud and tv+.
It has been a long time since people have needed cutting edge laptops, so an M1 bought today will still work for 90% of people for the next 5+ years. Even if Apple doesn’t earn a large profit margin on the sale of the laptop, they could earn a decent amount on monthly services revenue, plus increased odds of that person buying a watch/airpods/phone/etc.
I would agree except the machines are so low spec I don’t think they’re a good experience.
An M1 is great. But RAM and storage won’t hold up as long.
I suspect they can sell them at that price and still make a killing, and all the equipment to make chassis/etc is already paid off.
For what purposes will the RAM and storage not hold up?
I see most people around me watching media, using a web browser to shop, maps, look at photos/videos (small storage is great for Apple, then more people buy icloud), fill out pdfs, and maybe some email or light excel.
Presumably, those are the people likely to buy a laptop at Walmart.
Storage can at least be expanded externally, if at a cost of speed, reliability, and convenience.
For the RAM, 8GB is not enough, but in fairness, when the system can page out at 200GB/s, paging out doesn't hurt nearly as bad. Its only when things have to thrash the page file that it becomes readily apparent on these (say, an application needs to have more than a few GB of stuff resident in memory all the time).
I agree. If you’re using a lot of cloud services (Google Docs, iCloud Drive, Spotify, etc) you can get by without a lot of storage these days.
But even if 8 GB of RAM holds you today, will it hold you five years from now?
Or are you going to have to get rid of the computer much faster and buy another one by then.
Whereas simply doubling the RAM would likely extend the life a significant amount.
8 Gigs of RAM still give you a great experience if you don’t do everything at once like I do.
It’s not high spec for sure, but with M1 RAM counting double (they swap very efficiently up to a certain point) it’s still plenty for casual use.
Why would the product have to be available new for the project to be worth it? There are still many M1 chips out there, and this helps prolong the usefulness of those chips.
> M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point
New M1 Macbook Airs are still available at Walmart (maybe elsewhere). But even if not, who cares? People are still writing code for computers that haven't been sold since the 1980s.
Yeah, I get if it's just a for-fun kind of thing. I didn't mean to knock it. I guess generally people want their work to end up being used. The time-line is such that that seems semi-impossible.
As the other replies show, you can still buy this machine, but it sounds like it likely won't be for too much longer
The developers involved must be acutely aware of it. Maybe they have some sense that the work will easily update to current M chips. Or maybe they don't really care about that. It was just an interesting exercise and they move on
Hum.. I can still buy a 100% hardware compatible NEW C64...
You can repurpose a decent hardware, in terms of performance and consumption, to run for far more time than Apple is willing to support it?
Why only m1? Just installed stuff on my M2 Max Some texts says m3 also supported...
When the next gen chip comes out you can usually reuse large amount of stuff.
"usually" being compared to what..?
Maybe it's just due to a complete lack of attention, but I think M3/4 support is extremely minimal at this point. Which is not a great sign..
Im glad she stepped away from Asahi linux. Its absolutely great from a techincal perspective and the progress that team has made, but talented people like her shouldn't be trying to reverse engineer software/hardware from shitty anti-consumer company that can make the entire project work in a heartbeat by publishing documentation, in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up.
Reverse engineering requires a different mindset and somewhat different skill set than “forward” engineering. I’ve met people who were happy to only do reverse engineering (to figure out what make things “tick”) without building anything new.
If it was up to me, 2 years of successful reverse engineering (of a variety of projects/products) would be a requirement to be called an engineer. You learn a lot from working things that you can’t learn from a book (and without having to do the mistakes yourself first…)
Just to make it clear: I am not implying anything about Alyssa - just stating an observation based on my own experience.
If I could make roughly the same comp, I would jump on an all-RE job without a parachute. Sounds like heaven.
I mean, she wasn't just reverse engineering, she was doing it to make graphics work on Asahi Linux.
> in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up
To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.
Fortunately for her, Intel - her new employer has "fabs at home". Though on older nodes, TBF.
Intel's GPUs are manufactured on TSMC though.
That is correct. In my previous comment, for the sake of brevity, I deleted what I had written about Intel also being able to "call TSMC and have them doing a run of it's latest design", but it felt like that would have been belaboring the point that Intel isn't a rinky-dink chip operation, despite losing their commanding lead.
Ultimately we didn't need Jon Lech Johansen's work (and Derek Fawcus's, and others') on cracking DVD DRM or cracking Apple's FairPlay DRM, as there have always been alternatives. But their efforts did push the fight against DRM in our favour, and who knows what the world would be like if we had done nothing?
Creating things is a gamble, as mass adoption is almost never by technical merits, but by marketing. So you could make open documented everything but still end up with nobody benefiting from that openness, because a competitor (whether open or not) wipes you out. You saw this happen even in the era where electronic devices were expected to come with full schematics -- there were winners and losers even then.
But, if something has become widespread and well adopted, and it's not open, that's a problem. It absolutely should be opened up and documented. Especially if it's not because the money-grubbing creators of the something are deliberately hiding how it works and locking down control in order to extract more money from everyone else's pockets. The sooner you put an end to that, and the more often you fight against that, the sooner society itself becomes more efficient and fairer for everyone.
Even with proper documentation, there still would have been loads of work to get M1/M2 GPUs working on Asahi Linux. Writing GPU drivers worth a damn is about as difficult as targeting a compiler to a new CPU architecture. It would not be "in a heartbeat".
Im not talking about chip level documentation. Apple could take their source code for drivers and compile the kernel level for linux (since its all just C code) while open sourcing the user space.
Lucky you, Intel.
Amazing work! Panfrost driver was very impressive to me before, and now just know the lady also solved the GPU driver on Mac. Not sure Intel will be a good career path for her. :)
Interesting that it cuts off at the M2, I guess the M3 was a massive enough shift that it did not transfer over as nicely. I certainly hope that the M3s and M4's are supported by the time Apple EOL's my M4 laptop so I can still slap Linux on it. The M4 series of Macbooks is one of the nicest laptops I've ever had the pleasure of owning and using.
Very cool and what an amazing way to learn so much beyond what you do in those years at university (at least in the engineering sense). I wish we had software and hardware open to be able to run custom setups whether its NVIDIA on x64 or Ampere/arm64 with MacOS.
The Apple GPU stuff is amazing, but I wish the rest of linux-on-apple work did better.
For example neither suspend nor hibernate works in Apple hardware, which means if you put the laptop away for a day or two the battery will die and you'll lose everything you were doing.
Does Xe HPG compete with NVIDIA?
Xe HPG is also known as A750 and B580 so yes, it competes with the 3060/4060/5060.
What a legend in the making!
I can't wait to see what she accomplishes at Intel. She has a very bright future ahead of her!
Congrats! A great achievement.
I wonder if the Intel drivers are going be written in Rust.
He did a great job
Congrats on a job well done.
What a legend.
Great work
> I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans. If all you care about is Linux, resist the attacks on trans people. > If you have any decency, fight back.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250520182445/https://rosenzwei...
By the way, out of pure curiosity, why does it seem that there are a disproportionately high amount of super talented trans programmers? I mean, trans people make up for a relatively small percentage of the general populace so it would be unlikely for half of any random group, even if it's only 7 people, to be trans. There are even memes like programmer socks etc. I also personally know several very proficient programmers who are trans.
I am nowhere near an expert or even a particularly well-informed person here, but my idle speculation is that online technical spaces are a place where you can have much more freedom in comfortably choosing the outward persona you wish to present. In meatspace, if your physical appearances and your chosen persona don't match up in ways that some people find disagreeable, many people will go out of their way to let you know it.
Edit: I'm proposing a selection effect here, where people with these challenges gravitate towards spaces and communities where they don't feel confronted by them as often.
But by this logic roughly half of the population is trans, but the vast majority are afraid to present as such. The actual number of trans people is surely impossible to know due to these societal pressures but I find it hard to believe that almost half of the population is trans. I suspect there are other factors.
My read is that post is not arguing what you think (that it's caused by freedom to present how they feel and that it's a representative population) but instead that it's caused by a selection effect. But this argument is implied so I see why you mistook it.
That's correct. I suspect there's a selection effect where people who struggle with these challenges in their lives find comfort in a space where they can present as the person they want to be without constantly being questioned, attacked, or otherwise made uncomfortable. And that's not because this industry is more enlightened, but because it's much easier to contribute and participate only with an online persona that can be divorced from your physical characteristics.
I hope it's clear that I am not trying to speak authoritatively and that this is more or less a total guess on my part based on some pretty superficial analysis.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. I think your logic is backwards. Parent isn't saying the freedom of online technical spaces turns people trans, but that trans people in those spaces are more likely to make themselves obvious because of the freedoms.
There's also high overlaps between trans and non-neurotypical types. I'd suggest there's the same crossover between non-neurotypical and tech circles so makes sense there's a higher instance of trans in tech.
I'd also suggest that on some level coming out as trans is basically hacker mentality. "This hardware/wetware doesn't look/perform correctly. Let me get a soldering iron/rewrite some code/clothing/hormones/surgery and change that."
> disproportionately high amount of super talented trans programmers
Could it be that they also happen to be autistic? There appears to be a pattern I've noticed where a large number of trans developers are also autistic. This may be responsible for a lot of the passion and dedication required to work on projects like this. (Mostly video game) Emulation is another field that seems to have a similar overlap. Some might say Rust is another one.
I'm unclear what the relevance of this comment is. It's by the same author but doesn't seem to bear any relevance to the M1 GPU.
The author is incredibly talented, and has done the community with a valuable service; one that the HN crowd especially is likely to benefit from.
Many people in her situation are not lucky enough to be in a mental or physical position to be able to pursue this sort of work or take advantage of their talent, and that is in large part due to the persistent and long-standing discrimination trans people face.
Even if one is totally self-interested, it pays not to discriminate. Even if one can't muster up even a little decency to not discriminate because, ya know, it's wrong.
I agree. But I wouldn't have known that the author was trans had the commenter not pointed it out. My thoughts about the original article are unchanged, but if the goal is to not discriminate, then pointing out a feature that many people would discriminate against seems counterintuitive imo.
If the original commenter said something like "it's inspiring that a trans person could overcome all odds and have such an accomplishment" then that comment has value. Randomly pointing out that the author is trans with zero context has no positive value.
Their quote was easily translated for me:
“Asahi Linux wouldn’t exist without trans people. No one realizes how much Linux progress, and especially how much Linux graphics/gpu progress, hinges on trans people. Perhaps the selfish motivation of wanting Linux to succeed will make HN readers less placidly tolerant of trans hate in the future.”
But, as one of those “wait, you’re trans?!” people who silently contributes to projects without labeling myself, I get how it could be confusing. Hope that helps!
Thanks! I understood the quote in itself, but the OP quoting it with no additional context could have had two connotations: one nefarious (don't bother with this article because it was written by a trans person with an agenda) or one of positivity (Linux wouldn't be where it is now without trans people).
I always hope for the latter, but context and mood are impossible to communicate easily online which is why I was asking for clarification.
There’s a lot of value in selecting the best faith interpretation and then replying in that context; for those silent readers who might be confused, it helps clear up their confusion to the disfavor of any underhandedness — which is then forced to either identify itself plainly (and promptly get flagged) or lose the battle and move on.
That's good advice.
Not the OP but my guess is that they want to raise awareness that people who are making significant technical contributions in our field are affected by the actions of the US administration. Not that exceptionally talented people deserve more legal protections, but the reality is that our industry would be worse off without people like Alyssa.
I know it can be at times grating to constantly hear about stuff like this, but I can assure you folks like Alyssa would rather focus on techie stuff rather than have to ask for help so they can stay safe. For them that worry is now always present and it’s not something they can ignore.
Thanks. I agree with your sentiment. But the OP just posted a random quote from one of her blog posts with no context. It could have either been to raise awareness about her being trans (honestly I'd have never known had it not been for the comment), or to discount the original article because she is trans.
I hope it was the former, but that's why I didn't want to just assume the OPs intention.
> I’m 21 now. I’ll be blunt: if not for gender-affirming care, I don’t know if I would be around. If there would be FOSS graphics drivers for Mali-T860 or the Apple M1.