Gentoo on Macbook Air/Pro M1 (ARM64)

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22698

Wikipedia's disambiguation page for M2 says it's even worse than you thought.

The two most obvious candidates are Socket M2, a now very obsolete CPU socket design, and M.2, a relatively current standard for connecting mass storage devices, usually NVMe drives. M.2 slots are available on a variety of motherboards, including towers, and particularly including hardware that has no connection to Apple. Apple's Intel Macs may well have an M.2 slot too, which if so, would just increase the confusion further if they include M.2 mass storage slots on Apple Arm computers that use the successor to the Apple M1.

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

Am waiting for my machine, which should come in a month or so.

It's not so much about how much of an apple fanboy I am, but at this point, its about how much of an Intel hater I am. I didn't have good experiences with ati, amd, intel, nvidia, and at this point, if there's another alternative, especially in the arm space, I want to try it. Its as simple as that.

I looked at the macbooks with m1, they seem sturdy. Seem to be nice. Its not like I'm an alien to apple things. I do have the phone, tablet, watch and earbuds. A laptop wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

OFC installing linux, and specifically gentoo linux on it is top priority. But someone has to order these. Get the thing moving. It's already started and I can't wait to take part. Asahi linux already has a full desktop up, minus GPU acceleration. It's pretty impressive. I'm sure If they made theirs work, we could just use the booting method, and maybe some utils & stuff, and make gentoo work on it. I would be glad to be part of that.

The M1 is the only thing that actually gave me a fizz in the last few years (as James May would put it). But also, I think it's the tiny pebble that gonna break the camels back. Its pushing arm even more mainstream. Forcing other giants to move that way too. Intel is totally unequipped. Nvidia has some plans. Amd... I dont know or care. Microsoft is scrambling. I just love how last year people shrugged of apple m1. This year... uhm... I want to be part of it. I feel like I already was with the raspberry pi... but this is ... even better.

I am ready to retire my desktop.

Zucca · Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2021 6:38 pm Post subject:

M1 MacBook Air would be the sweet spot for me because it has pretty much performance considering it's passively cooled.

I wonder how much hassle installing Linux on it is and how's the performance then...
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axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/

a more comprehensive report from the guys themselves.

when we say asahi linux, i don't think it's so much a distro, but a group of hackers that get to contribute to the kernel on regular basis for the m1 cpu and soc.

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

I hate Apple. It's been 3 months ffs and my unit still ain't here. I'm thinking of canceling.

I get why it's not here. Romania is not very high on the list of important clients. But really since 27th oct...

On apple's side, they come up with a new product once a year, and they want to space out that product over the year. But it doesn't work for me if they tax me in october but deliver in march.

Zucca · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2022 5:49 pm Post subject:

I looked at the prices of the cheapest M1 Airs and the pricing is way too steep.
I'd love to have a passively cooled laptop, but I guess I'll settle with my current MateBook D with Ryzen 5.
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axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

ok. it finally arrived. i wont talk about ... it.

i'll just talk about my first impression on how it is to install gentoo on it. not on bare metal, coz that is a bit hard, but I started with parallels and am w86. orking my ways down. with parallels, gentoo fells like a qemu machine of a x86 on x86. even though its arm64.

its a huge satisfaction to see the "virtual/*" packages just rolling by instantly like its an x86_platform. even though its not.

the second huge win, for me, its the fact that I can chroot from m1 onto raspberry pi rootfs. just mount it over nfs, and you can chroot into it. that is... awesum. doesn't work both ways. m1 has aes/sha1/sha2 as cpu flag. feature. so prolly 2-3 packets back ( on pi ) will complain of invalid instructions. but its' the same arm64 base. except so muuuuch faster. it's intel fast. i was so close to regretting the buy... but just watching portage crunch data in parallels give me so much hope. it just matches well with the other gizmoz in my network.

I am glad I upgraded wifi prior to this buy, coz it doesn't have ethernet. feels weird not to have ethernet. but wifi doing fine. even with distcc everything works just fine. its amazing. i plan to try qemu next, even though, parallels works just fine. and maybe next avahi linux.

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

had today my first crash that didn't allow me to fix it from the m1 itself. it was warcraft 3 that crashed so spectacularly. did ssh from the phone, killed warcraft 3 (ps axw|grep -i warcraft|grep -v grep|awk '{print $1;}' | xargs -i kill -9 {})

i miss skill. what happened to skill? you could just skill warcraft. whatever, awk works just as well. just remember to grep grep. or you kill your kill

)

normal people would interpret that as a general crash. after upgrades, i didn't reset this machine once. and honestly it carries the same weight as linux does. as long as you can ssh into it, it didn't crash...

xavier10 · Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2022 6:39 pm Post subject:

Compared to x86, did you notice significant issues, e.g., about the graphics support ?
I am considering adding an M1 laptop some time soon...

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

Many issues. Right out the gate, the kernel support ain't ready yet. It's getting there, still working on some power management issues as far as I know. I think it could be done during this year. Also as far as I know, the gpu is working only in non-accelerated mode, as there is no driver whatsoever for it. As far as I know, they prolly using an EFI FB or something of the sort. That's for running linux in native mode. So not yet there. Even if we get there, remember that this is an aarch64 system, therefor wine wont work on it. Crossover yes, wine no.

As far as linux in parallels goes, it goes great. Video is accelerated. Everything works great. Great addition as distcc server for the pi. You can easily chroot from pi to m1 or viceversa.

As far as gaming goes, again, crossover & parallels. Some games work, some don't yet. And the ones that do, work relatively well as far as I can tell.

millenialhacker · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2022 Posts: 1

There’s an unofficial guide to install Gentoo on an Apple MbP M1:

https://blog.devgenius.io/installing-gentoo-linux-in-apple-macbook-pro-m1-49e163534898

Zucca · Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2022 8:24 am Post subject:

When/If I get my hands on used, cheapish, M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM, I'll go for it.
Until then I'll watch this thread for progress. And very nice to see that short guide to Gentoo install. The installation pretty much goes the way I envisioned it except adding the zstd support. A very important step I would have missed.

EDIT: I would have used rEFInd if possible istead of GRUB2 (its script system is unnecessarily complex just for boot loader), although it may provide more rescue possibilities.
Secondly I would have probably used lvm under all the filesystems where possible.
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xavier10 · Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2022 10:34 am Post subject:

Thanks, this is getting tempting... also thinking of looking for a cheap M1 Air right now...
I would probably try to virtualise with UTM rather than a real install.

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-an-arm-powered-m2-macbook-air-to-release-latest-linux-kernel/

Just thought I would leave this here.

Marcan the dev that did the M1/M2 port of linux had a few laudatory remarks when it comes to apple, including this one: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 & this one https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1554018227415846913

He only doesn't say apple went out of its way to create a feature especially for asahi and the greater linux community. This is both good news for linux, and apple. Bad news for intel and microsoft.

flysideways · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 492

I recently got an M1 Macbook Pro, replacing my 10 year old laptop that I was still traveling with. I am happy with virtualized, on UTM/QEMU, Gentoo. It is an M1 Max with plenty of ram. Compiles are quick, and quiet using the UTM default processor settings. It will completely load the 8 performance cores.

I need to find my watt meter and compare some big compiles between this laptop and my desktop.

I am in no hurry to try it on bare metal. In the future when Apple does their, it's too old to provide updates for, I will be compelled to at that point. I still have a 2008 MacBook that runs just fine on current Linux.

Zucca · Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2022 5:35 pm Post subject:

Afaik Linus also runs Mac Book Air nowdays (among others).
The main benefit for him is to run Linux on actual bare ARMm when testing/developing Linux.

Late EDIT: There was exactly the same mentioned two posts earlier. D'oh!
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Zucca · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2022 5:22 pm Post subject:

@axl: Do you have Gentoo installed on that Air already or bare Asashi?
How's the hardware supported nowdays?
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axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

flysideways · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 492

ScardracS · n00b Joined: 03 Mar 2021 Posts: 14

Hi everyone. You can actually follow https://blog.devgenius.io/installing-gentoo-linux-in-apple-macbook-pro-m1-49e163534898 to install gentoo on Macs but if you are planning to install it on a non-fan version (for eg: MacBook Air) be sure to have a good cooling system because it tends to become really hot during compilation time.

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1146 Location: Romania

devsk · Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2023 8:07 pm Post subject:

I recently installed Asahi Linux in a dual boot setup and I have been comparing portage speed in a chroot on Asahi vs AMD 3950x system (with 96GB RAM and 980 Pro 1TB NVME) I have. I am completely blown away by the performance of M1 MAX (from 2021). Its 10-core CPU easily finishes most emerges in half the time or less compared to 16-core (32 threads) AMD desktop system.

World update pretend takes about 20s compared to 90s on my desktop. Its similar (some ~100 packages are absent on arm64) world file with same USE flags, with about 2000 packages in total on both systems.

While the AMD system screams with temps reaching mid 80s during peak, Macbook Pro stays cool & quiet in the 50s.

I don't know how they did it but it feels like magical duo of performance and power efficiency!

Zucca · Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2023 8:11 am Post subject:

flysideways · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 492

I've been using VMWare Fusion for a while now on my M1 MacBook. It does not have the problems mounting another Samsung T7 from within the virtual machine that UTM still suffers.

I never have put a wattmeter on the system while emerging but I have used the macos powermetric command to see that it thinks the processor is using 25 watts with all 8 perfomance cores at 100% and the economy cores at about 20%.

I use it whenever I feel like updating a Gentoo Pi, just move the drive and chroot in, so much faster.