Will the uncertainty over forced obsolescence of fairly recent hardware force Microsoft and Apple users to switch to open source alternatives?
During the last few weeks several items of computing hardware in our household had reached the point in their lifetime when it made sense to trade in for upgrades.
Digi.no published a Norwegian version of this article: En skummel fremtid med operativsystem som går til 11 eller forbi, eller en rolig oase med fri programvare?
I've written articles about my last two major laptop upgrades and each time detailed (in 2010 and 2017, respectively) how to deal with hardware that was new enough that I had no way to be certain it would work optimally with my chosen operating system, OpenBSD.
I have tended to jump from snapshot to snapshot, generally following whatever was -current on OpenBSD/amd64. There were other upgrades during that time, but those were straightforward enough that I did not see a need to write about them.
This time around, even though the process involved interactions with OpenBSD developers via the bugs@ mailing list and even trying two separate models from the same manufacturer before settling on what I wanted, I considered just letting this upgrade round just pass relatively undocumented. There was simply not enough drama involved in the process to make for interesting reading or an inspired writing process.
But then came the announcements from Apple and Microsoft of their operating systems going past 11 or to 11 respectively, spaced not too many weeks apart. In both cases, the announcements indicated that the new operating system versions would not work with older hardware.
At their WWDC event in early June 2021, Apple announced new versions of their system with somewhat vague but only thinly veiled formulations that specific new features of the upcoming system would only be available on the newer ARM architecture "Apple silicon" hardware.
Then a few weeks later into June 2021, Microsoft announced their Windows 11, and the announcement included some fairly confusing statements that seemed to indicate at first that Windows 11 would only work well or at all on hardware based on Intel's 8th generation Core processors or equivalent.
Apple is almost a year into their announced two year transition from Intel-supplied processors, with a base architecture generally known as AMD64, to their own Apple-designed ARM64-based system on a chip cores. Apple has generally kept some level of support for Macs for seven years after release, and with a transition to a new architecture underway, it becomes even less surprising that support for older devices will gradually erode and that some new system features will only be available on newer model hardware.
This contrasts sharply with Microsoft's situation, with the company not really dependent on hardware sales and not with any announced or unannounced but apparent move to a different architecture. Whatever the reason for the cutback in support, the initial response from the public seemed to indicate that there now was a real fear that on installing the new software, upgrading Windows users would be faced with something like
(which is in fact an OpenBSD panic) unless they upgrade to newer hardware before trying the new software release.
The fear of abandonment seemed real and echoed the feelings I have had myself over the years when getting new hardware to run a free operating system on.
The previous articles chronicle some of the experimenting that was needed in the past to make OpenBSD work when the hardware was newer than what yet had time to reach the developers. But in the end we could always be quite certain that we could make what we were interested in work, given time and perhaps some interaction with developers, or if you were up to it, becoming a developer yourself.
Anyway, over time the chance that things would just work increased, and your sweet spot for some time was buying hardware that was released within the last couple of years before the operating system release you were installing.
Hardware drivers would generally be kept in and maintained as long as they appeared to be useful. In general a driver would only be retired from the tree if it was useful only to an architecture that was going out of support such as OpenBSD/vax which went to the attic after the OpenBSD 5.9 release in 2016.
The major lesson here is that the free systems like OpenBSD, Linux or others would keep hardware support around as long as it appears to be useful to somebody, somewhere.
If major players like Microsoft choose to simply abandon users who do not have the latest hardware to stagnation plus only security updates, moving to a free software alternative may very well be a viable option for users who are not willing to abandon not very outdated hardware as long as their typical use case allows.
In my own experience, with hardware that has been on the market for about a year or possibly more you will encounter few to no problems making things work. My most recent Linux experience on laptops is with 9th and 11th generation Intel Core hardware, both of which will serve you well, including multimedia setups, excluding only those that explicitly tell you that you are on your own (Netflix being a case in point).
Now for an incrementally geekier part. If you are not that interested in OpenBSD, please feel free to skip.
But if you were waiting for the promised OpenBSD on newer hardware runthrough, you will get the fuller picture by reading the following and by looking up the details in the mailing list archives via the links and links in those messages.
The thread AMD Ryzen based Asus ZENBOOK 14 UM433DA-PURE4 14" panic at first boot post install - how to debug chronicles the interactions from "machine installs but does not survive first boot" through finding that the machine's BIOS announced but did not actually implement some features, and the subsequent changes that went in to the mainstream OpenBSD kernel, if I remember correctly just in time to be included in OpenBSD 6.9.
However, as can be seen in ASUS ZenBook X freezes, there were problems in the DRM/xorg area that would prove too hard to debug. Do read the whole thread, it contains useful debug info for when you get into a similar situation yourself.
Returning that system to the shop for a refund while I was still fiddling with the finer points of the next system was an interesting experience in itself.
I tried to restore the system to its pre-OpenBSD state before returning it, but as it turns out the Windows 10 install image Microsoft supplies will not be able to complete an install by itself.
Rather, it will prompt you for hardware driver you are supposed to have to hand for this system.
As a result of this, the machine still had OpenBSD installed -- with my user and home directory removed and only root as an active user -- when I handed the machine in for the refund, and it was immediately clear that the support techs had never seen anything more Unixy than macOS before. Fortunately this only lead to a short delay in the issuing the refund (but I now have a 1 year PC and Mac Support contract which I do not know that I actually need).
Anyway, I had already discovered an offer for a slightly more expensive model with better features, so ordered and took delivery of the machine described in ASUS ZenBook S: SSD unrecognized, possible new iwx variant, which chronicles the relatively light debugging needed to get the system in shape.
In short, after receiving the package with the new machine late in the afternoon, I spent a few hours trying to work around a few items that lead to rather puzzling failures at first, but fortunately they were all relatively easy to fix with a little help from OpenBSD developers who read the bugs@ list.
The first hurdle was that the system apparently did not recognize the built in SSD. This turned out to a matter of finding the BIOS option for turning off RAID controller functionality, which anyway does not make a whole lot of sense in a system where it is physically impossible to fit more than one storage device on a permanent basis.
The option turned out to live in the BIOS' Advanced menu, labeled VMD setup menu, where you set the Enable VMD controller option to Disabled. Once that is done, the SSD shows up as a regular NVMe device:
nvme0 at pci3 dev 0 function 0 "Intel NVMe" rev 0x03: msix, NVMe 1.3
nvme0: INTEL SSDPEKNW010T8, firmware 004C, serial BTNH03460GYE1P0B
scsibus1 at nvme0: 2 targets, initiator 0
sd0 at scsibus1 targ 1 lun 0: <NVMe, INTEL SSDPEKNW01, 004C>
sd0: 976762MB, 512 bytes/sector, 2000409264 sectors
This made it possible to install on the internal SSD proper, and the next issue was that this 11th generation Intel Core system needed a newer revision (version 5.10) of the Linux-derived DRM code. At the time (and still at the time of writing) Jonathan Gray maintained an as-not-yet-committed branch of the OpenBSD kernel with the code I needed in. The reason this DRM code version was not committed to the main tree was that the newer code caused some regressions on older hardware.
On my system, it looked like the stock kernel would panic when loading the iwx(4) driver, but booting the test kernel Jonathan supplied cured that problem, and I have been running once a week checkouts of the drm510 kernel on top of sysupgraded snapshots since.
However, even with the iwx(4) driver now loading, the wireless network device did not work.
Running doas fw_update -v revealed that several of the relevant firmware files had been corrupted, and after doas fw_update -d iwx and re-installing (doas fw_update iwx), doas /etc/netstart iwx0 worked as expected and with excellent performance.
In the meantime it had turned out that not only was the audio parts of the system in fact supported (it only needed a one line patch to enable it), only minor manipulation to configuration files would make the audio output signal switch correctly between the internal speaker and my headphones, and that for video conferencing a low cost full duplex USB headset was the better choice.
So now I have a gorgeous, lightweight 13.9 inch laptop running OpenBSD with Xorg running with a 3300x2200 pixel resolution and everything I care about working. With a little attention to proper testing, we have reason to believe that all of this will be properly supported without regression for older hardware versions in the upcoming OpenBSD 7.0 release.
As I had hinted earlier, you may very well find yourself better served and supported by the open source operating system of your choice and its developers and users than you can reasonably expect from the commercial, proprietary options.
If you have questions about anything in this article, OpenBSD or other free systems, please let me know in comments here, seek out a local-to-you user group (the ones I am most involved in are NUUG, the national Norwegian Unix User Group, and BLUG, the Bergen (BSD and) Linux User Group), or drop me an email. If you choose the last option, please read my read me first document before sending a second message.
Update 2021-07-07: As reported in the following tweet, the DRM 5.10 update is now in, and I can go back to quiet sysupgrade(8) from snapshot to snapshot:
Following this commit https://t.co/Qn8QLQcbmH (the DRM 5.10 update), a simple sysupgrade was all that was needed for the machine from https://t.co/znXV6lRLNn to just work with the latest #OpenBSD snapshot. Thanks again to jsg@ and all #OpenBSD developers!
— Peter N. M. Hansteen (@pitrh) July 7, 2021
Which also means OpenBSD 7.0 will seriously rock on this and similar machines.