How Will Apple Silicon Affect Linux?

In this episode of the CyberGizmo we explore a topic from Big Daddy Linux - How will Apple Silicon impact Linux? I will be looking at the past ways Apple made decisions when to jump from one processor to another, and how Apple plans to manage the migration to Apple Silicon (ARM) using Universal 2 binaries and Rosetta 2 to dynamically translate Intel code into ARM.

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[aris]

Interesting. Thanks for the video DJ. Love the typo, Linux Torvalds 11:40

[progenitor_amborella]

>asking permission to use the patreon doner’s names
Thank you for being responsible and respecting privacy.

[julesgosnell]

Let me save you 22 minutes - Linux support for ARM will improve a bit.

[vikos]

my favorite part as always: "Hi I'm DJ Where" :D

[ShowsOn]

First Apple SOC was the A4 used in the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4S used the A5 which was a big upgrade because it was dual core.

[lucius]

Glad to found your channel. Excellent content! Greetings from Germany

[carloslemare]

The beauty about intel based macs were in the fact you can pick a very beautiful machine and develop for Mac, iOS, Linux, Android and Windows, at the same time, using virtualization or bootcamp. Now, the game change for us, I’ll probably can develop for Linux almost without a problem, and obviously for Mac and iOS, but I don’t know what’s gonna happened with Android Studio, and develop for Windows will probably becomes a pain emulating Windows 10 for Intel. So, use a Mac to develop Software becomes less attractive. In the other hand Windows 10 becomes more attractive with WSL2. I’m the happy owner of a MBP 15” 2017 and do development for Linux Android and Windows, but with an ARM chip Mac, is hard to justify a Mac Computer for my next purchase.

[ozmond]

I’ve been learning about British computer history specifically with Acorn and Sinclair, and knowing about the origins of ARM makes these sorts of things way more interesting to me.

[mrtn]

Can someone explain to me how Apples move to ARM will impact developing C++, C, Java, Python etc for x86

[JosephSaintClair]

I reckon it’ll be great for Linux... Linus is completely on the $$$... No qemu needed or special builds required. Common development and deployment environments. Common OS and libraries... This is great :)
Also, if IoT is mostly arm based, then it significantly simplifies a lot.
Cheekily... Who doesn’t build their own docker images? Lol. Buildx is a cool tool for this.
Would be great to see this develop into more mainstream. Can only hope hardware vendors move in this direction too, and enables Linux Distros to make a move

[blurandomnumber]

What you say at 14:45 is not correct -- I'm typing this on a aarch64-kernel + aarch32-userpace + aarch64-VM machine, where the latter also has multi-arch (32-bit/64-bit) support, so I can run all the native aarch32 binaries in the VM as well. It stems from the fact armv8a/aarch32 is a superset of armv7 and not that many armv8 machines are aarch64 (64-bit)-only at this stage (mine isn't). The trend is slowly moving in the direction of aarch64-only. E.g. Apple's own armv8 implementations have been aarch64-only since A11 (and since S4 on the iwatch side), but we're not there yet. Bottomline being, armv8 can run armv7 code and that is not the exception nowadays.

[RegiiPad]

Did I hear you’ve worked @Burroughs? B6700 was my first mainframe I’ve worked with.

[needsLITHIUM]

TBH, the biggest issue that stands to inhibit linux on the new Mac OS ARM devices is the possibility that Apple will add a co-prossessor or other IC like the T2 encryption chip and basically have the OS locked in at the UEFI level, so that if you want to reinstall Mac OS for whatever support reason, or even to clean-wipe to sell your Mac on the used market, you have to go into the Apple store, or contact their online support and arrange to ship the damn thing to California, in either case at your expense. There is also concern that they might use the same system to prevent the user from putting anything on the device but Mac OS, with every request for an unlock by an end user met with a flat "NO." Sorry, but I don't trust Apple post Steve Jobs to NOT do shady, scummy, black-capitalism type behavior. I mean, in all fairness, they still did some of that while he was still at the helm, even if most of it was from Wozniak and the rest of the board, he still signed off; not sorry.

[monchiabbad]

I currently run linux on more then 5 older macs, the problem is will the newer macs be boot-locked? WIll I be able to install linux on the arm macs

[DrunkAncestor]

Having unix terminal right alongside industry apps like Adobe etc in the one place on Mac OS (alongside bootcamp) is a huge reason why developers use Apple... In an industry setting you just can't expect everyone in a production team to run Linux, but you can have them all happily working away on Macs. And for devs, being able to run a virtual machine of your server directly on your mac and use all the same commands in bash/zsh just makes life for an industry developer on Mac pretty sweet... no PuTTY and all the C://\\ nonsense to remember/trip over (although Windows users are apparently well acclimated to that sort of nonsense)... I mean, I feel like Apple Silicon complicates that in one way, but you bring up a great point that Apple is right in that they have already put out 2 billion products with Apple Silicon which is essentially running pretty much the same OS...

[MaximoJoshua]

Raspberry Pi is linux computer running on ARM, and has been for quite some time, so it already exists. I do take your point about the different versions of the architecture, but luckily in linux, you can compile your own using the source, so its the best community for this.

[DylanDurdle]

I have been trying out making an arm laptop running Debian. One of the biggest issues is lack of support for suspend and hibernation in the arm platform. These are necessary to run laptops successfully. For always-on terminals, arm Linux systems are great.

[DJ-Daz]

I'm interested in how this will go, especially with big blue having so much trouble with 7nm and 10nm. Will Apple and ARM be able to compete with modern desktops and laptops? Will it be such a success that MS and windows switch...?

[chrisdistant]

I think Apple’s move to ARM could make apple laptops much more attractive to Linux developers since they announced very optimized virtualization support, which could also mean more demand and supply for ARM binaries. But we’ll see :)

[cactustweeter]

Great insight. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.