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Remember to star the gist if it is helpful to you ;)
The FAQ asks you not to ask for upvotes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I’m not asking for upvotes. I am saying to star it on GitHub if it is useful.
GitHub stars and HN upvotes are two different unrelated things.
Smash that like button! Subscribe!
What I have come to realize is that the default action for people online, including myself, is often to read/watch and move on. A gentle reminder to give a signal back will push some people to take the time to do so.
Beware a slow burning Time of Check to Time of Use attack.
What you like/star today may change tomorrow, but your public association with it will remain.
Not sure I follow what you mean.
Not OP, but as an example: get lots of 5 star reviews for a genuinely useful product and then on sell the listing to a shady seller. I guess OP is thinking of an even more high profile issue (exaggerated example: you donate to a charity that espouses human rights and it later pivots to genocide - your reputation is toast now).
Maybe something like this:
- I star a FreeBSD project on GitHub.
- The author changes the project to something racist.
- My GitHub profile now shows that I've starred a racist project.
I would love the origin person of that phrase because it is almost universal with YouTubers.
Now, I am really curious why would it be of any value (putting aside the HN policy discouraging it) to anyone. I understand that GH repo stars help project visibility and may be good on CV but gists?
I use the number of stars as a measure for how much the guide is of use to people.
If it’s not useful to anyone then I know not to spend time on that. Short though as the guide is, and even though it is based on much hard work of others, it still took time to make, much in part because when I write stuff like this I spend a lot of time actually redoing steps to ensure to the best of my ability that what I am writing will work for others too. So I like to know that people find it useful.
So you wrote it just for GitHub stars? Not because it was useful to yourself?
The motivation to run FreeBSD in a VM on my M1 MBP comes from being an active user of FreeBSD for a long time. For example my mail, web and VPN server runs FreeBSD. And I have been running FreeBSD both on desktops and laptops for a long time as well.
The motivation to make a guide for others to follow is that it should be useful for others too.
What I am saying is, when it’s useful for others it’s worth spending the time on writing up how to do it and share it with others.
You definitely got my attention so I bookmarked you as a comment here so I can find your post later myself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gist.github.com
Learn to live in attention economy with HTTP.
Does setting CPU to cortex-a72 mean that it runs natively on the m1 or with minimal translation?
The command line argument that means 'run natively' is the "-accel hvf" one, which makes QEMU use the Hypervisor.framework macOS APIs. (This is why you have to use an out-of-tree patchset at the moment -- mainline QEMU only supports hvf on x86 CPUs right now.) The hvf support patches don't make any attempt to make the guest CPU report different ID values or features, so regardless of what actual cpu type you ask for with -cpu the guest sees whatever the host CPU is.
I've spent way too long getting VMs to work on various platforms. I hate paying for software but does vmware make it a lot easier? It sucks to use free OSs, but then pay to virtualize.
yes certainly would suck to pay, because in the end VMWare isn't issue free either.
Next thing: run FreeBSD 13 natively on M1. It would be really nice, because even on this X230 this OS is really damn fast and snappy. Wayland and sway are super nice.
Oh yes, that would be so good. I hope to see the Linux on M1 project work out, and that the learnings from those people could enable running FreeBSD natively on M1 too!
Someone is working on getting OpenBSD running on Apple M1, I would imagine their work would be useful to assist porting FreeBSD too:
https://twitter.com/bluerise/status/1354216838406823936
Doubt if that will ever happen as even older Intel Mac Minis still have issues running FreeBSD - https://wiki.freebsd.org/IntelMacMini
There's 5 open PRs. Two seem to be boot related, which probably wouldn't apply to the M1. The Xorg one and the drm one are related to an Intel integrated GPU.
That leaves just the firewire one as possibly an issue.
Though I get the general point that hardware drivers could be an issue. Perhaps, though, the upside of the M1 is sufficient incentive for people to figure it out.
Maybe Apple does a favor for us and releases docs for their hardware, so it would be easier to write drivers for the open source operating systems. That would be the best news for 2021.
I would have been surprised if they did that before, and I certainly can’t see it happening now as they pull things out of the open source releases…
Can you describe your desktop setup? What login manager do you use? Does Zoom work? Does usb 3 work?
I installed it to my fun and games laptop I carry with me when I travel. It's the ThinkPad X230 that is small enough and has hardware that Just Works with almost all the open source operating systems. I'm not planning to work with this, so I'm not really thinking about installing Zoom or any other closed source software. I have other computers for work business. I'm considering trying on jails and iocage to see if I can get something similar to docker, but it's not my biggest priority: I kind of like having a computer that I'm not doing work with all the time.
What I now have is just a boot to console. I haven't decided on a login manager yet, so I just run `sway` to get to the desktop. I run sway window manager on wayland. I installed rust, emacs, vim, a music player ncmpcpp and firefox. It feels like this old laptop got lots of energy from this new setup.
Have you run any performance benchmarks?
I am running an ARM Ubuntu server in QEMU. SSH'ing to that gives me a complete dev environment that so far seems to work flawlessly. I guess it's slower than if I was running things natively but on the other hand, I get seamless Docker support and it's still significantly snappier than my semi-beefy PC (and this is the Air).
[link redacted]
I needed a FreeBSD/arm64 box, and so I did something similar a few weeks ago based on instructions for running Windows ARM64 on M1. The issue that I have is that the VM burns tons of battery even when idle.
It was explained to me that there are 2 different instructions on ARM to say "i'm idle, wake me up if something happens" (like x86 mwait), and Apple M1 uses one, while everybody else uses the other. Is this fixed in either FreeBSD or Qemu at this point?
BTW, I'm super impressed that a 4-core VM on my M1 13" MBP can build world in about 130% of the time of a 32-core Ampere EMAG.
"it was explained to me that there are 2 different instructions on ARM to say "i'm idle, wake me up if something happens" (like x86 mwait), and Apple M1 uses one, while everybody else uses the other."
That had me curious, so I searched around a bit.
And I found one QEMU patch that seems like the right one: https://patchew.org/QEMU/20210120224444.71840-1-agraf@csgraf...
This appears to be his latest/greatest bundle: https://patchew.org/QEMU/20210120224444.71840-1-agraf@csgraf...
Thanks, mine is indeed more than 2 weeks old..
Yeah, it looks like the WFI handler was removed in the v3 patch series, then put back in for v6. WFI appears to be one of the cpu sleep related instructions that don't work well on the M1 (or maybe just don't work in QEMU?).
This says more about the eMAG than the M1, to be honest :D The APM X-Gene derived cores in the eMAG are far behind current cores from everyone else. The new Ampere Altra is using stock Arm Neoverse cores. (Which makes me wonder if all they got out of the APM acquisition was just one dead-end generation of product…)
Not in FreeBSD for sure, as an obsessive commit watcher I can say I haven't seen any M1 quirks land.
Everybody should use both in different circumstances: https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/f...
But according to Corellium's Linux work "the CPU tends to lose state" when using WFI for system idle: https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1/commit/b8ecd5924678f1c...
Not sure why this would have an impact on VM idling… (upd: yeah it's QEMU-side stuff, see other comments)
Linux can be run on Virtualization.framework on Mac M1 without qemu [1].
Would it be possible to run FreeBSD similarly without qemu?
[1] https://github.com/evansm7/vftool
When I went on my quest to run FreeBSD on my M1, I was originally looking at tools like the one you link.
As far as I could tell, the Virtualization framework is Linux specific(?)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization
And in the guide in the OP, we are using some patches that someone wrote so that QEMU uses the Hypervisor framework.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
And from what I understand but please correct me if I am wrong, the Virtualization framework is actually a layer on top of the Hypervisor framework. So if I am correct in my understanding the way that the QEMU patches do it should in theory be comparable in performance to the way that the Virtualization framework does it.
I would like to do some benchmarking of Linux on the Virtualization framework versus Linux on QEMU to see if there is a difference. However, good benchmarking is no easy feat. So ideally someone else who is really good at benchmarking Linux would do this and write about it.
Yes, Virtualization.framework's XPC service (because VM is out-of-process there) is implemented on top of Hypervisor.framework.