[bayindirh]

That's true. What I wanted to point out is the fact that the most tightly integrated and arguably the most locked down platform on the market is more open than a platform designed to be adapted by others and sold by many.

I don't expect any daily-driveable alternative operating systems on Apple systems since it's a continuously moving target, yet Apple doesn't have a such heavy-handed approach. They just do their thing and do not hinder things actively like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.

[ece]

This comparison makes no sense. It's desktops/laptops vs phones. In either case Apple is the worst offender. You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs, or install other OSes on iPhone.

[aystatic]

> You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs

afaik you technically can, except that m1/m2 force pcie bars to be mapped as device memory (forbids unaligned r/w), so most gpu software (and drivers) that just issue memcpys to vram and expect the fabric to behave sanely will sigbus. it's possible to work around this, and some people indeed have with amdgpu, but it'd absolutely destroy performance to fix in the general case

so it doesn't really have anything to do with apple themselves blocking it but rather a niche implementation detail of the AS platform that's essentially an erratum

[ece]

You would think Apple would update this or put out another support page supporting what you're saying: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363

There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM.

I think this is more than just an erratum, even with newer chips. It's monopolistic behavior all too common nowadays.

[aystatic]

don't see why they would care to put out docs on it considering macos doesn't even permit kexts anymore, there'd be no gpu drivers anyways. i figured it was obvious we're talking in the context of running linux on these things, given the parent topic.

> There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM

can you link to this? my intuition is that they're speaking on whether apple would include dgpus inside AS systems like they used to with nvidia and amd chips in macbooks, which i agree wouldn't make much sense atp

[ece]

There were uses for DGPUs in MacOS before AS, those uses could have continued, but Apple left no choice. It's weird how continuity wasn't as important to Apple in this case.

Whatever kernel or hardware facilities are available to Apple's own GPU driver, should be available to other GPU drivers. Anything else is myopic thinking, which I realize might be common for Apple, but it is also monopolistic.

Linux also allows userspace drivers with less performance I think, but I don't think DGPU use can be made performant because of AS hardware choices.

I am predisposed to ignoring link requests for things that can be easily googled.