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Re:Linux Running on Apple M1 by plauribre on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @05:38PM (#25852907)
Apple's poor support for Linux on Mac hardware may reverse if the company gains data center ambition for the M1. Partnering with a cloud provider (maybe Microsoft?) to deliver seamless Linux deployment on M1 would be significant...
Re:Linux Running on Apple M1 by floatboth on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @08:39PM (#25854285)
Microsoft already has a good partner in Ampere, a company fully dedicated to servers and standards.

Apple clearly doesn't seem interested. The M1 is just a scaled-up version of the iDevice SoCs. From the reverse engineering we've seen so far, it is extremely clear that not even a single step towards any standardization was taken. It's very much the ad-hoc hodgepodge of embedded crap companies build when they only care about their own complete product and don't allocate any budget towards any "refactoring" that doesn't directly benefit the end product.

They use some ancient Samsung UART for debug (because the first iPhones used a Samsung SoC?), old P.A. Semi I2C controller, the Synopsys DesignWare USB 3 controller (just like some random cheap Allwinner/Rockchip/etc), and here's the fucking kicker, a custom Apple interrupt controller and a custom IOMMU too. These probably predate GICv2/3 at least. But there was no reason for them to switch to the standard Arm GIC and SMMU so they didn't >_<

Re:Linux Running on Apple M1 by fomine3 on Thursday January 21, 2021 @01:56AM (#25856274)
Interesting details. Is using Synopsys DesignWare problem?
Re:Linux Running on Apple M1 by floatboth on Thursday January 21, 2021 @04:55AM (#25857218)
Not necessarily – well, it does work :D and at least it mostly speaks XHCI – but it does require non-standard code for reset and initialization.