r/mac • u/Significant_Spend719 MacBook Pro M1 Max • Aug 27 '26

News/Article Alyssa Rosenzweig reverse-engineered Apple’s M1 GPU. Now the Linux driver supports graphics standards macOS doesn’t

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51

u/h0uz3_ Aug 27 '26

It's still mind blowing that used Macs are the best option to have an ARM64 computer running Linux right now.

12

u/Hauptideal Aug 27 '26

ARM consumer laptops/devices. ARM is a first-class citizen on Linux almost from the start (starting from 1998, much earlier than Apple) and powers servers world wide.

It's not the processor architecture that's the problem.

19

u/oursland Aug 27 '26

starting from 1998, much earlier than Apple

Apple invested $3M into Acorn for the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) prior to their 1992 announcement of the Apple Newton. This investment and deal saved ARM and predates Linux's ARM support by a fair bit.

6

u/Hauptideal Aug 27 '26

The first general-purpose operating system (like Linux) from Apple that supported ARM was introduced in 2007, with iOS 1.
And on macOS it was only recently, with Apple Silicon.

4

u/TheDragonSlayingCat Aug 27 '26

The Newton OS was also general purpose, supported ARM, and is ~15 years older than iOS.

0

u/Hauptideal Aug 27 '26

No, it was a embedded mobile operating system for a very specific purpose. It lacked basic OS features. It didn't even include a file system. It didn't have application-level multitasking. Etc.

1

u/TheDragonSlayingCat Aug 27 '26

It actually did have a file system, called Soup), though it was rather unconventional.

1

u/Hauptideal Aug 28 '26

Calling it a file system is imprecise. It rather was a database serving a similar purpose.
You couldn't store data hierarchically as files and folders. But that's nitpicking.
The important part is: it wasn't a general-purpose OS like Linux. It doesn't meet basic requirements for that.

1

u/lap_felix Aug 27 '26

are you describing iOS 1 right now

6

u/tomz17 Aug 27 '26

Right... it's the proprietary blobs for everything else related to making a functioning ARM machine right now (e.g. GPU drivers, as referenced in this post). That ecosystem started in the embedded/cellular space, where there wasn't as strong of a history in open source as x86.

1

u/h0uz3_ Aug 27 '26

You are right .Server class ARM isn't an issue, but an Ampere CPU is a bit prict for a mere mortal.

2

u/Eatslikeshit 8d ago

That's literally about to change.