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Comment by saurabhnanda | Hacker News Reader

For the uninitiated, what's the issue with getting nix to work on M1?

Just to be pedantic, nix actually supports macOS and runs on top of Apple's kernel and userland (which I've tried, which is why I'm being pedantic), it's nixOS which runs at ring 1 that's being discussed here.

> it's nixOS which runs at ring 1 that's being discussed here.

Well, to be pedantic, ring 0 is the closest thing to ARM EL1 and EL2.

Thanks for the correction and TIL!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18717016/what-are-ring-0... (scroll down to the ARM section)

The biggest issue is that M1 is undocumented Apple Silicon. It has to be fully reverse engineered, primarily by the Asahi Linux team.

Other Linux distros will have to piggyback off the work of Asahi, and I think that generally they're avoiding jumping in yet because the hardware support is not very mature.

Presumably everything from asahi will get merged in to mainline Linux and distros will just work.

The end goal of the project is to not require their own distribution/repos.

As much as I love the project, the work is far from done. Any macOS update can change the firmware of the GPU or the display controller, which would break the Asahi driver. And there are going to be a lot of macOS updates for at least the next five years.

I'm cautiously hopeful. Apple did break things a couple times already, but along with one of the breakages, they also introduced a new "we won't break this thing again" mode.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211217132913/https://twitter.c...

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