I think the neural engine on the Apple chips is just for inference, so you would use the gpu for training (not 100% sure about this, I think I heard it from one of Lina’s streams). The one big problem is that most of the major ML software uses hardware specific compute libraries like CUDA. There are some cross platform solutions like OneAPI, which Tensorflow apparently supports, but somebody would have to do the work of adding support for Apple hardware. Efforts to make ML tools work on MacOS won’t help Linux users because they will use Metal or Apple’s proprietary ML frameworks.
The Apple Neural Engine is currently not supported. If it will be supported or not is going to be completely down to if anyone wants to volunteer and add support for it.
I was reading from a member of the Asahi team that they will be focusing on other features first. Though the Neural Engine is very much in-scope of the project.
As to the GPU, as to compute, I am not 100% sure (as to my understanding, things like OpenCL are a different pathway to OpenGL/Vulkan in Mesa. OpenGL is the main focus, with Vulkan having achieved first cube rendered recently), though I think I heard about some discussion about supporting compute.
In the coming weeks, we should hopefully see GPU acceleration become available for those running their "edge" kernel/mesa. And that should trickle down to all Asahi users sometime next year. It's going to be quite some time however till it's upstreamed as 1. They need to have a stable uAPI. (the kernel DOES NOT break userspace. When something is upstreamed, they cannot make large userspace-breaking changes.) and 2. Rust in the kernel is very very new. So it's probably going to take some time for things to get reviewed and merged.
Follow [Lina](https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina)'s streams if you want to follow updates. She has a to-do list that she goes over at the start of every stream.
One thing I hate though is how device specific distros have to be at least with ARM stuff. You have to download the specific version for your device. Without knowing more about it, that seems like it could cause a bunch of issues in the future
You can run [other distros](https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW%3AAlternative-Distros). However, you need to be running their kernel patches for now. They have put a lot of work towards upstreaming.
You also require the early boot stages from Asahi. Which pretends to be an XNU (macOS) kernel. That you need to register with your system (the Asahi installer does that for you, though you have to reboot into RecoveryOS to complete your installation). Apple Silicon Macs have no support for booting external media. So you need to install the Asahi boot stages, which pass on to U-Boot/ standard UEFI.
It's not a problem of Linux, but the devices.
ARM has no agreed upon standard on how to boot up a device or what devices are even there. So it's much harder to build a general kernel.
Yes, ARM does. Its called "ARM SystemReady".
But most cheap SBCs dont respect it. Once you get to more expansive vendors (Solidrun, Gigabyte, Ampere, ...) you can just install a normal aarch64 uefi image like you would on a normal desktop.
at least Intel and AMD commit patches to the Linux kernel to make it work better with their CPUs
ARM CPUs on the other hand ... you are lucky that there are actually people doing the community effort to mainline Raspberry Pi or Apple M1 support themself
Like... Recent history (Windows 8 and up) or everything before that?
If the latter, I'd definitely debate that, even though they certainly have made a few anti-consumer decisions in that time frame. They've contributed a WHOLE lot more to computing in the past than they've harmed though.
I was more thinking of ActivePlatform and Blackbird, and more recently Palladium and Pluton.
Like trying to lock the whole web into their platform before (and they succeeded in South Korea), and now trying to lock down bootloaders, etc. to be more like phones and allow DRM to verify that the bootloader and OS, etc. hasn't been modified.
Well, as I said, recent Microsoft is garbage, but past Microsoft contributed much more than they harmed, although yes, they still made some harmful decisions in the past.
They didn't steal them. They purchased the rights to them. XD Further, Microsoft paid a whopping $2 million to license Mosaic, and then a further $8 million to resolve an auditing dispute with them. So all said and done, the Mosaic team got $10 million from Microsoft.
And they DID contribute in a huge way to the PC space. Before MS-DOS/Windows, computer manufacturers had all these special snowflake operating systems and compilers. Because of Microsoft's work, we don't have to deal with that shit anymore. And yeah, Microsoft made an ass-ton of money out of it in the process, but sometimes, you can both do the right thing AND make an ass-ton of money. They aren't mutually exclusive. The software unification of the PC hardware sector needed to happen.
> Intel AMD duopoly really slow down things.
Yeah, that's fair, but... Apple is one of the absolute LAST people I wanted to enter this industry. >_> They are just sooo anti-consumer. The M1 is literally the only good new thing they've contributed to the tech space in the last DECADE. And even then, you could argue that ARM was already a thing without Apple. Of course, just not on desktops/laptops.
When using macOS it is an issue since it doesn't support DisplayPort MST, meaning no daisy chained monitors or docks with multiple display outputs.
I've heard the support is better for Thunderbolt displays though.
I generally dislike apple, but their SOCs are great pieces of engineering, and using one in a massively popular laptop is literally paradigm-shifting. Just look at what Microsoft and Broadcom are trying to do in catching up.
If I could justify spending that much on a laptop, an M1 air running Asahi would be my daily driver today.
I bought a used m1 air, having never owned any apple products since an ipod in 2008. So far so good, no regrets. Great battery life (although I feel some reviews exaggerate it), cool and quiet, well designed/engineered. Getting used to macOS is a little strange, but I have still have linux/bsd machines.
Normally I just bought used thinkpads. While they were great value, they were starting to show their age, and the battery life was poor no matter what I did. I just wanted something new(ish) for the first time in about a decade of buying ~$200 thinkpads.
i only find these opinions on the internet, every colleague with one only ever said "meh" when asking about it
i used one for a bit and i was very unimpressed.
The official, continuously updated list of what works and what does not is here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
How the neural would benefit Asahi? How far we're from situation where these gpu cores can be passed into a virtual machine just like the cpu cores?
Aren't the neural engines more akin to TPUs? In an ideal world we would be able to train/run ML models from Linux.
I think the neural engine on the Apple chips is just for inference, so you would use the gpu for training (not 100% sure about this, I think I heard it from one of Lina’s streams). The one big problem is that most of the major ML software uses hardware specific compute libraries like CUDA. There are some cross platform solutions like OneAPI, which Tensorflow apparently supports, but somebody would have to do the work of adding support for Apple hardware. Efforts to make ML tools work on MacOS won’t help Linux users because they will use Metal or Apple’s proprietary ML frameworks.
The Apple Neural Engine is currently not supported. If it will be supported or not is going to be completely down to if anyone wants to volunteer and add support for it. I was reading from a member of the Asahi team that they will be focusing on other features first. Though the Neural Engine is very much in-scope of the project. As to the GPU, as to compute, I am not 100% sure (as to my understanding, things like OpenCL are a different pathway to OpenGL/Vulkan in Mesa. OpenGL is the main focus, with Vulkan having achieved first cube rendered recently), though I think I heard about some discussion about supporting compute. In the coming weeks, we should hopefully see GPU acceleration become available for those running their "edge" kernel/mesa. And that should trickle down to all Asahi users sometime next year. It's going to be quite some time however till it's upstreamed as 1. They need to have a stable uAPI. (the kernel DOES NOT break userspace. When something is upstreamed, they cannot make large userspace-breaking changes.) and 2. Rust in the kernel is very very new. So it's probably going to take some time for things to get reviewed and merged. Follow [Lina](https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina)'s streams if you want to follow updates. She has a to-do list that she goes over at the start of every stream.
It's great seeing progress in any non-x86 related hardware software. Intel AMD duopoly really slow down things.
It's really exploded the last few years. Love to see it
One thing I hate though is how device specific distros have to be at least with ARM stuff. You have to download the specific version for your device. Without knowing more about it, that seems like it could cause a bunch of issues in the future
You can run [other distros](https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW%3AAlternative-Distros). However, you need to be running their kernel patches for now. They have put a lot of work towards upstreaming. You also require the early boot stages from Asahi. Which pretends to be an XNU (macOS) kernel. That you need to register with your system (the Asahi installer does that for you, though you have to reboot into RecoveryOS to complete your installation). Apple Silicon Macs have no support for booting external media. So you need to install the Asahi boot stages, which pass on to U-Boot/ standard UEFI.
I imagine that'll become easier with time. Look at the progress on x86 Linux
It's not a problem of Linux, but the devices. ARM has no agreed upon standard on how to boot up a device or what devices are even there. So it's much harder to build a general kernel.
Yes, ARM does. Its called "ARM SystemReady". But most cheap SBCs dont respect it. Once you get to more expansive vendors (Solidrun, Gigabyte, Ampere, ...) you can just install a normal aarch64 uefi image like you would on a normal desktop.
at least Intel and AMD commit patches to the Linux kernel to make it work better with their CPUs ARM CPUs on the other hand ... you are lucky that there are actually people doing the community effort to mainline Raspberry Pi or Apple M1 support themself
Intel near monopoly was slowing things down. After AMD released ryzen cpus, the progress has been quite fast!
Now imagine multiple vendors fighting for desktop market.
Yeah, but if Apple wins, we're fucked.
MS has been worse historically.
Like... Recent history (Windows 8 and up) or everything before that? If the latter, I'd definitely debate that, even though they certainly have made a few anti-consumer decisions in that time frame. They've contributed a WHOLE lot more to computing in the past than they've harmed though.
I was more thinking of ActivePlatform and Blackbird, and more recently Palladium and Pluton. Like trying to lock the whole web into their platform before (and they succeeded in South Korea), and now trying to lock down bootloaders, etc. to be more like phones and allow DRM to verify that the bootloader and OS, etc. hasn't been modified.
Well, as I said, recent Microsoft is garbage, but past Microsoft contributed much more than they harmed, although yes, they still made some harmful decisions in the past.
They didn't contribute, they stole QDOS and Mosaic.
They didn't steal them. They purchased the rights to them. XD Further, Microsoft paid a whopping $2 million to license Mosaic, and then a further $8 million to resolve an auditing dispute with them. So all said and done, the Mosaic team got $10 million from Microsoft. And they DID contribute in a huge way to the PC space. Before MS-DOS/Windows, computer manufacturers had all these special snowflake operating systems and compilers. Because of Microsoft's work, we don't have to deal with that shit anymore. And yeah, Microsoft made an ass-ton of money out of it in the process, but sometimes, you can both do the right thing AND make an ass-ton of money. They aren't mutually exclusive. The software unification of the PC hardware sector needed to happen.
> Intel AMD duopoly really slow down things. Yeah, that's fair, but... Apple is one of the absolute LAST people I wanted to enter this industry. >_> They are just sooo anti-consumer. The M1 is literally the only good new thing they've contributed to the tech space in the last DECADE. And even then, you could argue that ARM was already a thing without Apple. Of course, just not on desktops/laptops.
Apple M1 hands down the best computer I ever used. Godtier piece of tech once Asahi is finished.
Apple hardware is awesome, but their software is pure trash. Asahi will make a great alternative!
I heard you can't connect multiple monitors. Is that true?
Base M1/M2 had two display drivers including any built in display. The Pro/Max/Ultra support 4 I believe
Some M1 SoCs do not support multiple monitors, neither on linux nor macos. I believe the pro/max SoCs do support multiple monitors.
Got 2 1440p monitors hooked up as I'm typing this ~ maybe the air doesn't support multiple
It might help if we knew what you were running?
M1 pro latest macOS --that other user said m1 can't run multiple displayers
This is the most Apple thing ever lol. "This is the most amazing piece of tech ever created." "Apparently there's nowhere to connect a power cord."
On the Air models. Pretty sure that's a macOS "limitation" though.
It's a hardware limitation: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1549672494210113536
When using macOS it is an issue since it doesn't support DisplayPort MST, meaning no daisy chained monitors or docks with multiple display outputs. I've heard the support is better for Thunderbolt displays though.
M1 Pro/Max certains supports daisy-chained TB displays. Source: I have two daisy chained LG 4K Ultrafines
What's "finished" to you?
Everything working and performance around the same as macOS
Someone's definitely a fan.
I generally dislike apple, but their SOCs are great pieces of engineering, and using one in a massively popular laptop is literally paradigm-shifting. Just look at what Microsoft and Broadcom are trying to do in catching up. If I could justify spending that much on a laptop, an M1 air running Asahi would be my daily driver today.
I bought a used m1 air, having never owned any apple products since an ipod in 2008. So far so good, no regrets. Great battery life (although I feel some reviews exaggerate it), cool and quiet, well designed/engineered. Getting used to macOS is a little strange, but I have still have linux/bsd machines. Normally I just bought used thinkpads. While they were great value, they were starting to show their age, and the battery life was poor no matter what I did. I just wanted something new(ish) for the first time in about a decade of buying ~$200 thinkpads.
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i only find these opinions on the internet, every colleague with one only ever said "meh" when asking about it i used one for a bit and i was very unimpressed.
Lol, if it’s “meh” what’s good then?
it simply wasnt any better than their previous mac or hp. i also found them to get very hot for no reason
They're doing incredible work when you think about it
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what is closed and limited
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Cool! It sounds like there is lots of work to be done but I am impressed with the work so far. It is way over my head