Linus Torvalds Wants Linux on Apple Silicon

Cool as
https://news.softpedia.com/news/linus-torvalds-wants-linux-on-apple-silicon-531597.shtml

There’s not too many things stopping ASi machines from running Linux. Just play by iBoot’s rules and it should be fairly doable.

The skeptic in me thinkgs this will probably will not happen because Apple wants you to update to a new machine once they release one and opening their laptops to Linux gives the option to stay on an old machine longer.

It is currently bad for Apple’s business model for them to open it to Linux.

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You want to add a few more thoughts here?

There’s such a thing on Apple computers called iBoot?

I’ve been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for alongtime

someone get Linus a pinebook pro

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I’d mail him mine if he wanted it, but it’s only $200 so I don’t know why he wouldn’t have one already if he wanted one.

maybe what he meant was just an apple silicon one, or a high power arm :man_shrugging:

I’m sure he could get one fairly easily, I believe even the people at pine64 would gladly send him one

Doesnt the pinebook pro have alot less computing power than apple’s new chips?

I’ve been tempted to get a PBP, but its specs compare to my 7 year old laptop. I am guess that Linus wants an arm linux laptop that could actually compete with modern x86 laptops

Oh, the difference in performance is night and day. The Pinebook Pro has an RK3399 and 4GB of RAM, it’s about as powerful as a modern low- to mid-range smartphone. But it’s also about 1/5 the price of the cheapest Macbook.

Yes and it’s why I keep getting tempted to buy a PBP. If they had a higher performance model in the 500-600 range I’d be all over it. (Pinebook Extreme?)

Yes it’s the second stage bootloader for Apple machines. It will take whatever is in the UEFI boot ROM and load it as long as that passes all of iBoot’s prerequisites.

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Hmm, so iBoot on M1 is itself the [U]EFI implementation for ARM macOS machines? It sounds like on iOS the boot process is,
BootROM/SecureROM → iBoot → OS

So do you think it is the same on macOS, just with EFI as the interface between iBoot and the OS? For all I know iPhones might be using EFI or UEFI there as well, but I really do not know where to look for this sort of information besides theiphonewiki.com, but it mentions nothing about that.

RK3399 is not good, at least not for the compute that I tested it for. Better performance than the chip in a pi3b but no better in power efficiency. It may be on par with a low end smartphone in performance but unfortunately even low end smartphones are on a much better process node now. This is assuming RK3399 is on the same process node it’s always been on, a new node would almost certainly mean a new designation.