jdb8167

cloudguy said:

rob53 said:

So what we're talking about is a company like Walmart taking over the small to medium cloud service providers. Amazon will simply undercut the traditional Mac cloud providers, forcing them out of business then when things aren't profitable, they'll dump AWS hosting on Mac hardware. I see this as predatory actions by a monopoly. Microsoft did the same thing. Apple had a half-baked server product (still has a quarter-baked server OS product) that they dumped because of cheap server hardware and free (linux) server OS. AWS is not free but it's huge. I'd rather see Apple enhance what's left of their server software and release a competitor to AWS instead of seeing AWS released on a desktop device (Mac mini). Apple could easily build a true server box with a version of the M1 that could compete with other server hardware and work with linux distributions for a very good server OS complete with better security than any server hardware and software available today. 

1. Why on earth would things not be profitable? AWS has offered Windows 10/8/7 instances for years. Why would Amazon be any more likely to dump Macs than Windows?
2. See 1: you can only develop macOS, iPadOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, HealthKit and HomeKit on macOS. There are no other alternatives. As Apple platform app development is booming, again why?
3. See 1 again: There was a major article a few months back on Deadline, Variety etc. about how entertainment companies are moving animation, movie and TV production and post-production to the cloud, which will remove the requirement to live in Los Angeles if you want to do technical work on Hollywood projects. (Or to live in Tokyo if you want to do similar in Japan, Seoul for Korea, Beijing for China, London for the UK etc.) Now, what is the #1 PC platform for Hollywood types and other creators? Exactly.
4. Microsoft did the same thing? How? Microsoft does not make server hardware. Microsoft most certainly does not make Linux. Quite the contrary, Microsoft under Ballmer tried to crush Linux using patent lawsuits and market pressure. Had Microsoft not recently already been reined in by an antitrust ruling, they would have succeeded. Don't blame Microsoft: they had nothing to do with it. And don't blame Linux as Microsoft's competing server products thrived. Instead, blame Apple for making a bad product. You would have needed to be absolutely nuts to buy that server product: expensive hardware, bad software and it only supported Apple products!

Apple's failures in the enterprise are due to their own abject refusal to care about software beyond the absolute basics - 20 years and they still don't have an equivalent to Microsoft Active Directory when Google created their own to manage Chromebooks in less than a year - and their dragging their feet to embrace open platforms and standards. Look, Apple could dominate the ARM-based small server market tomorrow. Just come out with a 12 or 16 core version of the M1 and do what Google did with ChromeOS - start with a version of Debian (for maximum compatibility), inject some proprietary macOS libraries in it and ship it. They would utterly dominate.

In fact, that is going to happen already. The guy who is working to put Linux on M1 Macs? What do you think they are going to use it for? Exactly. However, adoption is going to be limited because once you put Linux on the M1 Mac, it will be out of support. So not very many enterprises are going to put their mission-critical server applications on unsupported stacks because they won't receive timely security patches or help when something breaks.

Good grief ...

chasm said:

Was I hallucinating when Apple appeared to devote a half-minute or so to the emulation powers of the M1, including an on-screen demonstration of some flavour of Linux running just fine on it?

Sure, that probably wasn't a native version, but if it runs fine in Rosetta 2 I don't see any rush to develop an Apple-native version -- not to mention that the software people tend to want to run in Linux won't be up to speed for a good long time. I'm glad to see another community understanding the great potential for M1 and beyond, but this project seems like an ego trip for "one guy" to take on rather than to organize a team to tackle such a big project.

I don't doubt Hector's qualifications but this just doesn't seem to be the right approach to solving this particular problem IMO.

Marvin said:

jdb8167 said:

Marvin said:

jdb8167 said:

wizard69 said:

It really isn't much of a surprise the somebody has gotten QEMU running.   On my MBA I've rebuilt a number of Mac Ports as native ARM apps with no problems.   There are a few show stoppers, for example RUST isn't ready yet and that has a trickle down effect on software using that compiler.   However for the most part I'm rather surprised at just how well some of this stuff is building this early with the ARM based MBA's being available.   As such the machines are looking good for open source even if there is some lag.   The thing that really stands out though is performance of this software/system.   This machine hardly warms up and compiles faster than I'd would have imagined that a fanless device could.   

I can build qemu but it doesn’t run. It fails with a memory allocation error. One of the main developers posted a page of patches that should fix things but I don’t know how to apply them. I’m going to have to do some research. But everything looks promising even though it is early in the transition. 

With the patches on the following page, you can try using git apply:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/qemu-devel/list/?series=391797

Download the diff file for each of the 8 patches, cd into the repo root directory and run the following on each of the 8 patches:

git apply drop_patch_file_here

Then build the project after applying the 8 patches.

Excellent. Thanks. I was trying to use the patch tool without any success. Saves me some research.

There was a guide with more details posted online recently and deleted for some reason but it's cached, save a copy for reference:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/success-virtualize-windows-10-for-arm-on-m1-with-alexander-grafs-qemu-hypervisor-patch.2272354/latest

That has info about launch commands, some apparently affect the speed.

Marvin said:

jdb8167 said:

wizard69 said:

It really isn't much of a surprise the somebody has gotten QEMU running.   On my MBA I've rebuilt a number of Mac Ports as native ARM apps with no problems.   There are a few show stoppers, for example RUST isn't ready yet and that has a trickle down effect on software using that compiler.   However for the most part I'm rather surprised at just how well some of this stuff is building this early with the ARM based MBA's being available.   As such the machines are looking good for open source even if there is some lag.   The thing that really stands out though is performance of this software/system.   This machine hardly warms up and compiles faster than I'd would have imagined that a fanless device could.   

I can build qemu but it doesn’t run. It fails with a memory allocation error. One of the main developers posted a page of patches that should fix things but I don’t know how to apply them. I’m going to have to do some research. But everything looks promising even though it is early in the transition. 

With the patches on the following page, you can try using git apply:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/qemu-devel/list/?series=391797

Download the diff file for each of the 8 patches, cd into the repo root directory and run the following on each of the 8 patches:

git apply drop_patch_file_here

Then build the project after applying the 8 patches.