Linux 6.2 released: first kernel to support Apple Silicon.

[Colstan]

The Asahi team's hard work has been upstreamed, marking the beginning of what will hopefully become mainstream support for Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. Linus Torvalds himself has been using an M2 MacBook Air. There's still a lot of work to be done, particularly on GPU drivers, but they've made considerable progress.

Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives

Linux is now ready to run on modern Macs.

www.zdnet.com

 

[theorist9]

Neat! From what I've read, unlike the case with Windows 11 for ARM, which requires a VM layer like Parallels to run on AS, this Linux kernel will run natively.

 

[Cmaier]

The Asahi team's hard work has been upstreamed, marking the beginning of what will hopefully become mainstream support for Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. Linus Torvalds himself has been using an M2 MacBook Air. There's still a lot of work to be done, particularly on GPU drivers, but they've made considerable progress.

Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives

Linux is now ready to run on modern Macs.

www.zdnet.com

Didn‘t Linus say Arm sucks or something?

I assume I’ve talked about when I met that guy while interviewing at Transmeta, but, if not, let’s just say he’s a dick.

 

[Colstan]

Didn‘t Linus say Arm sucks or something?

Linus' real complaint was that there aren't enough Arm personal computers, which he said back in 2019. Now there are.

He's had interest in getting Linux running on Apple Silicon. As I said earlier, he's currently using an M2 MacBook Air. Torvalds has a history of using Macs with architectures other than x86.

I assume I’ve talked about when I met that guy while interviewing at Transmeta, but, if not, let’s just say he’s a dick.

Then I suppose he knows one when he sees one, because he has no issue sending a message to the ultimate dick in the industry.

 

[exoticspice1]

Didn‘t Linus say Arm sucks or something?

Linus is pretty chill with ARM and arm64.

 

[mr_roboto]

Didn‘t Linus say Arm sucks or something?

In fact, he's an early adopter of Asahi. This is from his email announcing that he'd tagged and released kernel version 5.19:

On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the
release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've
been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks
to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a
long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development
platform until now.

It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development - I
did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine.
And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real
thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.

Basically for him it's a big deal if you get to do native development on a machine which doesn't suck, and prior to Apple Silicon Macs there weren't ARM personal computers which did not suck, so he thought that was going to limit ARM's inroads into the server market.

As he is in fact a dick well known for unhinged ranting, I'm guessing that he went off about those pre-AS machines at some point and this got reported as "Linus Torvalds says ARM sucks". That's one of the annoying things about the guy, he's prone to letting his outbursts of nerd rage drive the narrative (and drive people away from contributing to the Linux kernel).

 

[Yoused]

I had Linux on my 7200, and it was pretty good. One time, my dialup cut off and then reconnected so fast that Undernet never noticed I was gone. Later, though, I was using Gnome, which they upgraded with so much damn eye candy that the whole thing became a slog (never had a video card in that thing).

 

[ArgoDuck]

I worked with Unix for about 7 years, and before that AOS/VS on Data General mini computers, which had features in common with Unix. Both were good! Landing in PC-land and MS-DOS and Windows was a shock after all that

Had no call to use Linux professionally

 

[KingOfPain]

Later, though, I was using Gnome, which they upgraded with so much damn eye candy that the whole thing became a slog (never had a video card in that thing).

Off-topic:
This reminds me of the time when we got new HP-UX workstations that aparently had the fastest PA-RISC CPUs (maybe PA-8500, but I'm not totally sure).
For some reason they didn't feel any faster than the old ones. After someone put the rudimentary X-Windows that the old ones ran on one of the new workstations, it became clear that it was CDE that turned the new ones into a slog.