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A comment on Introduction to Apple Silicon. Parent comment

Re:Introduction to Apple Silicon by smoldesu on Monday August 01, 2022 @08:00PM (#32313707)
That's not helping Asahi. Apple never mentioned the reason behind the change (or even publicly acknowledged Asahi, as far as I'm aware), and non-Marcan sources have speculated that it was added to help Apple run hardware testing firmware. It's equally likely that Apple added this in as an alternate entrypoint for Bootcamp, which wouldn't work on Apple Silicon otherwise. In other words, people are applauding Apple for fixing the problem Apple created: a perfect allegory for developers in the 21st century, if you ask me.
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Re:Introduction to Apple Silicon by GeekyBear on Monday August 01, 2022 @08:10PM (#32313766)
Putting in all the effort to design a system that allows you to install an unsigned OS without it effecting the boot security of the MacOS partition is definitely helping Ashai, NetBSD and any other OS that would like to add support for the hardware going forward.

Also, designing the boot menu so that unsigned OSes can show up as valid choices or be set as the default OS.

As well as the EULA allowing the use of unsigned OSes.

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Re:Introduction to Apple Silicon by smoldesu on Monday August 01, 2022 @08:27PM (#32313861)
All of those things you listed also existed on x86 Macs, I fail to see how this represents a change in attitude towards supporting Linux users.
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Re:Introduction to Apple Silicon by GeekyBear on Monday August 01, 2022 @08:38PM (#32313913)
>All of those things you listed also existed on x86 Macs

Nope. Security settings on the Intel Macs were per machine just like other PCs.

The system of allowing per partition security settings so the user could install an unsigned OS without it effecting the security when booted into MacOS is new on Apple Silicon Macs.

As the Asahi Wiki puts it:

>From a security perspective, these machines may possibly qualify as the most secure general purpose computers available to the public which support third-party OSes, in terms of resistance to attack by non-owners.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...

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Re:Introduction to Apple Silicon by saagarjha on Monday August 01, 2022 @08:38PM (#32313916)
> non-Marcan sources have speculated that it was added to help Apple run hardware testing firmware

Those sources are wrong. Apple doesn’t need to add or release anything to test their own hardware, they have an in-house Linux that hardware bringup uses.

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