jerehana derwood rainert
Pit Gebeyaw
On chromium, I suddenly started to get a "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" error. It worked fine yesterday
I also can't download things from One Drive and access live.com. live.com gives the same error as netflix.com.
But sometimes there are large changes. The reason why support for the M2-series desktops devices took so long is display output. To be clear: The M2 laptops released in summer of 2022 were supported after a few weeks. Display support for M2 Pro/Max laptops required not much more than adding support for the DCP firmware version used by the devices (initially 13.2/13.3 and finally 13.5). This left the M2 / M2 Pro Mac Minis and M2 Max/Ultra Mac Studios (M2+s) to support. Since iBoot no longer brings up HDMI, we need some Display Controller Processor (DCP) code in our bootloader m1n1 to get display on the desktops before linux loads (e.g. m1n1, u-boot, grub screen). However, unlike M1, HDMI output on M2+s is no longer managed by the DCP firmware, specifically DCP no longer handles the complete eDP -> DP2HDMI setup. In turn DCP acts more like dcpext, giving it more flexibility: for example, DCP on the M2 Mac Mini can now be routed to the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. This makes the M2 Mac Mini Thunderbolt 4 certified. However, doing all this in our bare-metal m1n1 adds quite a bit of complexity.
Meanwhile, we also needed some tweaks for supporting Bluetooth on the new M2 Pro/Max and later machines, since they use a new Bluetooth/Wi-Fi chip. Aside from the usual chip-specific magic numbers, it turns out that Apple also started cryptographically signing Bluetooth firmwares - and this caused the boot process to be slower, ending up in a timeout. That took embarrassingly long to figure out, but the fix was trivial.
However, just bringing up new chips does nothing to address the rest of the problems of the brcmfmac driver, from lack of support for newer Wi-Fi standards to weird bugs and power/throughput limitations. Thankfully, Daniel Berlin took it upon himself to fix some of these longstanding issues and improve the Wi-Fi experience on Asahi Linux and for everyone. Wifi6 and 6E support was recently added. Throughput was also improved from around 80 Mbps max to 1200 Mbps max when connected to higher speed access points. Finally, support for low power scanning and other features significantly reduce power usage of the Wi-Fi chip.
Our Rust userland touchbar daemon is tiny-dfr: while we obviously do not have teams of developers dedicated to the touchbar ecosystem and third-party app integration, tiny-dfr is equipped with the most important features: showing the Fn row and the media control keys (brightness, volume, backlight, play, etc). And since the exact contents of those key layers are configurable, feel free to look at the config template at /usr/share/tiny-dfr/config.toml, all the possible settings are extensively documented there. Note that the version currently packaged in Fedora only supports the fixed key layout, but an upcoming dnf upgrade bringing configurability is coming very soon. Tiny, yes, but very mighty.
You may have been burned by Bluetooth pairing failing after switching partitions, or you simply hate having to hold the power button down to select a non-default boot partition. How does the bootpicker make the Mac boot into a certain volume? Inside the NOR flash is a non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) section which stores various boot-related environment variables. When we select a volume, the bootpicker sets the NVRAM boot partition key as the selected volume, from which the Mac will source its boot options from on the next boot. The NVRAM also stores your Bluetooth pairing keys and WiFi configuration so that your input devices and networks seamlessly connect when in recovery mode! ChaosPrincess has developed a collection of tools that interact with the NVRAM chip present on Apple Silicon machines. The NVRAM tool suite (dnf install asahi-nvram) will be of particular interest to those who frequently switch between Linux and macOS.
Apple cares about audio quality. Like, they really care about audio quality. macOS will tell you your Mac has a single pair of stereo speakers, but in reality your Mac could have as many as six speakers, all secretly coordinated by macOS to make them seem like a single high-quality stereo pair. The 14" and 16" MacBook Pros for instance have two woofers for bass and mids and a tweeter for treble on each channel, an arrangement closer to a modern HiFi speaker than it is to most other laptops.
Putting EAS and utilisation clamping together, we took a 15" M2 MacBook Air from about 6 hours of useable battery life just sitting at the desktop to about 8-10 hours of 1080p30 YouTube, 12-15 hours of desktop use, and an enormous 25-28 hours of screen-off idle time. We still have many more tricks up our sleeves to eke out more battery life, and a deep dive on EAS utilisation clamping is in the works. Watch this space!
We took this distro migration chance (flock to fedora!) to remove -edge entirely. All the code that was provided through the -edge flavor has been stabilized and released into the main kernel flavor. The unified linux kernel package maintained by Neal Gompa enables everything we had before under a single kernel-16k package, which means you get complete, high-quality hardware integration out of the box! Additionally, he has contributed the framework for the kernel-16k flavor to the Fedora kernel package to be enabled in the future once more of the kernel work lands upstream.
Users who wish to use other patent-encumbered codecs under their own resposibility may choose to install them from third-party repositories, such as the libavcodec-freeworld package in RPM Fusion. Note that RPM Fusion is not affiliated with Fedora nor Asahi Linux.
OpenH264 may decode H.264 by definition, but it cannot decode H.265/HEVC, which is basically H.264 cranked up including the licensing part. OpenH264 could also be faster: it has very little SIMD code, and even less ARM64 SIMD (Janne would know..). The release of speaker support has heightened the need for fast, high-quality, and power-efficent video decoding. While software decode on the M-series cores is faster than some hardware decoders, some users report their laptop battery converts to released heat at a noticeably faster rate than macOS. We want to at least match macOS efficiency numbers.
Another hurdle is the Linux video hardware acceleration API. Current options cannot yet handle all the demands of a video decoder driver that lacks a firmware handling a signifcant chunk of the decoding logic. V4L2? VA-API? Vulkan? To be answered in 2024.
Apple Silicon devices use 16K pages, but the rest of the (x86) world runs on 4K. Running Apple Silicon on a 4K kernel is technically feasible, but it requires a number of invasive and controversial upstream changes and comes with a significant impact on performance. A better approach would be running the host with the native 16K kernel, and using a 4K kernel in a VM for those problematic workloads, assuming the performance of the VM is good enough for the use case.
We're going to be blunt: Hacker News is increasingly a haven for alt-right trolls and hateful abusers, and the administrators have demonstrated that they have no interest in improving the situation despite repeated pleas by multiple people, in public and in private, even going as far as deploying countermeasures to prevent us from blocking HN traffic*. A significant number of Hacker News commenters have repeatedly directed harassment, abuse, doxxing, and bigotry at multiple Asahi Linux developers, and much of this content remains available and not flagged or downvoted.
This may surprise you as a HN user, since overly hateful content is indeed often flagged and not immediately visible in HN top-level comment sections. While this is true, there is a major flaw in the HN moderation mechanism that enables abuse to continue unabated. This is the fact that, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. Once the high-level comment is no longer visible in the top-level comment section by default, this significantly reduces moderation activity in the subthread, as users are less likely to click to expand it. The deeper you go, the less likely it is for content to be moderated. Entire subthreads with dozens of comments are spawned, both abusive content and anti-abusive content that serves to feed the trolls, and it is rare for any of the child comments to be ultimately killed and hidden. The original comment being flagged/hidden becomes completely irrelevant, as the context provided by the replies sends the same message (sometimes, an outright quote exists with the exact flagged content). This completely defeats the moderation system, merely slightly reducing the exposure of the abuse but allowing it to continue with impunity.
At the time of this writing, a recent HN subthread of a killed comment contained replies including comparisons between an Asahi Linux developer and Hans Reiser, direct support for Kiwi Farms, doxxing content, and general insults and abusive assertions. These comments were at most slightly downvoted by the community, but still readable and not in any way killed or hidden by default. These threads pop up more often than not on Asahi Linux discussions on Hacker News; previous comments that again remain unkilled to this day include transphobic abuse, allegations of mental illness, etc. We have brought up some of this content to Hacker News administrators directly, and they have chosen to ignore it (abusive content we reported almost a year ago remains up and unflagged/unkilled to this day).
We believe that this pattern is the result of explicit, organized abuse perpetrated by a group of users overlapping with communities like Kiwi Farms (this is evidenced by the talking points used and certain style patterns we will not explicitly describe here that are a hallmark of that website's users). These people seek to harass others until their life is destroyed. It is not low-level trolling, but rather an organized and directed effort to hurt and destroy people. Multiple lives have been lost to this kind of abuse already.
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