Arch Linux

fixel

Member

Registered: 2009-03-27

Posts: 19

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

@Sc0rian: when I updated, libata.force=noncq disappeared from my kernel parameters. If it's still there and you're getting freezes you can try: "echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth"

heipei

Member

Registered: 2014-01-30

Posts: 6

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Can someone sum up the current state of Linux on the MacBook Pro 11,1? I'm interested in the 13" model with only the Intel GPU.

There are a few questions I have, based on which I might make a decision to purchase this laptop:
* Does hotplugging displays work? DVI? HDMI? With the new Thunderbolt-hotplugging patches?
* Suspend-to-disk working reliably?
* (Battery) performance OK compared to OS X?
* Can this be used for everyday use? If not, what is missing?
* Could someone update the wiki?

I know these are quite a few questions. But for someone who does not have the hardware yet, judging the current state based on forum posts and replies is really hard. I suspect there are a few people out there which have it working perfectly fine but don't bother posting that observation here Thanks in advance for any replies.

Last edited by heipei (2014-01-30 16:41:11)

Sc0rian

Member

Registered: 2014-01-06

Posts: 41

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

@Sc0rian: when I updated, libata.force=noncq disappeared from my kernel parameters. If it's still there and you're getting freezes you can try: "echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth"

cheers..

 cat  /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth
1

seems to already be set to 1.  but still get mini hangs. Same for GF's laptop (same setup as mine)

* Does hotplugging displays work? DVI? HDMI? With the new Thunderbolt-hotplugging patches?
yes, I use mini-dp, hdmi out of the box.
* Suspend-to-disk working reliably?
has been fine here on latest stable kernel. Resumes no problem
* (Battery) performance OK compared to OS X?
battery life is pretty good, its not OS X good but I get around 7ish hours. I dont really count though and i tend to use my laptop heavily.
* Can this be used for everyday use? If not, what is missing?
yup. I use it everyday.

Last edited by Sc0rian (2014-01-30 13:44:53)

baronmog

Member

Registered: 2013-11-01

Posts: 60

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Can someone sum up the current state of Linux on the MacBook Pro 11,3? I'm interested in the 13" model with only the Intel GPU.

The 13" model is the MacBook Pro 11,1.

uriah

Member

Registered: 2014-01-03

Posts: 10

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

There are a few questions I have, based on which I might make a decision to purchase this laptop:
* Does hotplugging displays work? DVI? HDMI? With the new Thunderbolt-hotplugging patches?
* Suspend-to-disk working reliably?
* (Battery) performance OK compared to OS X?
* Can this be used for everyday use? If not, what is missing?
* Could someone update the wiki?

I have a Macbook Pro 11,1 and I've been using it as a main computer for a while now, and I've gotten it working almost perfectly.

- HDMI hotplugging should work fine. I haven't tried the Thunderbolt hotplugging patches, sorry. I have, however, used the Thunderbolt gigabit ethernet adaptor by plugging it in before booting, and that works fine.

- Last time I tried suspend to ram, it resulted in my needing to plug the laptop in, turn it off by holding the power button down for a while to shut the laptop off, then hold the power button down again to turn it back on. Obviously all my work was lost, thankfully it wasn't anything important. I haven't tried suspending to disk personally, as I don't want to use it due to how I have my laptop set up. However, I hear it works fine, but I'm not sure whether that info is from 11,1 users.

- Battery performance is great, almost as good as in OSX, if you set the laptop up with powertop. At some points with the screen backlight dimmed to the max it was reporting power usage in the 5-6W range, which is phenomenal. However, due to buggy wifi drivers it's better not to have powersaving enabled for the wifi device.

- Also, from time to time you'll need to fight with the wifi to get it working right as it will sometimes give errors in dmesg. However, I don't find it so bad.

- One thing I've noticed is that when you close the lid the screen and apple logo don't turn off automatically. However, I've set up acpid to take care of that. But who knows, you might not care, especially if you plan on suspending when the lid closes, but I don't like that functionality. I prefer suspending manually. Also, once acpid is set up, you need to close the lid slowly/delicately after the apple logo turns off, or else the screen and apple logo will turn back on. That's a small bug...

- I use the laptop for every day use, and I'm quite happy with it.

- I'll take a look at the wiki eventually, when I have time, to see what can be added, but it seemed pretty complete last time I checked. After all, I got most of it working thanks to the wiki...

-uriah

BeamMeUpScotty

Member

Registered: 2013-12-29

Posts: 5

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Can someone sum up the current state of Linux on the MacBook Pro 11,1? I'm interested in the 13" model with only the Intel GPU.

There are a few questions I have, based on which I might make a decision to purchase this laptop:
* Does hotplugging displays work? DVI? HDMI? With the new Thunderbolt-hotplugging patches?
* Suspend-to-disk working reliably?
* (Battery) performance OK compared to OS X?
* Can this be used for everyday use? If not, what is missing?
* Could someone update the wiki?

I know these are quite a few questions. But for someone who does not have the hardware yet, judging the current state based on forum posts and replies is really hard. I suspect there are a few people out there which have it working perfectly fine but don't bother posting that observation here Thanks in advance for any replies.

I've been using the 11,1 (on kernel 3.13) for a while now and mostly agree with Uriah. Hdmi and DP hotplugging works fine, use it daily.
Suspend was a big issue for me at first but is 99% consistent right now with waking up. Rarely does it take the screen a bit longer to turn on at resuming, sometimes requiring me to turn up the backlight by hand. This is mostly when i rip the external monitor out with the laptop suspended.

Battery performance has been equal to my osx experience. I got powertop down to some 4.5w but didn't really look into tuning further. Is there anyone that looked into deeper sleep states of the gpu? rc6 modes?

Ive had bad luck with the Broadcom wireless drivers and multiple APs with the same SSID. It would randomly drop connection and take a while to recover.

Other than that rock solid if you ask me.

heipei

Member

Registered: 2014-01-30

Posts: 6

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Thanks for the answers. This has reinforced my decision to get a MacBook Pro 11,1. I will report on how it goes once I'm up and running

Glaucous

Member

Registered: 2010-11-06

Posts: 41

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Battery performance has been equal to my osx experience. I got powertop down to some 4.5w but didn't really look into tuning further. Is there anyone that looked into deeper sleep states of the gpu? rc6 modes?

Wow, 4.5W sounds VERY low, lowerst I ever got was like 7W. Would you mind posting the powertop html output, I'd like to see if there's anything that's different. Did you do anything specfic to configure power saving?

powertop --html=file

uriah

Member

Registered: 2014-01-03

Posts: 10

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Battery performance has been equal to my osx experience. I got powertop down to some 4.5w but didn't really look into tuning further. Is there anyone that looked into deeper sleep states of the gpu? rc6 modes?

Wow, 4.5W sounds VERY low, lowerst I ever got was like 7W. Would you mind posting the powertop html output, I'd like to see if there's anything that's different. Did you do anything specfic to configure power saving?

powertop --html=file

I would also be interested in knowing what you did to get your power consumption down to 4.5W... I only saw such low power consumption the first time I ran powertop, but since then it has always been between 5.5W and 7.5W...

Thanks,
uriah

hrod

Member

Registered: 2013-10-24

Posts: 57

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Battery performance has been equal to my osx experience. I got powertop down to some 4.5w but didn't really look into tuning further. Is there anyone that looked into deeper sleep states of the gpu? rc6 modes?

Wow, 4.5W sounds VERY low, lowerst I ever got was like 7W. Would you mind posting the powertop html output, I'd like to see if there's anything that's different. Did you do anything specfic to configure power saving?

powertop --html=file

I would also be interested in knowing what you did to get your power consumption down to 4.5W... I only saw such low power consumption the first time I ran powertop, but since then it has always been between 5.5W and 7.5W...

Thanks,
uriah

i would like to know what both of you have done.

on 20% brightness
i get 8.8W with a chrome tab open
i get 7.8W with just a terminal open

heipei

Member

Registered: 2014-01-30

Posts: 6

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Who is using some form of full-disk-encryption on his MacBook Pro 11,1? I read that some of the proprietary mSATA SSD controllers Apple users might support hardware encryption, but that this is not used by OS X since it can't encrypt the whole disk (which includes the recovery partition). How about Linux? Does anyone have any further information on that?

If not, how is the performance with plain old LUKS and AES-NI on the i5? Any caveats? Suspend-to-disk is absolutely necessary for using FDE in a secure way obviously

Sc0rian

Member

Registered: 2014-01-06

Posts: 41

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

How can I go about disabling WIFI when not using it? It drains my battery and I cannot seem to turn it off...

BeamMeUpScotty

Member

Registered: 2013-12-29

Posts: 5

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

I found the rather resource hungry Gnome3 to be pretty efficient and complete out of the box, compared to some other desktops out there. Somehow i guess the defaults (acpi stuff) for Gnome just work with suspending to RAM, keyboard backlight controls, and so on. Idle i get to around 5.4-5.5 watts in Powertop with Wifi enabled and just a terminal open. With wifi 'disabled' in network manager this drops to 5.2 watts. However much these figures are worth, it's with an uptime of 7 days already.
I haven't let Powertop do any tweaks as i found that it does more harm than good with the Haswell chips. I merely used a default config of TLP. Also Disabling bluetooth as i never use it.

One thing I have been wondering is the RC6 states of the Intel GPU. Anyone that can comment on the deeper sleep states, beyond RC6, and their support for the Intel 5000?

If you want i can get the html output of Powertop later.

Last edited by BeamMeUpScotty (2014-02-06 14:14:52)

Glaucous

Member

Registered: 2010-11-06

Posts: 41

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Thanks for the information, I would like to see your Powertop output, and which brightness are you using?

I did a couple of tests with only a terminal open. Tested with and without composition as well as low and medium brightness.

No comp:
Low: 4.94 W
Med: 6.87 W

Comp:
Low: 6.87 W
High: 10.1 W

Four csv files available here - I thought github would render them, but no - anyway:
https://github.com/ekroth/linux-setup/tree/master/stats

Fine I guess, I'll see if I can configure compton to use less resources, although I doubt it.

Edit: Got Comp with high to 9.69 W with different compton settings, but it's probably within margin of error. Overall composition seems to add about 3 W. It seems like composition completely "disables" GPU power save, perhaps obvious, but it's quite significant. Without composition it's about 5% on and 95% RC6, with composition it's about 99% on.

Last edited by Glaucous (2014-02-06 20:19:21)

Bionic Apple

Member

Registered: 2008-08-05

Posts: 59

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

For people with the Macbook Pro 11,3, what is the status of switching between the two cards? How easy is it?

DrKillPatient

Member

Registered: 2011-07-28

Posts: 85

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

Can someone sum up the current state of Linux on the MacBook Pro 11,1? I'm interested in the 13" model with only the Intel GPU.

There are a few questions I have, based on which I might make a decision to purchase this laptop:
* Does hotplugging displays work? DVI? HDMI? With the new Thunderbolt-hotplugging patches?
* Suspend-to-disk working reliably?
* (Battery) performance OK compared to OS X?
* Can this be used for everyday use? If not, what is missing?
* Could someone update the wiki?

I know these are quite a few questions. But for someone who does not have the hardware yet, judging the current state based on forum posts and replies is really hard. I suspect there are a few people out there which have it working perfectly fine but don't bother posting that observation here Thanks in advance for any replies.

A little late, but I have a rMBP11,1 as well so I'll throw in my lot. I don't have Arch on it currently (I got it replaced shortly after purchase due to a small defect with lid alignment and haven't had time to reinstall), however, when I did use Arch on it a little more than a month ago, suspend worked fine, though resume is a bit slower than on OSX — just a few seconds, but OSX seems fairly instantaneous in comparison. Perhaps there's a way to speed it up; I didn't investigate at the time. The battery life was a bit less than on OSX, but not by a significant amount (something like 6 hours instead of 7 on high brightness), though I don't think I did a lot of optimization with powertop, so this could probably be improved as well. I did not test Thunderbolt, as I didn't know of the patches at the time. I will probably wait until kernel 3.14 to take a look at those since I only rarely use Thunderbolt devices at this point.

I plan to use Arch on it for normal computing, but I'd like to wait for a few things that will become stable shortly: firstly, I prefer Chrome/Chromium chiefly because it means I don't have to mess with flashplugin directly, but high-DPI on Chrome/ium is currently only partially supported on Linux. It should be in permanently by M35 (see here). With DPI set to 227, all other programs that I tried seemed to display fairly well, with the occasional exception of icons in Thunar and such — slightly undersized but overall quite functional. (I think this may just depend on the icon set, however.) Secondly, the external audio and that weird little red light in the headphone port had some issues — both were easily fixable via a patch, but I'd like to have these features in the stable kernel if I'm going to be using Linux full-time.

My only other concern would be the webcam; I use it exceedingly rarely, so its lack of functioning wouldn't be particularly significant to me, but I would like to know whether any progress has been made in terms of finding/producing drivers for it.

For people with the Macbook Pro 11,3, what is the status of switching between the two cards? How easy is it?

My understanding is that Apple's graphics switching is a bit nonstandard and thus somewhat more difficult to deal with, but I think some people have, at the very least, been able to choose a card a boot. I know of graphics switching while running on older MPB 15" models, but it's difficult for me to find info on it for the rMPB11,3 at the moment.

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2014-02-12 23:41:01)

regulament

Member

Registered: 2014-02-15

Posts: 67

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

New patch for NCQ posted in https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60731.

Can anybody confirm if it fixes the problem?

Also, what fstab optimizations for SSD do you use?

Any other pointers for somebody waiting for his 11,2 rMBP? ( tricks, reading material, etc)

Last edited by regulament (2014-02-15 15:39:07)

fkpwolf

Member

Registered: 2014-02-16

Posts: 7

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

For bluetooth, everyting works fine after you run

systemctl start bluetooth

If you didn't want to re-pairing bluetooth when dual boot between osx and linux, try this script. But the script has issue. Now the linkkeys should be put at /var/lib/bluetooth/usb-bt-mac/bt-mouse-mac/info rather than /var/lib/bluetooth/usb-bt-mac/linkkeys.

Last edited by fkpwolf (2014-02-16 01:12:46)

hrod

Member

Registered: 2013-10-24

Posts: 57

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

for 3.13.4-1-ARCH
- nomodeset is no longer needed (tested with MacBookPro11,1)
- nomodeset will break vaapi if left on (tested with MacBookPro11,1)

fkpwolf

Member

Registered: 2014-02-16

Posts: 7

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

how to make wifi connect to 5G singal?  I use "wifi-menu" and can't find my 5G ssid.

It works on os x.

hrod

Member

Registered: 2013-10-24

Posts: 57

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

edit

5ghz n does work for me, i use broadcom-wl on my mbp13,2

Last edited by hrod (2014-02-27 23:53:52)

hephooey

Member

Registered: 2014-01-23

Posts: 2

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

I have been using 5G 802.11n all the time at work and home. Works great without any problem. Never had the chance to try 802.11ac though.

mathew

Member

Registered: 2013-07-09

Posts: 16

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

I haven't been able to connect my bluetooth mouse, trackpad or keyboard

below are the details for my trackpad:
bluetoothctl seems to pair, then a moment later disconnects:

#systemctl start bluetooth
#systemctl enable bluetooth
#bluetoothctl

[bluetooth]# power on
Changing power on succeeded

[bluetooth]# trust 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX   
Changing 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX trust succeeded

[bluetooth]# pairable on
Changing pairable on succeeded

[bluetooth]# pair 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Attempting to pair with 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
[CHG] Device 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Paired: yes
Pairing successful
[CHG] Device 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Connected: yes
[CHG] Device 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Paired: no
[CHG] Device 7C:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Connected: no

output from hcidup says that the connection was terminated by Local Host

hcidump -at

2014-02-27 08:53:26.933620 > HCI Event: Command Status (0x0f) plen 4
    Create Connection (0x01|0x0005) status 0x00 ncmd 1
2014-02-27 08:53:29.875621 > HCI Event: Connect Complete (0x03) plen 11
    status 0x00 handle 12 bdaddr 7C:C3:A1:4E:13:8F type ACL encrypt 0x00
2014-02-27 08:53:29.876611 > HCI Event: Command Status (0x0f) plen 4
    Read Remote Supported Features (0x01|0x001b) status 0x00 ncmd 1
2014-02-27 08:53:29.877628 > HCI Event: Read Remote Supported Features (0x0b) plen 11
    status 0x00 handle 12
    Features: 0xbd 0x02 0x04 0x38 0x08 0x00 0x00 0x00
2014-02-27 08:53:29.878623 > HCI Event: Command Status (0x0f) plen 4
    Remote Name Request (0x01|0x0019) status 0x00 ncmd 1
2014-02-27 08:53:29.919619 > HCI Event: Remote Name Req Complete (0x07) plen 255
    status 0x00 bdaddr 7C:C3:A1:4E:13:8F name 'mathew's trackpad'
2014-02-27 08:53:31.885617 > HCI Event: Command Status (0x0f) plen 4
    Disconnect (0x01|0x0006) status 0x00 ncmd 1
2014-02-27 08:53:31.977622 > HCI Event: Disconn Complete (0x05) plen 4
    status 0x00 handle 12 reason 0x16
    Reason: Connection Terminated by Local Host

anybody got this figured out?

thanks Mat

Last edited by mathew (2014-02-26 22:16:34)

fkpwolf

Member

Registered: 2014-02-16

Posts: 7

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

@Mat, I didn't use command line. I directly use Gnome bluetooth GUI and it works well.

Mouse: Logitech M558.

regulament

Member

Registered: 2014-02-15

Posts: 67

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

This might be a stupid question, but I can't find an answer. I apologize if the answer is starring me in the face.

I am trying to install Arch on my new rMBP 11,2. I can't get the wireless to work.

When I try to install broadcom-wl-dkms I get an error that dkms is a dependency that is missing. And when I try to install broadcom-wl I get that linux is an unmet dependency.

What am I doing wrong?