I don't understand the kernel problem. Why did he feel he had to rebuild the kernel weekly? When the amdgpu stopped working why couldn't he just go back to the last working kernel?
> there was no org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia in Flatpak repositories for AArch64
All he had to do was build some packages from source, right? It's really worth learning how to do this, since it removes a lot of constraints.
And the kernel patch should land in the kernel pretty soon, I hope? He won't have to run a patched kernel forever. Should be possible to get that in a release in a year or so?
I'm not surprised at the outcome. These Ampere system single core/thread performance is pretty low and that is where you feel it. The OS/software simply cannot allocate the threads across enough cores effectively to make up for this difference.
This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, they have single thread performance exactly were it is needed.
Maybe we will need 80 cores in future, that is cool but for daily home use it is still just way too much for what we need.
Fascinating! I've been running the laptop version-ish of this experiment with the 14M9610, and my major complaint is Device Tree sucks. It's been explained to me why all of ARM can't just enumerate devices like PCs do, but it still sucks. This means every ARM device starts off in custom kernel territory, which makes all sorts of hacks okay to begin with, since you need a custom kernel anyway.
I see the problem, but I don't see a clear analysis on the actual source of the problem. I assumed the issue was mainly single core performance, but he is also suggesting context switches could be the cause?
So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores.
My naive view is that such high core count system comes with tradoff on core size and interconnect/memeory bus complexity.
And I mean.. my phone is a middle lower end device and for sure I can play youtube videos (maybe in a popup as well) and run the browser without noticing that much difference from my laptop.
Wasn’t booting other operating systems supported from early on (two months after release of M1)? It was reverse engineering the graphics hardware that took time and effort.
True, but they had to implement their own bootloader chain and because of such overhead they need a lot of effort to port to each new apple SoC generation
I just setup Gentoo on a Lenovo laptop last week. It was the least painful process for a Linux laptop of my entire career. Everything just works. Even sleep and the fingerprint sensor for sudo. LLM tuis replaced Google entirely.
I can't even say there was any pain whatsoever. The experience is now more akin to MacOS circa 10.6.x years.
I use a DGX Spark every day as my daily driver and it's great. I barely use the "AI" facilities of it, but as an Aarch64 desktop Linux, I have no complaints.
Has anyone ever pretended that (non-Apple) ARM hardware running Linux makes for a remotely suitable desktop experience for the general public or are you shadow boxing here?
All he had to do was build some packages from source, right? It's really worth learning how to do this, since it removes a lot of constraints.
And the kernel patch should land in the kernel pretty soon, I hope? He won't have to run a patched kernel forever. Should be possible to get that in a release in a year or so?
This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, they have single thread performance exactly were it is needed.
Maybe we will need 80 cores in future, that is cool but for daily home use it is still just way too much for what we need.
So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores. My naive view is that such high core count system comes with tradoff on core size and interconnect/memeory bus complexity.
And I mean.. my phone is a middle lower end device and for sure I can play youtube videos (maybe in a popup as well) and run the browser without noticing that much difference from my laptop.
It is called Apple Silicon.
I can't even say there was any pain whatsoever. The experience is now more akin to MacOS circa 10.6.x years.