Re: Freebsd on M1 Macs

As I said to Joe in a previous post - I am personally quite impressed of how easy it was go get up and running - granted it crashes with >8 Cores - but Under parallels it ran well - making a very long term BSD user very very happy - Looking at both Linux and NetBSD - (NetBSD randomly freezes with >8 Cores) but both seems doggy when it comes to how it handles efficiency cores. What got me to go back to FreeBSD - was 

A) I really miss it but since I got rid of my PC's there seems to be no option
B) I do understand the codebase 
C) Nobody seems to have a consistent approach to scheduling 

E.g. Mac OS X uses QoS to control affinity, everybody else uses "affinity" - but "setaffinity" seems like taking a hammer to the schedular - So I wanted to understand. ARM as such is a bit of a mess in as much there are a very varied number of CPU and designs - but at the same time this is why ARM is such an interesting design. But Personally I am still a bit unsure what acronym  or branding covers platform. Looking at two different - if somewhat exotic applications - E.g. A mainframe emulator and GNU APL who both hard relies on the assumption that binding to a specific CPU will give you the best performance, personally I think that assumption is the intellectually the same as running everything under rtprio    - it seems that assumptions are being made in the wild that will break once you have asymmetric CPU's - So I think we - I mean the FreeBSD camp -  has some work to do - If POSIX or others codify the state of "Now" we end up with the same mess as pthreads ended up being. 

After all that I really wanted to thank everybody who has worked on ARM for allowing me to get back to having FreeBSD running on my daily workhorse - it's really a work well done

Regards
	Thomas  

On 26/11/2023, 23:52, "Kyle Evans" <owner-freebsd-arm@freebsd.org <mailto:owner-freebsd-arm@freebsd.org> on behalf of kevans@FreeBSD.org <mailto:kevans@FreeBSD.org>> wrote:


On 11/26/23 16:04, Jason Bacon wrote:
> On 11/26/23 13:22, Joe B wrote:
>>
>> I know this is a longshot but I'm going to ask I know MacOS is a BSD 
>> but we all know it's very sugarcoated and doesn't look like a BSD.
>>
>> Question will real freeBSD ever come to the m1 Mac's. I got a 16 inch 
>> mbp with good specs just taking up space right now
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> ~ Joe B
> 
> I assume you've seen https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon <https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon>. Not sure 
> how up-to-date it is. The wikis tend to lag behind reality in my 
> experience.
> 


Yeah, this is a bit out of date. SMP and watchdog bits are good, along 
with some subset of the USB ports (IOMMU is a WIP). With the branch I'm 
working on right now, we can go full multi-user on a USB root. Work
stalled for a bit because there was a general disagreement with how we 
integrated parts of the interrupt control into the interrupt framework, 
but I've been given a vision recently of a clear path forward, so 
hopefully we can move forward with that and unblock upstreaming some of 
the other bits.


Thanks,


Kyle Evans