Asahi Linux progress report [LWN.net]

Asahi Linux progress report

Posted Mar 12, 2021 11:33 UTC (Fri) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
In reply to: Asahi Linux progress report by juliank
Parent article: Asahi Linux progress report

It is a real ARM64 computer, not less real than any other ARM64 device.

Count the number of quirks in arch/x86 and drivers for various ostensibly "standard-ish" PCs. Remember the amount of work every new PC laptop brings to the kernel due to "works on Windows" ACPI tables.

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Asahi Linux progress report

Posted Mar 12, 2021 12:41 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Remember the amount of work every new PC laptop brings to the kernel due to "works on Windows" ACPI tables.

You mean "Works on Windows using device-specific drivers"

But I think you vastly underestimate the number of new models that come out every year.

The ones that need special work are the exceptions.

Asahi Linux progress report

Posted Mar 12, 2021 16:57 UTC (Fri) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590) [Link]

True, to an extent.

However, Apple is ~7% of the whole PC market, they tend to have 1-2 hardware models at the same time, and they mass-produce them.

Given the number of hardware decisions M1 has inherited from previous Apple devices and the contents of the initial patch series, one can try to extrapolate the amount of kernel work, and it seems to be quite small, for ~7% of all new PCs sold in the world.

Asahi Linux progress report

Posted Mar 16, 2021 4:21 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

It's missing EL3 (read the article), so it's less real in that respect.