NHacker Next
- new
- past
- show
- ask
- show
- jobs
- submit
login
Rendered at 00:14:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Seems essentially impossible to get:
* pytorch
* GPU acceleration
* VM/container like isolation
The virtio-gpu layer gets closest but seems to only pass through graphics GPU not compute GPU so no pytorch
>podman libkrun
Haven't tried it but research suggests its really shaky still. podman libkrun exposes vulkan while torch expects mps on macs. Sounds like one can force vulkan but that's apparently slow and beta-ish?
TBF, I only got to the point that using device=mps_device didn't fail. I used Sonoma at the time and the image for the vm was ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-sequoia-xcode:16.2-beta-3. Python 3.12, as well, because torch didn't work with later versions.
import torch
mps_device = torch.device("mps")
print('device is', mps_device)
x = torch.ones(1, device=mps_device)
print(x)That specific Geekbench test is to measure the ANE performance, which they did by setting the CoreML run to cpuAndNeuralEngine. They could have set it to all and it would use any hardware available, but that would be counterproductive to a test that hopes to measure the ANE, no?
And note that there is no "just ANE" option. In this case it is probably the virtualized CPU side of the equation that's yielding the massive slowdowns for int8 and quantized runs.
The ANE isn't the problem here.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/02/apple-neural-...
Typical Apple behavior, I guess, but grating to see in a OSS tool.
Why are they obliged to emulate the Docker CLI? This limits them to just shadowing someone else's product. Just use Docker if you want their CLI/API, it uses the same virtualization framework under the hood on Macs.
Thanks.
edit: For example, I can create a container on my MacBook to run an application. A colleague *in my Tailnet* can then connect to this container to interact with that application from a coffeeshop or airliner while not exposing the rest of my MacBook.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization
200 lines?! That’s two orders of magnitude too many. What exactly are you doing that you need so such code for signing and notarisation?
You don’t need to do that, you can give options to the CLI to define what profile to use.
> Most of the hassle is because it's 100% unattended and I had to do stuff to avoid GUI-prompts for passwords/unlocks
I have a shell function to which I point my code and it compiles, signs, and notarises it without any more intervention, GUI or password prompts, and I’m pretty sure signing and notarising are literally two lines.
Unfortunately I’m not at my computer now or I’d paste them, but from your description that script is definitely too long.
They're constantly doing other optimizations in other ways, too. But that's the one you were pointing at, I think.
OrbStack isn't open-source though and I can't justify buying a license for every single person in my company just for something functionally equivalent but performing better.
These kinds of things should just be provided by Apple as a first-class thing.
But... if you start applications inside your VM it will want the full 8 Gb you've allocated not the 5 Gb it uses at startup?
Edit: I stand corrected!
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzv...
Browse /r/macos if you dare to wade into the uninformed cesspool; it's full of OOTB apps causing OOMs (among 3rd party apps) with the past at least two major versions of macOS.
I admit I don't have much experience with how Windows handles constrained memory since XP, and XP was abysmal at it just by virtue of being far more bloated than an equivalent Linux distro. It's certainly far more bloated nowadays, but maybe it handles memory pressure better.
None of this should be construed to say that macOS doesn't have serious issues or that it's not in dire need of a Snow Leopard-esque "0 new features" release. That's tangential to its memory handling, where I haven't seen the issues you describe.
As for macOS...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1njf1aj/bravo_apple_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nxh08n/impressive_m...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1jo5pnq/passwords_ap...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1gkwxe4/how_is_memor...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1seq0ij/freeform_has...
There are _plenty_ more. There is some fundamental library leaking given the range of impacted apps.
Or Apple doesn't really care, though I doubt that's the case.
See my other post for just a tiny amount of references to OOTB faulty apps.
> Not sure what your intentions are.
This is just a weird statement.
> Yes, modern OS's might have issues in runtime
/All/ modern general purpose OSes have issues at runtime. Every last one of them. macOS isn't without it's significant UX and other faults. It's OK to acknowledge them; this isn't a religion.
This is just weird behavior for HN. I suggest you re-evaluate how you participate in conversations, here.
$ podman image list | grep cross
docker.io/gotson/crossbuild latest d96ea9b7054b 3 years ago 6.71 GB
Below content from https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/28/startup-modes-for-m1-mac...
Launch 1 True Recovery, open Terminal, then run “bputil -a” (without the quotes) to downgrade system security and allow for more boot arguments. You might need to restart after this step.
Then, run [nvram boot-args=”-s”] (without the square brackets). Restart to launch Single User Mode.
Once in Single User Mode, run these commands (in the following order) to mount the root volume group:
1. mount -P 1
2. /usr/libexec/init_data_protection
3. mount -P 2
Future restarts will always launch Single User Mode first. To stop launching Single User Mode, run [nvram boot-args=“”] (without the square brackets).
To restore your system to full security, run “bputil -f” (without the quotes). If you choose to run that command in macOS, prefix “sudo” to the beginning.
"What you're referring to as Darwin, is in fact, Darwin/XNU."
"What you're referring to as XNU, is in fact, BSD/Mach."
I seem to remember it being possible to run macOS-less Darwin several years ago, not sure if that's still possible or if Apple has modified it so much at this point that it's useless without at least some macOS components.
Apple stopped updating this 5 years ago.
I remember getting it to boot once long ago but I didn't have anything to actually do with it.
2024, maybe? needs some renewed interest perhaps:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/17022784?baseli...
The difference between the absolutely silent M1 and the hairdryer Intel was staggering.
I’m sure you’re completely right.
Good reminder that there's a certain amount of memory tied up with each core (probably mainly page cache and concurrency handling etc).
Besides the fact that the operating system may allocate some memory for each thread, when you launch a multi-threaded application that is able to use all available threads, for instance the compilation of a big software project, it frequently will allocate some working memory in an amount proportional with the amount of working threads.
I have encountered many multi-threaded applications that need up to 2 GB per thread to work well.
This corresponds to having 64 GB for a desktop CPU with 32 threads, like Ryzen 9 9950X.
For the compilation example, I have seen software projects, like Chrome/Chromium and its derivatives, where if you do not have enough memory, proportional to the number of hardware threads, e.g. when you have only 32 GB for a 16 core/32 thread CPU, you must reduce the number of concurrent compilations, e.g. with an appropriate parameter to "make -j", leaving some threads and cores idle, because otherwise you may encounter out-of-memory errors.
Also, depending on the architecture, avoiding odd(or even) virtual cores might free more L2 or L3 for the worker threads and speed up the process.
Similarly if you started with 4GB and there was 900MB available for user apps, I expect you could launch apps that consume 1500MB just fine; the OS is leaving enough to launch anything, and making use of unused memory for cache/etc.
All good things imo, it dynamically makes the most of what is available, at the expense of making it harder to see a true baseline of hard min requirement to operate.
Fun things to check, `vm_stat`
$ vm_stat Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 230295.
Pages active: 1206857.
Pages inactive: 1206361.
Pages speculative: 31863.
Pages throttled: 0.
Pages wired down: 470093.
Pages purgeable: 18894.
"Translation faults": 21635255.
Pages copy-on-write: 1590349.
Pages zero filled: 11093310.
Pages reactivated: 15580.
Pages purged: 50928.
File-backed pages: 689378.
Anonymous pages: 1755703.
Pages stored in compressor: 0.
Pages occupied by compressor: 0.
Decompressions: 0.
Compressions: 0.
Pageins: 832529.
Pageouts: 225.
Swapins: 0.
Swapouts: 0.
edit: no code fence markdown support or am I doing something wrong?
Triple backticks also aren't recognized. However, if you indent by I believe 4 spaces, it formats it in a fixed width font presuming it's code.
Let's try (4 spaces):
None for comparison:func main() { fmt.Println("Hello, HN!") }