• DeadPixel@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Wins no matter how small are wins!

      Don’t compare yourself to others, just enjoy the learning process & satisfaction it hopefully brings you for every single win, no matter the size!

      Arduino is a fantastic platform for learning, I still remember a lot of my ‘firsts’ with it, I had no idea what I was doing, we all start somewhere. Have fun!

      • thingsiplay@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        While I agree partially, want to mention that having someone to compare to is not as bad as it sounds. Its only bad if you think its unreachable and you give up doing anything. Sometimes you need a hero to look up and fight and dream about it, for the motivation. I think looking up to people like Alyssa’s work is inspirational. In a similar way how I look up to those magicians who create emulators… but that is a different topic for another day.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I have such immense respect for people who know how the bits are physically flowing through a machine. I took classes about it but I can’t imagine doing that daily, it’s so tedious.

            • edwardbear@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              thaaaaat’s the shit, when it finally cracks and you laser focus on implementing your solution. better than drugs.

              • sunbeam60@feddit.ukEnglish
                0·
                1 month ago

                The high of cracking an intractable problem (pre-AI) was just unreal. I’d struggle to sleep, awaiting the morning so I could get back at it.

                • Darkmoon_AU@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  0·
                  1 month ago

                  Nothing groundbreaking but writing my own Huffman compressor in C and seeing the whole thing work knowing where nearly all the real physical bits were going, was seriously satisfying. Recommended exercise ☺️

      • Cypher@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        If you can’t get the Arduino lights to blink at this point I can only applaud your persistence

  • notSys@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Hot take, but we, as a community should focus resources on improving hardware support for devices, manfacturers of which aren’t actively hostile to linux.

    Sadly, linux and open source is managed in capitalist way.

  • afk_strats@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Of you look at all of the work behind Asahi, it’s incredible. I’m so grateful for heroes like Alyssa who are saving millions of computers from landfills when Apple no longer supports them

    • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      saving millions of computers from landfills when Apple no longer supports them

      Kindof except that their build quality tanked during the late Intel era and the motherboards will die a lot sooner now

      • afk_strats@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I have traveled extensively with my m1 and gave it 2 solid drops (which left massive dents in the metal) and I feel like they are holding up. To Apple’s credit, the original os which I use for photography still feels like new after 5 years. Yes, they have a myriad of other ethical problems, but the M series have been great hardware with not bad software… So far

      • Karjalan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        My macbook pro, 2019, just stopped charging or responding to anything in the USB ports.

        Took it to repair shop abcd they said “the logic board was fried” and it needed replacing.

        It’s been a while since I dabbled with hardware (built my own pcs back in the day) but is logic board just apple for motherboard?

    • djhandsome@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      How far developed is asahi now? Is every hardware working? Last time i looked into it wifi didn’t work, i think. So i thought it was not useful for me.

      • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        For M1 most things work except for USB-HDMI dongles and the fingerprint reader, I think M2 is in a similar boat now

      • kevingoes@feddit.onlineEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I’ve been using Asahi as my daily driver on my m1 MacBook for a few weeks now. The only thing I’ve noticed that seems to not work is audio through the built in speakers. I normally use Bluetooth headphones anyways so I haven’t tried to fix it.

        • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Audio has been supported for a long time now, do you have “asahi-audio” installed?

        • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          I ran it on my M1 mini for several months a year or so back. At that stage it was probably 90% of what I needed it to be, which was bloody impressive. After I no longer needed it for work, I tried using it as my Home Assistant server, but with only 8gb RAM, ultimately it ended up being far more efficient to run HA in a virtual machine in macOS.

          But yeah, if you can pick up an M1 for a good price, give it a go. It’s good fun.

          • arsCynic@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            I’ve already been using Linux for ten years, it definitely puts the fun back into computing. This would actually be primarily to know how to install it on a Mac, because when offering to install Linux as a replacement for Windows in groups I am part of, there have been multiple requests for doing so on a Mac. Unfortunately always had to answer I’ve never done so, so couldn’t promise anything.

            Anyway, is €375 for an Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1, 256GB a good price?

            • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              True. I played about with it on my M2 Air for a bit. But I need my Air to be rock solid because it’s how I do my radio show.

  • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    IIRC Apple were refusing to implement open standards because they were trying to force developers to use their proprietary Metal API.

    • Ptsf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I don’t know if a lack of direct support is exactly the same as trying to force everyone, as they could’ve easily prevented her from reverse engineering this project, but that’s sort of splitting hairs and they definitely know they have an open source community who would appreciate even a modicum of support that they’re ignoring.

      • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        People weren’t forced to use Metal as it turns out - they just didn’t make games for Mac instead.

        Apple tried to force people to use Metal, they just forgot that MacOS isn’t the iPhone and they don’t have enough weight in the desktop PC market to dictate terms like that.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    It’s people like her who make life worth living. People who solve hard problems that need solving (or sometimes don’t even need it) are the best people.

  • happy_wheels@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    And here I am unable to ssh/putty/connect to my banana pi m5 so I can wipe lineageos off the emmc module. (Legit happy for her success!!!)

  • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    It’s an amazing accomplishment, but if anybody is wondering why it’s not flat-out impossible, she very likely was snooping on how it was controlled by existing drivers, either by looking at the software side, which honestly, I’m less familiar with, or by using something like a logic analyzer, which can be used to record signals being sent to the hardware directly. So, if she did it that way, she didn’t reuse the code of the existing driver, but analyzed the output. I’ve had to debug some drivers in the past with a logic analyzer, and just that was a lot of work.

    If she did it without existing drivers, then it would have been an absolute slog, I think bordering on impossible. You’d have to guess every signal. GPUs may be more specialized than CPUs, meaning that their instruction set will be smaller, but that would be insane.

    • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      By my recollection she started from the open source Imagination Technologies GPU drivers. As the Apple GPU is definitely not derived from the GPU they used to license for the iPhone, she was able to use it for the initial register definitions, etc.

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      lol I randomly searched for a page from collabora about how they reverse engineer GPU drivers (since I’ve seen that they’ve done that for other GPUs) and the very first page I went to was written by this person. Apparently this was a side project while she did fairly similar work on Mali GPUs at Collabora.

      Anyways, here’s what she said about the process:

      Typically, for Linux or Android driver reverse-engineering, a small wrap library will be written to inject into a test application via LD_PRELOAD that hooks key system calls like ioctl and mmap in order to analyze user-kernel interactions. Once the “submit command buffer” call is issued, the library can dump all (mapped) shared memory for offline analysis…

      it took some elbow grease to identify the three critical calls: memory allocation, command buffer creation, and command buffer submission…

      With those obstacles cleared, we can finally get to the shader binaries, black boxes in themselves. However, the process from here on out is standard: start with the simplest fragment or compute shader possible, make a small change in the input source code, and compare the output binaries. Iterating on this process is tedious but will quickly reveal key structures, including opcode numbers.

      From https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html , there’s a lot more details about the subsequent parts of the process in the next articles but they’re harder to summarize