from Hacker News

Linux 5.19

by anpep on 8/1/22, 9:05 AM with 230 comments

• by nicoburns on 8/1/22, 10:25 AM

  Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team don’t have support for everything yet (notably no GPU) but what they do have support for seems to be high quality, well integrated with Linux’s conventions, and upstreamed into the mainline kernel! How much other hardware can claim that?

  The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations (they speculate that this is to keep things easy for their own OS dev teams), and that this has so far proven to be true for M2 (and several iPhone generations before that), and thus once support is available , it should stay relevant for some time.

  Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come.

• by Omniusaspirer on 8/1/22, 9:55 AM

  Title correction: From an M2 MacBook Air, which was impressively supported before it had even shipped.

  https://mobile.twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/155396839473481...

  https://mobile.twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/155086604218397...

• by ranguna on 8/1/22, 9:39 AM

  Checkout the Asahi repos in github: https://github.com/AsahiLinux

  Didn't know it was fully usable right now, amazing work!

  I think one of the few last things missing is the gpu module, which is being developed with a help of a VTuber, she puts up full live coding session on YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/AsahiLina

• by OJFord on 8/1/22, 10:11 AM

  > I'll likely call [the next release] 6.0 since I'm starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again.

  I'm not sure whether to read this as a joke, or if there's really no semantic difference between x & y version numbers for the Linux kernel?

  [Edit: that was a sincere question, not 'what a joke', I didn't mean anything against it.]

  If I hadn't seen that I'd have been very cautious, a bit worried even, about upgrading to :shocked-face: six point oh, scoured for news & changelogs (yes yes as I should anyway.. actually what I do is assume patch will be fine, and check /r/archlinux for minor bumps - that is, I thought they were 'minor' and 'patch' rather than arbitrary) etc.

• by amelius on 8/1/22, 10:47 AM

  Wait, if Linus is happy about supporting undocumented hardware, then does he like NVidia now too?

• by zinekeller on 8/1/22, 12:47 PM

  While the main focus is on the surprising compatibility of M2, I still laughed a bit at this:

  > (*) I'll likely call it 6.0 since I'm starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again.

  It seems that he ran out of fingers and toes again.

• by colomon on 8/1/22, 12:20 PM

  Nothing against the Asahi team, it sounds like they're doing fantastic work. But I'm a little surprised at the talk (which I've seen before) which indicates theirs is the first approach allowing you to use Linux on ARM Macs. A few months ago I used UTM Virtual Machines (which itself uses QEMU) to get ARM Linux up and running on my M1 Mini, and it worked brilliantly. Admittedly I only use the command line interface for working on Linux -- maybe the GUI is lacking? -- but I effortlessly got G++, Perl 5, and Raku working on it, and used that to get a full build of my $work up and running. It was actually easier than getting the same setup working on the MacOS side of things, with great performance.

• by alexeiz on 8/2/22, 7:39 AM

  So Linus wants to use an arm64 to build and test kernel. Why not use AWS Graviton instead? Graviton3 may be slightly less powerful than M1 for single core workloads, but for multicore workloads like building the kernel it's much better suited. In fact, I don't understand why Linus uses a laptop for development. You can easily configure a more powerful cloud instance for the type of work he does. It may be costing more than the Macbook Air M1, but I'm sure the Linux Foundation can afford it.

• by henearkr on 8/1/22, 9:40 AM

  And the news hidden in the news: this will be renamed Linux kernel 6.0.

• by MichaelRazum on 8/1/22, 9:48 AM

  Anyone using it fulltime? Just curious how the simple things work for you. The biggest question for me would be the keyboard, since linux seems to be much more windows like.

  PS: Im on a p1 gen4 thinkapd very happy with it, BUT it is sometimes really noisy..

• by ngcc_hk on 8/1/22, 10:39 AM

  “ On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop.”

  Some comments seems not on this. It seems to a mac arm notebook he tried to use not in a big way. But will be for travelling.

  For the release itself tbh I am confused his last merge window (*) comment. Is it 6.1 or not I am not sure? ( should it be odd number if it replaces 5.x9?or it 6.0 as it is after 5.x9)

• by a3w on 8/1/22, 10:05 AM

  Linus' third time using ARM64, once ``a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite [machine] around'', confuses me. The original Macbook Air and successor a decade ago used Intel IIRC?

  <edit>Wikipedia agrees with my memory.</>