> Anyways, Asahi can ship DSP turned on by default because the distro is specific to Apple. That's how Apple boosts the quality of its hardware, and the same applies to a distro dedicated to it.
Aww, so you don't think other distros will ship this even once upstream is figured out?
Kernels already ship hardware-specific drivers, but I suppose that just comes with the Linux kernel, whereas this needs support on both the kernel and userspace sides...
If a distro is shipping an image specific to macs? sure
If a distro is expecting you to install onto the rando asus gaming laptop you got at staples? not going to work.
The thing about M-series apple macs is there are only like 10 models total to record profiles for. You can't realistically do that and ship profiles for every x86 laptop under the sun.
I am at a complete loss how this is any different or harder than shipping hundreds of bits of firmware or hundreds of quirks for random hardware (have you seen the entirety of the quirks tables in the Linux kernel) all based off hundreds of drivers shipped with the kernel.
You maintain profiles in a repo and package them like anything else. No one has indicated how this cannot usually be zero config via hardware probing.
You have to actually measure a profile to ship it.
That means sitting down in front of every single model with decent measurement equipment and running a test. This doesn't scale, especially not for a distro with limited resources.
Huh? Distros don't produce the overwhelming majority of the software or configuration they ship. There's no reason individual distros need to be part of this effort.
This can scale with a central repository that any organization including manufacturers or suitably equipped individuals can contribute to. It just needs to be permissively licensed. The major distros or associated vendors such as Redhat or Ubuntu certainly have the resources to host such a thing and so does the Linux Foundation.
How are you applying that to the Asahi packages though? They're just packages for Fedora, a pretty generic distribution, and ArchARM, which is also meant to be installed on Raspberry Pis or Chromebooks after all. I know it because I run it on both Raspberry Pis, my M1 and a Hetzner server.
it seems like precisely the contrary to an Apple-specific distribution.
I'm not. I'm talking about shipping profiles for rando x86 laptops.
There are a fuck of a lot of rando x86 laptops, and you need to record a different profile for every single one of them. That means sitting down in front of every single laptop model you want to ship a profile for and running tests with a measurement-grade microphone and equipment.
Marcan did that for the handful of M-series mac laptops that exist. Good luck physically testing even 0.01% of the x86 laptops that exist.
You don't need to test every model of x86 laptop, just the most popular ones!
I have no data on this, but I would guess that the top 10 or 20 best-selling x86 laptops comprise a very significant portion of the overall market. So profile those, ignore the others, and you've helped a lot of users!
Aww, so you don't think other distros will ship this even once upstream is figured out?
Kernels already ship hardware-specific drivers, but I suppose that just comes with the Linux kernel, whereas this needs support on both the kernel and userspace sides...