<story><title>Introduction to Apple Silicon</title><url>https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Apple-Silicon</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Teknoman117</author><text>There is a huge difference between not physically locking people out of running custom software and legitimately being able to claim you support other operating systems. Requiring that a community exist that is willing to spend many years of collective time reverse engineering your products when you could have just released documentation is still a massive middle finger to everyone.&lt;p&gt;The problem with these 100% vertically integrated stacks is that every hardware release could be completely different and it&amp;#x27;ll take years to catch up with just that release. In the intervening time more hardware generations were released - It&amp;#x27;s been 18 months since the M1 release. Asahi doesn&amp;#x27;t have 3D acceleration, video encode&amp;#x2F;decode acceleration, or support for many of the things that make Apple Silicon any good (i.e. the fixed function &amp;#x2F; low power consumption hardware for the majority of user tasks). At this rate it&amp;#x27;s going to be years before it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;done&amp;quot; and we already have a successor generation of hardware.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll leave you with a quote from the Asahi docs&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Development for an undocumented platform is a treadmill of work. Every new feature requires reverse engineering the relevant hardware, writing drivers, testing those drivers, then getting them upstreamed. Even after a driver is upstreamed, maintenance and optimisation is sometimes required, for example if Apple introduce a breaking change to any firmware we are required to interface with. For developers the work is never really done&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same reason we don&amp;#x27;t have third-party images for most Android phones that are anything beyond tweaks of existing Android images.</text></item><item><author>macintux</author><text>The overview document makes for an interesting read. Definitely worth referencing next time someone on HN or elsewhere claims Apple&amp;#x27;s trying to lock down their computers to running macOS only.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;AsahiLinux&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Introduction-to-Apple-Silicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;AsahiLinux&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Introduction-to-Appl...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iasay</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s difficult to have an opinion here as I&amp;#x27;ve seen both sides. While compatibility is nice, if you start kicking out reference hardware documentation you instantly open up several additional cans of worms from upstream IP licensing to crappy clone repair parts appearing on the market.&lt;p&gt;But realistically with Apple you don&amp;#x27;t know what&amp;#x27;s going to happen. They could be silent forever. They could suddenly dump a whole pack of documentation out tomorrow. An official position would be nice.&lt;p&gt;Switching it round though, 99.99% of customers are buying a toaster. I put bread in. It makes toast. I eat toast. Does it make commercial sense to support the 0.01% use case? That&amp;#x27;s their equivalent model of supporting the iPhone 5&amp;#x27;s market share for example.</text></comment>
<story><title>Introduction to Apple Silicon</title><url>https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Apple-Silicon</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Teknoman117</author><text>There is a huge difference between not physically locking people out of running custom software and legitimately being able to claim you support other operating systems. Requiring that a community exist that is willing to spend many years of collective time reverse engineering your products when you could have just released documentation is still a massive middle finger to everyone.&lt;p&gt;The problem with these 100% vertically integrated stacks is that every hardware release could be completely different and it&amp;#x27;ll take years to catch up with just that release. In the intervening time more hardware generations were released - It&amp;#x27;s been 18 months since the M1 release. Asahi doesn&amp;#x27;t have 3D acceleration, video encode&amp;#x2F;decode acceleration, or support for many of the things that make Apple Silicon any good (i.e. the fixed function &amp;#x2F; low power consumption hardware for the majority of user tasks). At this rate it&amp;#x27;s going to be years before it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;done&amp;quot; and we already have a successor generation of hardware.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll leave you with a quote from the Asahi docs&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Development for an undocumented platform is a treadmill of work. Every new feature requires reverse engineering the relevant hardware, writing drivers, testing those drivers, then getting them upstreamed. Even after a driver is upstreamed, maintenance and optimisation is sometimes required, for example if Apple introduce a breaking change to any firmware we are required to interface with. For developers the work is never really done&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same reason we don&amp;#x27;t have third-party images for most Android phones that are anything beyond tweaks of existing Android images.</text></item><item><author>macintux</author><text>The overview document makes for an interesting read. Definitely worth referencing next time someone on HN or elsewhere claims Apple&amp;#x27;s trying to lock down their computers to running macOS only.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;AsahiLinux&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Introduction-to-Apple-Silicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;AsahiLinux&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Introduction-to-Appl...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iseanstevens</author><text>It’s been 18 months on an entirely new platform and a small team of (BRILLIANT) people did such a good job discovering and porting to undocumented hardware that it worked on the M2 hardware essentially before it started shipping.&lt;p&gt;I don’t think Apple is trying to get in their way.&lt;p&gt;Also… developing for documented hardware is also an endless treadmill of work as it evolves&amp;#x2F;new products are released.&lt;p&gt;It just has much less uncertainty.&lt;p&gt;I 100% agree it would be awesome if Apple released full documentation. Broadcom too. Probably others.&lt;p&gt;(All IMHO)</text></comment>