17 ms·

Gnome Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal

263 points by pthariensflame 5y ago

morganvachon 5y ago
Phenomenal work by Alyssa, she and her contemporaries are making excellent progress on this project!
chownchown 5y ago
Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker? I kid. Now what I really wanted to ask.. Is it using Wayland?
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Only framebuffers are currently available and a typical Wayland compositor runs through DRI (direct rendering infrastructure), which is a whole bunch more complex. I haven't ruled out Mutter having a framebuffer backend, but I suspect she just ran it through X, which has one. Edit: Looks like DRI is there after all: "Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now."(https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098 https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098).
  - floatboth 5y ago
    "DRI" is a fuzzy term :) What's there is a basic KMS driver, so rather than one single framebuffer, userspace can do pageflips. Mutter can run with a display-only KMS driver + llvmpipe for rendering by now I'm pretty sure. wlroots has landed this feature recently-ish too.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  > Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker? This is of course a harder and more pervasive problem than one might realize. macOS Finder RAM usage can explode catastrophically and take down the whole system if you have image previews enabled and click on a very large (gigabyte) TIFF.
  - mixedCase 5y ago
    That sounds like an edge case that should just be accounted for in finder. lgnoring for certain file sizes is a fast solution that can be expanded upon as your thumbnailing programs grow in efficiency and improve their handling of low-IO situations or large files.
    - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
      Should! But apparently isn't. In fact, nearly every image viewing/accessing program assumes that your image content will just happily fit entirely in available RAM after decompression and doesn't bother with things like live tiling.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >In fact, nearly every image viewing/accessing program assumes that your image content will just happily fit entirely in available RAM after decompression Sounds like a totally reasonable assumption, for 99.9% of the cases (including graphic designers).
        BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
        Absolutely, and the pervasiveness of that mindset leads to things like tearing through swap and grinding the computer to a halt because the user clicked on a random file. It doesn't take supergenious or paranormal powers to realize that files might be arbitrarily large. Engineers mostly just fail to care.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > macOS Finder RAM usage can explode catastrophically and take down the whole system if you have image previews enabled and click on a very large (gigabyte) TIFF. I've experienced (and confirmed with a quick search) that Finder won't display a preview for any file that doesn't have the resources to show.
    - 5y ago
azinman2 5y ago
I’m extremely impressed with anyone’s ability to do this at any age, but if I remember correctly, she’s like 17-19 years old or something? Incredible! You go Alyssa!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jfmc 5y ago
  Modern society tends to infantilize people. (Congrats to Alyssa and everyone making this possible!)
  - oblio 5y ago
    > Modern society tends to infantilize people. Well, from what I've heard regarding the frontal cortex, adult decision making is fully crystallized on average around age 25. So it kind of makes sense why on average society these days doesn't trust kids with important stuff. Though, you know, statistics. There are outliers :-)
- teekert 5y ago
  From what I remember from that age, it was the sweet spot for having the intelligence, the enthusiasm and the time to just grab a problem and completely loose myself in it. I didn't care at what time I slept, there were no children requiring attention, my bachelors was pretty easy and didn't require much time investment. My parents were also pretty easy and let me be at my computer for very long times at very strange hours. It was a nice time for me to learn Linux, compile kernels, install Gentoo. For me this was about 2004 btw. Ok, this is pretty next level and way cooler than what I did, but my point is that people at this age are not to be underestimated, they are smart AND have resource ;) (Note that I'm also not claiming that this is what is happening here, but it could be).
  - azinman2 5y ago
    It’s not so much cognitive capability, but experience and knowledge. This is well beyond the experience and knowledge of many professional senior software engineers, let alone someone who hasn’t actively worked at NVIDIA/etc on video chips. She’s figured all this out on her own — not even a full CS degree at a top tier school would go into this level of detail to know how these chips & drivers work, let alone reverse engineer a cutting edge chip from a black box. Reverse engineering is its own skill set, and be the first in the world in this uncharted territory means this isn’t your first time reverse engineering something. It isn’t her first, which makes it even more impressive what she was doing at an earlier age. That combination of self-drive, knowledge, and talent is extremely rare… even more rare when her peers are wanting to hang out and do normal teen stuff!!!
rpowers 5y ago
I am forever in awe of the engineers that can work with the low-level bits and make things like this happen. I'm a deer in the headlights whenever I see addrs and `eax 0xDAFAC000...`
- aviatordongle 5y ago
  I was until I did some device driver development. Imagine it like trying to write a HTTP client for an undocumented SMTP-as-a-service HTTP server. * you know how to make HTTP requests (you know how to use I2C or PCI or ...) * you know roughly what an SMTP-as-a-service should do (you know roughly what a display driver should do) * you don't know the URLs (you don't know the addresses) It's a fun exercise in collaborative reverse engineering. Also there's survivorship bias. The reverse engineering that's most likely to succeed (and thus be written about) are the most approachable ones. Bravo to all those doing this stuff!
  - the_biot 5y ago
    That's regular device driver reverse engineering stuff, and not a bad analogy BTW. But what marcan is doing is another level of awesomeness altogether. The m1n1 bootloader that runs the rest of MacOS in a VM for logging purposes is a hail mary move of such epic brilliance, it brings tears to my eyes.
butterisgood 5y ago
Excellent!
sys_64738 5y ago
Are there any videos of the movement of windows? Trying to gauge if it’s sluggish or not.
- rvz 5y ago
  It is using llvmpipe which is a LLVM-based software renderer, so it will be sluggish than what everyone here is used to which is direct rendering manager hardware acceleration. The graphics drivers are not there yet. Hence this, don't expect graphical elements or graphics intensive software to be any faster than other systems using accelerated graphics right now.
  - bcook 5y ago
    It looks like that's no longer true: https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098 https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098 "Up until now both the Asahi and Corellium kernels were on #1. Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now. #3 is the ultimate here be dragons, but will get us 4k display"
    - tambre 5y ago
      That tweet, and the whole thread, only speak of the Display Controller and Linux render/framebuffer management. Graphics drivers are another separate topic, which as the parent noted, aren't usable yet.
Kuphal 5y ago
This is a very informative blog for me. I am very much benefited after reading this blog. Keep sharing. https://www.mypascoconnect.info/ https://www.mypascoconnect.info/
jeppesen-io 5y ago
I know a pipedream, but if apple provided the docs and drivers for Linux on m1, it would really cement the current defacto standard of a MacBook as the development laptop of choice Amazing progress - but I wonder if getting accelerated gui is 10x the current effort No skin in the game, but can't wait to see how this progresses
- pkulak 5y ago
  I’m pretty sure if you’re not signed into iCloud, you’re of no use to Apple. They’d probably prefer folks not buy their hardware just to wipe it.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that after paying Apple ~$1700 for a M1 MacBook Air, they not only don't care if I don't sign into iCloud, they don't care if I smash it repeatedly with rocks. They have the money already.
    - jeppesen-io 5y ago
      > They have the money already. Not how a publicly traded company works. Broadly speaking, services are becoming a larger and larger part of apples bottom line
      - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
        Yes, I know. I also know that if you look at the numbers Apple still makes the majority of their income on hardware. By a lot. (Like, 79% to 21% as of the last reported quarter.) Maybe one day this will not be true, but that day is not today, and it is unlikely to be a day next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. In any case, I was making a dry joke about Apple not wanting your money if you weren't signed into iCloud, because how all companies, private or public, work generally includes "this person giving us some money may not be as good as this person giving us more money, but is obviously better than this person giving us no money at all." One day I will learn that dry humor rarely flies on Hacker News, but that day is not today, and it is unlikely to be a day next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. So it goes.
pkulak 5y ago
I’m so worried this project will get 95% of the way there, and then all the fun issues will run out and the M1 will be just another MacBook with WiFi, Bluetooth and sleep issues. The obvious issue is to pay someone to do the work, and I am, but I still can’t shake the fear.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  I wonder why we even bother trying to support these hardware vendors sometimes. I have been trying really hard to simply not deal with them for my own sanity. Are we not simply letting the leash out further for what we will accept and buy? Are we truly that powerless against the market forces which drive HW/OS sales?
  - watermelon0 5y ago
    For some people it's a nice challenge to tackle. Additionally, M1 is currently best? platform when comparing performance with power usage, and (at least MBA) comes in a great form factor. AFAIK there is no comparable device that has decent support for Linux.
    - distances 5y ago
      Ryzen mobile is of course still faster in multi-core tasks, although with a higher power demand.
      - phonon 5y ago
        Actually not--a 5900HX is about 1400/7500 (ST/MT GB5) An M1 is about 1700/7600. So call that a tie for MT, and 20% faster in ST...with a chip using about a third the power.
        distances 5y ago
        No, M1 is clearly slower in multi-core (to be fair, it has fewer threads). Not sure where you got your numbers from. 5900HX gets about 7800 in Geekbench 5, and the difference is much larger in some other multi-core tests. For example Cinebench gives 7800 for M1, 13800 for 5900HX. E.g. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-5900hx https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
supperburg 5y ago
Wow going through this persons online presence, she is astoundingly prolific. Transgender, as well.
- orthoxerox 5y ago
  There seems to be a lot of trans folks doing crazy tech stuff. Her, the Perl 6 on Haskell woman, the actually portable executable woman, byuu (RIP), etc.
- dsego 5y ago
  > Transgender, as well. I might be wrong, but that seems to be the norm for techies. At least from what I've seen online.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Theres a somewhat significant correlation between hf autism & gender dysphoria; and hf autism & technical proficiency.
somewhatbetter 5y ago
Why is it newsworthy if a programer gets a program running on a general purpose computer? I mean 89 comments seems to be a lot for this.
- netdur 5y ago
  Because she can... And we really want linux on good arm laptop - you know, so we can ditch x86 on servers.
  - somewhatbetter 5y ago
    >we really want linux on good arm laptop >so we can ditch x86 on servers So linux enthusiasts hate apple for their influence and business methods, but love them for the good arm laptops, but hate them for the undocumented hw so they develop linux to work on an their arm laptop so you can ditch x86 on servers. I knew linux is a ductape-work, but i never tought you can get high of its glue-fumes.
- Octoth0rpe 5y ago
  > Why is it newsworthy if a programer gets a program running on a general purpose computer? In some sense, a computer with nearly entirely undocumented hardware isn't 'general purpose'. This effort is literally the process of taking a non-general purpose computer and turning it into a general purpose computer, and the news is that a major milestone has been reached.
  - somewhatbetter 5y ago
    Then please define me what a "general purpose computer" means.

morganvachon 5y ago

Phenomenal work by Alyssa, she and her contemporaries are making excellent progress on this project!

chownchown 5y ago

Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker? I kid. Now what I really wanted to ask.. Is it using Wayland?

solarkraft 5y ago
Only framebuffers are currently available and a typical Wayland compositor runs through DRI (direct rendering infrastructure), which is a whole bunch more complex. I haven't ruled out Mutter having a framebuffer backend, but I suspect she just ran it through X, which has one. Edit: Looks like DRI is there after all: "Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now."(https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098 https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098).
- floatboth 5y ago
  "DRI" is a fuzzy term :) What's there is a basic KMS driver, so rather than one single framebuffer, userspace can do pageflips. Mutter can run with a display-only KMS driver + llvmpipe for rendering by now I'm pretty sure. wlroots has landed this feature recently-ish too.
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
> Can it run anything with thumbnails in the filepicker? This is of course a harder and more pervasive problem than one might realize. macOS Finder RAM usage can explode catastrophically and take down the whole system if you have image previews enabled and click on a very large (gigabyte) TIFF.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  That sounds like an edge case that should just be accounted for in finder. lgnoring for certain file sizes is a fast solution that can be expanded upon as your thumbnailing programs grow in efficiency and improve their handling of low-IO situations or large files.
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    Should! But apparently isn't. In fact, nearly every image viewing/accessing program assumes that your image content will just happily fit entirely in available RAM after decompression and doesn't bother with things like live tiling.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >In fact, nearly every image viewing/accessing program assumes that your image content will just happily fit entirely in available RAM after decompression Sounds like a totally reasonable assumption, for 99.9% of the cases (including graphic designers).
      - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
        Absolutely, and the pervasiveness of that mindset leads to things like tearing through swap and grinding the computer to a halt because the user clicked on a random file. It doesn't take supergenious or paranormal powers to realize that files might be arbitrarily large. Engineers mostly just fail to care.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > macOS Finder RAM usage can explode catastrophically and take down the whole system if you have image previews enabled and click on a very large (gigabyte) TIFF. I've experienced (and confirmed with a quick search) that Finder won't display a preview for any file that doesn't have the resources to show.
  - 5y ago

azinman2 5y ago

I’m extremely impressed with anyone’s ability to do this at any age, but if I remember correctly, she’s like 17-19 years old or something? Incredible! You go Alyssa!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jfmc 5y ago
Modern society tends to infantilize people. (Congrats to Alyssa and everyone making this possible!)
- oblio 5y ago
  > Modern society tends to infantilize people. Well, from what I've heard regarding the frontal cortex, adult decision making is fully crystallized on average around age 25. So it kind of makes sense why on average society these days doesn't trust kids with important stuff. Though, you know, statistics. There are outliers :-)
teekert 5y ago
From what I remember from that age, it was the sweet spot for having the intelligence, the enthusiasm and the time to just grab a problem and completely loose myself in it. I didn't care at what time I slept, there were no children requiring attention, my bachelors was pretty easy and didn't require much time investment. My parents were also pretty easy and let me be at my computer for very long times at very strange hours. It was a nice time for me to learn Linux, compile kernels, install Gentoo. For me this was about 2004 btw. Ok, this is pretty next level and way cooler than what I did, but my point is that people at this age are not to be underestimated, they are smart AND have resource ;) (Note that I'm also not claiming that this is what is happening here, but it could be).
- azinman2 5y ago
  It’s not so much cognitive capability, but experience and knowledge. This is well beyond the experience and knowledge of many professional senior software engineers, let alone someone who hasn’t actively worked at NVIDIA/etc on video chips. She’s figured all this out on her own — not even a full CS degree at a top tier school would go into this level of detail to know how these chips & drivers work, let alone reverse engineer a cutting edge chip from a black box. Reverse engineering is its own skill set, and be the first in the world in this uncharted territory means this isn’t your first time reverse engineering something. It isn’t her first, which makes it even more impressive what she was doing at an earlier age. That combination of self-drive, knowledge, and talent is extremely rare… even more rare when her peers are wanting to hang out and do normal teen stuff!!!

rpowers 5y ago

I am forever in awe of the engineers that can work with the low-level bits and make things like this happen. I'm a deer in the headlights whenever I see addrs and `eax 0xDAFAC000...`

aviatordongle 5y ago
I was until I did some device driver development. Imagine it like trying to write a HTTP client for an undocumented SMTP-as-a-service HTTP server. * you know how to make HTTP requests (you know how to use I2C or PCI or ...) * you know roughly what an SMTP-as-a-service should do (you know roughly what a display driver should do) * you don't know the URLs (you don't know the addresses) It's a fun exercise in collaborative reverse engineering. Also there's survivorship bias. The reverse engineering that's most likely to succeed (and thus be written about) are the most approachable ones. Bravo to all those doing this stuff!
- the_biot 5y ago
  That's regular device driver reverse engineering stuff, and not a bad analogy BTW. But what marcan is doing is another level of awesomeness altogether. The m1n1 bootloader that runs the rest of MacOS in a VM for logging purposes is a hail mary move of such epic brilliance, it brings tears to my eyes.

butterisgood 5y ago

Excellent!

sys_64738 5y ago

Are there any videos of the movement of windows? Trying to gauge if it’s sluggish or not.

rvz 5y ago
It is using llvmpipe which is a LLVM-based software renderer, so it will be sluggish than what everyone here is used to which is direct rendering manager hardware acceleration. The graphics drivers are not there yet. Hence this, don't expect graphical elements or graphics intensive software to be any faster than other systems using accelerated graphics right now.
- bcook 5y ago
  It looks like that's no longer true: https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098 https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429583864679129098 "Up until now both the Asahi and Corellium kernels were on #1. Sven and the #dri-devel crew helped me spin up #2, which is what I'm using now. #3 is the ultimate here be dragons, but will get us 4k display"
  - tambre 5y ago
    That tweet, and the whole thread, only speak of the Display Controller and Linux render/framebuffer management. Graphics drivers are another separate topic, which as the parent noted, aren't usable yet.

Kuphal 5y ago

This is a very informative blog for me. I am very much benefited after reading this blog. Keep sharing. https://www.mypascoconnect.info/ https://www.mypascoconnect.info/

jeppesen-io 5y ago

I know a pipedream, but if apple provided the docs and drivers for Linux on m1, it would really cement the current defacto standard of a MacBook as the development laptop of choice Amazing progress - but I wonder if getting accelerated gui is 10x the current effort No skin in the game, but can't wait to see how this progresses

pkulak 5y ago
I’m pretty sure if you’re not signed into iCloud, you’re of no use to Apple. They’d probably prefer folks not buy their hardware just to wipe it.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that after paying Apple ~$1700 for a M1 MacBook Air, they not only don't care if I don't sign into iCloud, they don't care if I smash it repeatedly with rocks. They have the money already.
  - jeppesen-io 5y ago
    > They have the money already. Not how a publicly traded company works. Broadly speaking, services are becoming a larger and larger part of apples bottom line
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      Yes, I know. I also know that if you look at the numbers Apple still makes the majority of their income on hardware. By a lot. (Like, 79% to 21% as of the last reported quarter.) Maybe one day this will not be true, but that day is not today, and it is unlikely to be a day next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. In any case, I was making a dry joke about Apple not wanting your money if you weren't signed into iCloud, because how all companies, private or public, work generally includes "this person giving us some money may not be as good as this person giving us more money, but is obviously better than this person giving us no money at all." One day I will learn that dry humor rarely flies on Hacker News, but that day is not today, and it is unlikely to be a day next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. So it goes.

pkulak 5y ago

I’m so worried this project will get 95% of the way there, and then all the fun issues will run out and the M1 will be just another MacBook with WiFi, Bluetooth and sleep issues. The obvious issue is to pay someone to do the work, and I am, but I still can’t shake the fear.

nixpulvis 5y ago
I wonder why we even bother trying to support these hardware vendors sometimes. I have been trying really hard to simply not deal with them for my own sanity. Are we not simply letting the leash out further for what we will accept and buy? Are we truly that powerless against the market forces which drive HW/OS sales?
- watermelon0 5y ago
  For some people it's a nice challenge to tackle. Additionally, M1 is currently best? platform when comparing performance with power usage, and (at least MBA) comes in a great form factor. AFAIK there is no comparable device that has decent support for Linux.
  - distances 5y ago
    Ryzen mobile is of course still faster in multi-core tasks, although with a higher power demand.
    - phonon 5y ago
      Actually not--a 5900HX is about 1400/7500 (ST/MT GB5) An M1 is about 1700/7600. So call that a tie for MT, and 20% faster in ST...with a chip using about a third the power.
      - distances 5y ago
        No, M1 is clearly slower in multi-core (to be fair, it has fewer threads). Not sure where you got your numbers from. 5900HX gets about 7800 in Geekbench 5, and the difference is much larger in some other multi-core tests. For example Cinebench gives 7800 for M1, 13800 for 5900HX. E.g. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-5900hx https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...

supperburg 5y ago

Wow going through this persons online presence, she is astoundingly prolific. Transgender, as well.

orthoxerox 5y ago
There seems to be a lot of trans folks doing crazy tech stuff. Her, the Perl 6 on Haskell woman, the actually portable executable woman, byuu (RIP), etc.
dsego 5y ago
> Transgender, as well. I might be wrong, but that seems to be the norm for techies. At least from what I've seen online.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Theres a somewhat significant correlation between hf autism & gender dysphoria; and hf autism & technical proficiency.

somewhatbetter 5y ago

Why is it newsworthy if a programer gets a program running on a general purpose computer? I mean 89 comments seems to be a lot for this.

netdur 5y ago
Because she can... And we really want linux on good arm laptop - you know, so we can ditch x86 on servers.
- somewhatbetter 5y ago
  >we really want linux on good arm laptop >so we can ditch x86 on servers So linux enthusiasts hate apple for their influence and business methods, but love them for the good arm laptops, but hate them for the undocumented hw so they develop linux to work on an their arm laptop so you can ditch x86 on servers. I knew linux is a ductape-work, but i never tought you can get high of its glue-fumes.
Octoth0rpe 5y ago
> Why is it newsworthy if a programer gets a program running on a general purpose computer? In some sense, a computer with nearly entirely undocumented hardware isn't 'general purpose'. This effort is literally the process of taking a non-general purpose computer and turning it into a general purpose computer, and the news is that a major milestone has been reached.
- somewhatbetter 5y ago
  Then please define me what a "general purpose computer" means.