[HN Gopher] AirPlay and Touch Bar = Network Disaster
___________________________________________________________________
AirPlay and Touch Bar = Network Disaster
Author : davidbarker
Score : 323 points
Date : 2022-06-11 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mnpn.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mnpn.github.io)
| miked85 wrote:
| Touch Bar was an absolute failure on every level, thankfully
| Apple backtracked on it.
| gamache wrote:
| They did, and then they didn't. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-
| mac/macbook-pro/13-inch
| jen729w wrote:
| I think they're just selling out that hardware because they
| made a quantity of the cases and Tim insists on running them
| out.
|
| I'd be stunned if any new Touch Bars had been manufactured in
| the last 18 months.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I always thought it was quite nice to have what's effectively
| an Elgato Stream Deck
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31528895) built into my
| keyboard. It was certainly much better than fixed icons, which
| are in turn far more discoverable than numbered mystery keys.
|
| Apple's only real mistake was not keeping ESC a fixed hard key.
| andrewnicolalde wrote:
| > Apple's only real mistake was not keeping ESC a fixed hard
| key.
|
| They've added that back for a few years now, but I agree. I
| used to own one of the 2016 MBPs with a Touch Bar and the
| lack of a physical escape key drove me insane. Even though I
| sold that laptop, I had actual while-asleep nightmares about
| the horrifically bad keyboard for a while too.
| leoff wrote:
| I actually found it nice when using the debugger in VScode.
| Having the buttons for play/pause, skip line, etc make life
| easier.
| makecheck wrote:
| This is also one of the many cases of Apple not following their
| own guidelines. They suggested that Touch Bar items should act
| statically like keyboard keys and _not_ be used to display
| status, etc. (In reality, plenty were abused for that, I guess
| the allure of a dynamic colorful display was too great.)
|
| So in this case, _all they had to do was make it key-like_ and it
| wouldn't have had any of the features that could trigger this
| problem.
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| Apple no longer has the hunger to get things right. It's sad as
| I've enjoyed the ride since 1995 but without Steve and Jony,
| and without having a "early acceptance stage" leaders like, but
| instead having a "late acceptance stage" leader (Tim the
| accountant), this is par for the corporate lifecycle - nothing
| lasts forever and Apple is now just as bureaucratic as IBM,
| Sperry, DEC, etc. The key thing about bureaucracies that reach
| this point is they become more interested in preserve
| bureaucratic power and privilege than focusing on customer
| mission. It's been repeated so many times you'd think someone
| would finally figure out and implement the formula to prevent
| it, but not ever Apple has.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Apple: Completely resets bar for computing efficiency, has PC
| industry scrambling.
|
| HN: "Apple no longer has the hunger to get things right."
| [deleted]
| randyrand wrote:
| That's pretty embarrassing. Perf teams at apple play second
| fiddle to any "Manager" with "A vision". This is the result.
| bigdict wrote:
| > After having desperately achieved seemingly nothing over far
| too many hours of troubleshooting and feeling out of reasonable
| options, I decided to [...] just randomly start killing [...]
| HideousKojima wrote:
| "I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be
| unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable
| things."
|
| - Marvin Heemeyer, shortly before making an armor plated
| bulldozer and going on a rampage
| rubatuga wrote:
| You would be mistaken if you thought switching to ethernet would
| fix everything in macOS. There are three options for USB Ethernet
| chipsets that are supported in macOS without drivers: RTL8153,
| AX88178, AX88172A (not B or C). When using a RTL8153, I've
| experienced extremely high CPU usage (it's a shitty user-mode
| driver), and I've had the adapter drop out after transferring
| >20GB of files over it. I ended up buying the AX88178 and
| AX88172A adapters which are supported by the kernel. Based on my
| limited testing, only the AX88172A chipset is stable enough for
| 24/7/365 connectivity. Unfortunately the AX88172A is only
| 100Mbit, so consider it if you value stability > throughput
|
| The thread that sparked this rabbit hole:
|
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252387604
|
| TLDR: 2022 and we are still stuck with 100Mbit adapters on macOS
| fifteenforty wrote:
| Recently discussed on Hacker News was this article:
| https://khronokernel.github.io/macos/2021/11/22/PCIE-ETHERNE...
|
| I've had MUCH better results with the Belkin Thunderbolt 3
| Express Dock HD (INtel i210) than my OWC Thunderbolt 4 Dock
| (Realtek RTL8153).
| astrange wrote:
| Nothing crappy about user mode drivers. If you look at the new
| Ventura beta you'll find a lot more of them, like the wifi
| stack.
| aasasd wrote:
| As detailed in this post, RTL8153 with Mac also regularly hops
| down to 100 mbps and doesn't return back to 1 gbps:
| https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
|
| A pertinent question, however, is: how do you know what chips
| an adapter uses, before buying? I'm in utter dread regarding
| the prospect of buying a usb hub, since just like in the above
| post, they're black boxes to me which of course turn out to
| repackage the same Alibaba junk with 10x markup.
| jonathonlui wrote:
| After issues using various (cheap) USB 1Gbps ethernet adapters
| and an Intel MBP, I ended up getting one that uses a RTL8156B
| and seems ok. These are 2.5Gb adapters that use NCM driver so
| shouldn't cause high CPU.
|
| I don't have 2.5Gb network equipment but have tested with iperf
| between and get around like 900 Mbps and no high CPU, unlike
| noticeable CPU usage with the cheap 1Gbps USB adapters that use
| ECM drivers
|
| See also
| https://gist.github.com/MadLittleMods/3005bb13f7e7178e1eaa9f...
| legalcorrection wrote:
| Yeah, despite all the hype, MacOS is one of the least
| technically sophisticated operating systems in common use.
| Their main advantage over other systems is power management,
| and a large part of that is attributable at least as much to
| control over the hardware as to technical excellence.
|
| The fanboyism and reality distortion field is very strong. I
| remember when they came out with timer coalescing and were
| hyping it as a major accomplishment and selling point. Of
| course, Windows supported timer coalescing for years before
| MacOS, but that didn't stop Jobs from convincing a bunch of
| developers that this was a novel breakthrough.
| jen729w wrote:
| > Their main advantage over other systems
|
| is that some of us just really don't like Windows and really
| like our Macs.
|
| We're not fanboys. It's just a preference. Chocolate vs.
| vanilla, football vs. cricket, boys vs. girls.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't really care about my laptop being sophisticated as
| long as it doesn't crash.
| chefandy wrote:
| I think I need to write a plugin that searches the current HN
| page for terms in a configurable flame fodder string list and
| adds `opacity: 0.2` to the row. _Fanboy_ would definitely
| included by default.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| There are some usability affordances in macos that are quite
| nice.
|
| For example something as simple as copy and paste is
| command-c, everywhere.
|
| In Ubuntu? control-c or control-shift-c. It is pretty
| annoying being in autopilot and killing the command line
| program you are in because you reflexively hit control-c.
|
| Also, readline shortcuts work through out, so control-a will
| send you to the start of a line. Not with Ubuntu.
| stenius wrote:
| The Linux way is to copy text anywhere just by selecting it
| and paste it with the middle mouse button.
| pvtmert wrote:
| it is the "primary" buffer, not clipboard.
|
| macos also have it. that is part of application handling.
| iterm, alacritty, and bunch of other apps can behave the
| same. Including Xquartz.
| bscphil wrote:
| This is a common complaint, but this issue is that Mac
| users and Linux users basically talk past each other on
| this point. Just speaking for myself, I find that I
| accidentally kill a process in the _Mac_ terminal whenever
| I try to copy anything because I can 't keep Ctrl-C and
| Cmd-C separate (both Windows and Linux use Ctrl
| exclusively, which means you don't have to tell them
| apart).
|
| If you're going to use Ctrl for shortcuts, you necessarily
| run into the issue needing a separate shortcut for copy in
| the terminal, because Ctrl-C has meant "send an interrupt
| signal to the process" since at least the 60s.
|
| Fortunately, for people sufficiently annoyed by this, most
| Linux terminals do allow you to change keyboard shortcuts
| arbitrarily, so you _can_ have unified copy shortcuts if
| you want. For a variety of reasons, I find this more
| trouble than it is worth and prefer sticking with the
| default.
| duxup wrote:
| > main advantage over other systems is power management
|
| I can understand that appeal.
|
| In the last 5 years I don't think I've had a windows laptop
| sleep or hibernate as I would expect, not randomly wake up in
| the middle of the night, in my bag, and just sit there fans
| at full speed...
|
| I'm tired enough of it to try a Mac...
| viraptor wrote:
| Same happens occasionally on my mac. And even if it doesn't
| stay on, it wakes up often enough to drain >50% overnight.
| My only machine to reliably sleep, wake up and power manage
| is Linux.
| [deleted]
| beagle3 wrote:
| Did you turn off "powernap" in settings? By default, a
| mac would wake up to download mail, run backups, and do
| other things in the middle of the night.
| viraptor wrote:
| Yeah, that's with powernap off.
| stevage wrote:
| I had a problem like that a lot with my MBP. Except it
| would do it while fully closed, in an insulated sleeve,
| inside my backpack. Roasting hot. Just awful.
| sofixa wrote:
| My new M1 MBP runs out of battery over a 3 day weekend of
| sleeping without charge ( the only way to make it sleep is
| to disconnect the charger, otherwise it refuses, probably
| due to the external screen connected).
| fortran77 wrote:
| I bought a high-end lenovo and the fans would turn on and
| the machine would get hot when it was in my bag.
|
| But it's not Microsoft's fault. The Surface Book I replaced
| it with works perfectly.
| kibwen wrote:
| I've got bad news, I've been extremely unimpressed with my
| Macbook's so-called smart sleep. Literally the first day I
| brought it into work I went to go take it out of my bag
| only to find that it was too hot to touch. Neither
| selecting "Sleep" nor closing the lid for 30 minutes had
| convinced the fickle OS to enter a low-power state.
|
| You know what Windows and Linux offer that Mac doesn't? A
| friggin' Hibernate option. Please, just let me have a
| button to power off my computer while persisting its state
| to disk. No, I don't want to have to shut down my computer
| every time I put it in a bag, that's completely ridiculous
| and an utter waste of my time having to reset all my tmux
| panes, vim windows, shell histories... what a UX nightmare.
| They've made a laptop that's a terror to actually take
| anywhere with you. Even when the "smart" sleep does
| (sometimes) finally decide to kick in, it invariably costs
| 20% of the battery.
|
| When people say that Macs have good power management, what
| they mean is that Safari is optimized for power consumption
| relative to Chrome and Firefox.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Macs have a hibernate option that completely powers the
| machine off after saving the contents of RAM to disk, but
| you need to set it via the terminal. Find the current
| hibernate mode via: pmset -g
|
| The default is hibernatemode 3 (RAM stays powered on
| until battery drops below some threshold, so that wake
| from sleep is very fast).
|
| The version of "hibernate" you want is mode 25: sudo
| pmset -a hibernate mode 25
|
| If you routinely keep your computer 'hibernating' for
| days at a time without plugging it in, you'll save some
| battery life this way at the expense of a slower wake-up
| time because RAM is not kept powered.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pmset for more details.
|
| > _Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to
| Chrome and Firefox_
|
| This is a very big difference. Chrome has zero respect
| for battery life.
| astrange wrote:
| Report a bug in Feedback Assistant.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You have either a hardware issue (lid sensor), an SMC
| issue (try an SMC reset, it's painless), or software you
| run is preventing sleep (which you can find by looking in
| the Energy tab of Activity Monitor. Google search for "os
| x sleep prevented") or you have some hardware plugged in
| (external displays and keyboards can sometimes prevent a
| lid-shut from triggering sleep; I forget the 'rules'
| around this.)
|
| Also, you can set the power manager's hibernatemode to
| your liking (Google search "os x hibernate mode") but
| there usually no reason to adjust the default (sleep for
| 3-4 hours, then suspend to disk) given how fast storage
| is in macs these days.
|
| Macs have been famous for decades for having the best
| sleep/hibernate functions in the industry and when yours
| didn't work properly maybe you should have investigated?
| Or at least not be whinging about Apple over it?
| duxup wrote:
| > maybe you should have investigated?
|
| I did / have on multiple devices.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Maybe let's wait until Windows allows scrolling of a non-
| active window before saying this.
|
| Or moving/changing the name of a file while it's open.
|
| Or having a slash in a file name.
| tshell wrote:
| Pretty sure that you can scroll non-active windows. Just
| tried it to be sure.
| bgroins wrote:
| Yes, works fine on Windows 11
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Windows 10, too. I _think_ it didn 't work in Windows 7,
| though. If my memory is correct, that means that it's not
| a super-new feature, but still relatively newish.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Windows 10 (at least the first version) came out seven
| years ago. It's not even new anymore, it's well on its
| way to just becoming... old?
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Wow, didn't realize thank you!
|
| I still think being able to move/change the name of a
| file while it's open is impressive
| smoldesu wrote:
| MacOS has really strong userland software, stuff like the
| Quartz compositor is genuinely quite hard to beat (neither
| Windows, x11 nor Wayland can live up to it's featureset and
| stability).
|
| However, MacOS as an operating system really is a mess.
| Especially the XNU kernel, which is _still_ an unbelievable
| amalgamation of disagreeing technology. Remember, MacOS is
| not _natively_ a UNIX-certified machine: all of it 's UNIX
| compatibility comes from a BSD-based compatibility layer
| that hasn't really been changed since the late-90s. Oh, and
| the coreutils? Notoriously garbage. MacOS ships with all
| sorts of outdated, downgraded, vulnerable and otherwise
| broken shell utilities. pico instead of nano, zsh instead
| of modern bash... hell, even something as simple as
| installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory
| reboot.
|
| I'll give MacOS credit where credit is due (Apple had good
| design philosophies in the 2010s), but the actual
| _operating system_ (see: functional network of software
| components) is truly awful, arguably just as bad as Windows
| if not worse. Just about it 's only redeeming qualities are
| the things that Apple didn't make (like pf and process
| management. If you _forced_ me to pick something that I
| found impressive, I 'd have to choose Grand Central
| Dispatch, but even _that_ isn 't terribly impressive. It's
| mostly as if some Apple engineers decided to iterate on the
| fairly lackluster Linux process management. It would have
| been a miracle if they managed to make something _worse_.
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| > pico instead of nano, zsh instead of modern bash
|
| nano is a GNU clone of pico. pico is OG nano.
|
| bash was replaced with zsh because Apple purged their OS
| of all GPL3 software (including nano).
| tjr225 wrote:
| Switching to gnu coreutils is trivial on a Mac.
| astrange wrote:
| You seem to be under the impression that because you
| haven't looked up if anything's changed since 2010,
| nothing has.
|
| The command line tools (except GPL ones) do get updated
| from FreeBSD and there's nothing "non-native" about how
| the kernel works.
| jolux wrote:
| > even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb
| installation with a mandatory reboot
|
| Mandatory reboot? I've never experienced that with the
| Xcode command line tools.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I could be wrong, last time I seriously used MacOS (for
| both personal/work uses) was Mojave. Either way, it's
| installing a _lot_ more than just the 30mb of the git
| binary, so I learned my lesson and just installed all the
| GNU stuff with my package manager. Annoying to be sure,
| but somehow better than dealing with Apple 's default way
| of handling it.
| Geezus-42 wrote:
| As a Linux user, why would you want a slash in a filename?
| dmd wrote:
| Because a very large fraction of people - greater than
| 90% - use forward slashes in dates, and people like
| putting dates in filenames.
|
| Nearly all of those people have never seen a filename
| path written out in text, and wouldn't care if they did.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Because a very large fraction of people - greater than
| 90% - use forward slashes in dates
|
| Citation needed
| jen729w wrote:
| A forward slash is a very common separator character.
|
| I did this myself the other week. Mac user. Folder was
| called 'Lessons/episodes' from memory. I only noticed it
| was weird when my Synology didn't display the character.
| Renamed to 'Lessons & episodes'.
| kergonath wrote:
| > MacOS is one of the least technically sophisticated
| operating systems in common use
|
| Having a driver for a given Ethernet controller is hardly a
| good proxy for sophistication...
| msbarnett wrote:
| > TLDR: 2022 and we are still stuck with 100Mbit adapters on
| macOS
|
| That's something of an exaggeration. There are a bunch of macs
| that ship with perfectly good 10GigE ethernet adapters - my Mac
| Pro's ethernet has been rock solid since the day I bought it.
|
| It seems like you're more specifically concerned with the
| quality of support for USB<->ethernet adapters, which is always
| going to be kind of a crapshoot if you're looking for 24/7/365
| connection stability (on a laptop?)
| coder543 wrote:
| I'm literally using a 2.5Gbps RTL8156(B?) without adding any
| drivers on an M1 MBA as I type this, and I've never had _any_
| stability issues with it. I also have an RTL8153 that works
| flawlessly too.
|
| I transfer tons of large videos and RAW photos imported from my
| mirrorless camera over these network adapters to a NAS.
|
| I've been using these for quite a few months.
|
| I'm not stuck on 100Mbps adapters, but maybe you are.
|
| Usermode vs kernelmode seems irrelevant... if anything, I want
| the benefits of usermode isolation for _more_ things.
| Monolithic kernels aren 't great for security.
| rubatuga wrote:
| I will have to try these RTL8156 adapters eventually, but
| according to the resource from the comment below, they don't
| support AirPlay 2. Not exactly a rock-solid chipset.
|
| https://gist.github.com/MadLittleMods/3005bb13f7e7178e1eaa9f.
| ..
| coder543 wrote:
| Could you please explain how this could possibly be a
| _chipset problem?_ The chipset sends and receives packets
| without problem. It 's a pretty rock solid chipset in my
| testing. This sounds like an "Apple didn't implement
| AirPlay support in the driver" problem, which sounds crazy,
| because it is kind of crazy. AirPlay should just be packets
| on the network like anything else.
|
| You also seem to be digging pretty hard to try and justify
| your original position, which was very extreme. No, Apple
| computers are not stuck at 100Mbps. This would be a _very
| big_ deal, as tons of creative workflows rely on having
| multi-gigabit network connections. The outcry would be
| enormous.
|
| I had never tried to use AirPlay 2 from my laptop over
| ethernet (I can probably count on one hand the number of
| times that I've used AirPlay from my laptop at all), but I
| tested, and it is true that the Music app won't connect to
| AirPlay devices over this Ethernet adapter (but it will
| over the 8153). I also have no problem redirecting the
| system sound to an AirPlay device, even over this Ethernet
| adapter, as that comment says.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Why is 2.5Gbps (copper) Ethernet even a thing? 10Gbps
| (copper) Ethernet was standardized first, and available
| first. Is this just another case of planned obsolescence?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
| coder543 wrote:
| Why did you feel the need to leave this comment? How could
| 2.5Gbps _ever_ be construed as planned obsolescence? 10Gbps
| ethernet stayed too expensive for too long, so everyone was
| stuck on 1Gbps for like a decade. Eventually, manufacturers
| decided 2.5Gbps (and 5Gbps) would be more cost effective
| options for the time being, and would allow increases in
| network performance beyond 1Gbps.
|
| It's a completely positive outcome for end users, since
| they now have more options, and pretty much all 10Gbps
| ethernet ports are compatible with "multi-gig" 2.5Gbps and
| 5Gbps connections as well.
| jolux wrote:
| I use the Belkin one that Apple sells and have never had much
| issue with it. What chipset is that?
| mrpippy wrote:
| A bulky but reliable option is the $29 Apple "Thunderbolt (1)
| to Gigabit Ethernet adapter" connected to the $49 Apple
| "Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter". It's gigabit
| and PCIe using the rock-solid BCM570x chip.
| JonathonW wrote:
| Yes, this adapter works well in my experience, too. A little
| clunky since Apple still hasn't updated it to native
| Thunderbolt 3 so it needs an adapter, but that doesn't really
| impact how it functions.
|
| I've also had good luck with whatever Caldigit uses in their
| Thunderbolt Mini Docks (not at my desk to check and see what
| chipset's in mine).
| krull10 wrote:
| This works great for me too, and is what I use for multiple
| laptops. Ridiculous there isn't something better though at
| this point...
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| So you need two daisy-chained dongles to get a reliable
| Ethernet port on your $2000 laptop? Take my money please!
| snemvalts wrote:
| Should it be the other way around? 95% of people who
| haven't thought about ethernet cables for the past year
| should have a bulky port on the laptop that eats into PCB +
| battery space
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| The assertion that something as basic as a functioning
| Ethernet port in a "professional" laptop - the high end
| model of which exceeds $6000 - constitutes a waste of PCB
| and battery space, is utter delusion. At that price they
| should throw in a Saks Fifth Avenue bag to carry your
| dongles.
| rollcat wrote:
| The same company has been selling a tiny 10Ge machine
| that can saturate this plus both TB ports without
| breaking a sweat. You'd think they could make a single
| dongle with 1/10th of that capacity.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Aren't closed ecosystems wonderful?
|
| I was elated to hear that Apple is being forced to abandon
| Lightning on iPhones, and I'm normally not much for
| government meddling.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Reliable, meh. I've had two die on me. One lasted a few years
| of VERY light usage, the other died barely a year or two in.
| Also almost no usage.
|
| In both cases it simply stopped appearing on the bus, but was
| clearly "running" to some degree - it would get warm to the
| touch, just as they normally do.
|
| I've also found that the Thunderbolt connector's lack of a
| "click" engagement to be a serious issue for storage,
| network, and even display - every Mac I've seen it in use,
| the connection has been flaky. It really fucking sucks to
| whip out the thunderbolt adapter and plug into ethernet for
| "reliability", set up a transfer of a ton of data, and half-
| way though shift the machine slightly aaaaaaaaand then the
| ethernet adapter disappears and your transfer is fucked.
|
| Happy to see them drop that idiotic connector for USB-C, as
| at least that has _some_ sort of physical retention mechanism
| other than "hopes and dreams" (ie: rely on proper clearance
| tolerances between different vendors, on surfaces that will
| wear with use.)
| brigade wrote:
| Is AX88178 compatible without 3rd party drivers? Plugable says
| no, and IIRC I needed a driver that never got updated for my
| gigabit ASIX, but it might been a slightly different chipset...
|
| At any rate, a big issue is that for USB, macOS only has
| generic ECM and NCM drivers. ECM as a protocol sucks and was
| barely suitable for 100Mbit, let alone gigabit, plus Realtek's
| implementation of ECM is quirky to say the least.
|
| RTL8156 implements an NCM endpoint, so that's probably the best
| USB option these days.
| esaym wrote:
| Similar issue on linux:
| https://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2016/05/16/networkmanager-and-w...
|
| Just ran into it using a fresh Debian install on a Lenovo T14. My
| old laptop used an intel wifi card. Normally that is all I ever
| use, but figured I'd leave the stock one (Qualcomm 6855 (NFA765))
| in and try it out. Worked fine except random lags every minute
| with a correlated increase in pings times. Fix was to lock
| Network Manager to a single AP so it won't background scan
| (something that apparently intel cards are better at doing).
|
| Googling shows this to be an issue going back 15+ years.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Search for "intel 7260 drops" says 162k+ results on Google.
|
| No matter the drivers (though for me the stock Windows ones
| worked best), AP, whatever.
|
| It just drops the connection once in a while.
| herpderperator wrote:
| I ran into this the other day and did a video about it - not the
| best quality video but shows it happening in realtime with
| analysis and commentary:
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/hra2uxx66kf7z0j/PXL_20220609_21480...
|
| The cause in this case was AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link.)
| Holding the Option key while clicking the Wi-Fi icon and clicking
| "Enable Wi-Fi Logging" and then checking /var/log/wifi.log will
| show AWDL scans starting and ending randomly, and when the scan
| is active it causes latency spikes every 1s like clockwork.
| Unrelated to AWDL, but if a process is requesting a Wi-Fi network
| scan (different from an AWDL scan), /var/log/wifi.log will also
| tell you the name of the process, such as "locationd" when the
| Location Service needs your location. (Tangential, but the
| locationd process rarely causes these latency spikes for me - on
| a default macOS install it very rarely requests scans in my
| experience, backed by my analysis of the log.)
|
| AWDL has to be used for things like AirDrop, so it's expected to
| have this latency increase while you have the AirDrop window open
| scanning for nearby devices / sending files to other devices.
| There are other uses of AWDL (AirPlay, Auto Unlock, Universal
| Clipboard at the very least)[0], but I don't know what was
| triggering it so actively in my case... and why it wasn't
| happening on my M1 Air. It also wasn't always happening in the
| background like this, it just started that day.
|
| The "fix" was to disable the awdl0 interface, but that may also
| cause AirDrop/AirPlay and related services to not function (I did
| not test.) It's easy to re-enable it though.
|
| To disable: ifconfig awdl0 down
|
| To enable: ifconfig awdl0 up
|
| Upon disabling, the latency spikes go away permanently.
|
| [0] https://owlink.org/wiki/
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's a ton of things on macOS that just randomly start
| network scans and just destroy Wi-Fi performance. I helped
| Martin find on in the post, but personally I dealt with another
| one for several months on my own computer and eventually just
| gave up. I just went ahead and rewired my house with MoCA and
| now I get the speeds I was looking for, continuously and
| without the hassle, whenever I'm at my desk. I'd recommend
| everyone else to do the same, honestly. (Unless you're at
| Apple. Then you should not do this and instead send in Radars
| when your network performance drops.)
| jrowley wrote:
| I wasn't familiar with MoCA. Seems like a lot of the
| advantages of power line networking, but higher throughput /
| reliability I imagine. Thanks for the tip!
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yep, MoCA gives me a gigabit+ backbone which is definitely
| more than my ISP gives me :)
| giantrobot wrote:
| > (Unless you're at Apple. Then you should not do this and
| instead send in Radars when your network performance drops.)
|
| Which unfortunately will get moved to NMOS/Future with a P6
| priority and ignored forever. At best it'll get sent back to
| you "for more details". If you play the game an attach logs
| and investigation it'll get filed make into a black hole
| milestone or closed as a duplicate. There's a cabal that
| seems to only want new features and never tackle existing
| bugs in the OS.
| exikyut wrote:
| > _There 's a cabal that seems to only want new features
| and never tackle existing bugs in the OS._
|
| Huh. That sounds strikingly similar to the culture
| breakdowns I've observed be associated with Google - the
| whole focus on newness and landing features in the name of
| solving hard problems, as opposed to maintaining stuff.
| Apparently the feedback/peer review/bonus system is
| completely broken.
|
| ...Maybe this sort of scaling problem is a "$T+ market cap"
| thing that we've just never had to figure out before?
| throwawayFanta wrote:
| It depends on if that aligns with your management's
| views. In aws, ive seen teams spend some effort on
| keeping their backlog low (but no zero) since if it
| balloons out of control you know you're gonna get called
| out on it.
|
| i recall a team that had all its feature releases struck
| down for the coming year so they would work through their
| backlog.
|
| Opinions are my own, bla bla bla
| giantrobot wrote:
| With Apple there's a pathological need to release new
| devices and OSes on a yearly cadence. Landing a new
| feature rewards middle management and the top quintile of
| ICs with cash/stock bonuses and reflects on their end of
| year review. Fixing bugs does not get those rewards so
| there's little incentive to fix old bugs that 1) don't
| prevent a new feature's implementation or 2) aren't
| called out in a security release.
|
| > ...Maybe this sort of scaling problem is a "$T+ market
| cap" thing that we've just never had to figure out
| before?
|
| I don't know in all honesty. I'm sure part of it has
| something to do with the fact these companies have
| _billions_ of customers. It 's a mind numbing number of
| users. Even a single percentile change in the number of
| customers or revenue per customer makes for huge revenue
| differences. So given a finite amount of developer
| effort, a new feature which is likely to increase revenue
| is incentivized over a stupid AirPlay bug that isn't
| likely to increase revenue.
| zrail wrote:
| For anyone else reading this, the one tip I have is to
| reorder your network interfaces to put your wired interface
| first. There's a three-dot menu somewhere in the network
| panel to do so. macOS will use the first active interface and
| ignore the rest.
| nier wrote:
| Technically macOS will use all active services but only
| communicate with the topmost interface's router address to
| leave the local network unless you have a VPN connection
| that's set to send all traffic.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Do you know if the grade/power of wireless router makes any
| difference for this?
|
| I've not had too much issue with wifi performance with
| several Apple devices on the network, but my wireless router
| is also a fairly high end consumer model and probably not at
| all representative of the average.
|
| I do still intend to figure out some sort of hardwiring
| solution (maybe MoCA, but man those boxes are expensive) but
| the performance of wifi in the interim has been good enough
| for it to not be pressing.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I have a pair of Google Wi-Fis that aren't particularly
| powerful, for reference.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Intel and Qualcomm wifi chipsets have some secret sauce in
| them that make them better than Realtek, Ralink, etc. I
| haven't personally tested Broadcom, so I don't know where
| they fall. In low congestion environments it doesn't
| matter, but in high congestion environments they work
| better. Basically, Intel and Qualcomm chipsets are better
| able to receive frames successfully even when there's a
| collision.
|
| Transmit power doesn't matter in that more isn't
| necessarily better. Same for antenna gain. They are
| variables you can change if you know you have a specific
| problem that would be solved by it. That's hardly ever the
| case, though.
|
| Why not just hardwire CAT6? MoCA is nice if you already
| have the coax, but otherwise it seems silly to put in.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > Why not just hardwire CAT6? MoCA is nice if you already
| have the coax, but otherwise it seems silly to put in.
|
| My house is already wired with unused coax. I'd prefer
| CAT6, but don't know how involved doing that would be. I
| need to figure out if there's wiring conduits in the
| walls, for example.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Omg! This may very well solve my ping issues in webliero!
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Update: yes, after `ifconfig awdl0 down` my ping was no
| longer shooting up to ~200ms randomly, and I was able to play
| a 2-hour deathmatch with my wife without a single lag!
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| This is wild! Duet Display, an app built by ex-Apple engineers
| has a curious toggle in the settings menu to turn off Airdrop,
| Handoff etc as well since it apparently screws up the remote
| desktop experience.
|
| Apple also has introduced a beta feature called "Universal
| control" which allows you to use your keyboard and other
| peripherals across all devices nearby (ipads, other macs etc) I
| wonder how much of a performance tax these other features levy
| and if Apple tests the regression explicitly.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| On a tangential note, I'm a fan of the support cycle of macOS. I
| consistently stay a major version or so behind to avoid the
| various issues of the major upgrades while getting security
| updates, but I'm also happy they are able to put out major
| upgrades yearly (which I also get each year -- just a year
| behind).
|
| I don't know if this will be consistent, but I was also able to
| do this with iOS, staying on iOS 14 for a long time while
| receiving security updates. Hadn't noticed that ability in
| previous major versions of iOS and I'm not sure if it was due to
| device support of iOS 15. I hope that continues.
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| > I'm a fan of the support cycle of macOS.
|
| Their _what_? They _have no support cycle_. Their cycle is "we
| support it until we don't". It's 2022 and it's an absolute
| joke. Windows, Linux, BSD -- basically everyone -- has
| published support dates aligned with all OS releases. For
| example from official documentation you would know that Windows
| 10 LTSC 2021 is supported until 1/12/2027[1] and FreeBSD 13 is
| supported until 1/31/2026. Apple is the only one that refuses
| to publish any dates. The mystique bit is getting old. The
| Jobs-era magic is gone. macOS will continue to be a toy until
| they take support seriously and that includes not breaking
| anything and everything with reckless abandon in every new OS
| release. No one who does IT with even a modicum of
| professionalism is okay with looking at Apple's latest critical
| security updates and suddenly finding out that N OS version was
| no longer included in the patch set. But that would take the
| mystery aspect out of it!
|
| [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/lifecycle/products/windows-...
| Hackbraten wrote:
| > Apple is the only one that refuses to publish any dates.
|
| I don't mean to defend Apple here, but one reason Apple may
| do that is because they essentially consider themselves a
| hardware company, and so the things they support are device
| models, not software versions.
|
| For me, a good-enough approximation has been that you can
| consider a macOS version [major dot minor] to be supported
| until the day [major dot (minor+1)] comes out, or the day
| [(major+3) dot 1] comes out, whichever happens earlier [1].
|
| (Full disclosure: I'm the author of that merge request.)
|
| [1]: https://github.com/CISOfy/lynis/pull/1006
| [deleted]
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| > so the things they support are device models, not
| software versions.
|
| Except they don't publish any support dates with hardware
| either. Devices support the latest macOS/iOS/etc until they
| don't. At which point devices become not only obsolete
| overnight, but are vulnerable as well because the OS
| suddenly becomes unsupported due to Apple's insistence of
| bundling feature updates with security updates. Remember,
| this caused a lot of controversy when Windows 10 moved to
| this model, but Microsoft had the foresight to publish
| support dates for when they would stop releasing security
| patches for the previous release. Unfortunately, Apple's
| cult-like fan base frequently treats them with kid gloves
| in this regard, and insists we should just be happy we got
| free updates until now and we're not running abandoned-
| support-by-design Android.
|
| I don't expect a device to be supported forever nor do I
| expect free feature upgrades. All I'm asking for is a
| published date that "X device or OS will receive security
| patches until Y date". That's it. It's a relatively simple
| request that is pretty much standard in the rest of the IT
| world so you can plan adequately.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| I fully agree.
| [deleted]
| jiripospisil wrote:
| > while getting security updates
|
| Apple releases security updates properly for the current
| (latest) version only. Older releases get security updates that
| sometimes don't fix all of the known vulnerabilities.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5KUvgXHOFU
|
| https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/apple-neglects-to-p...
| Hackbraten wrote:
| My problem with that is, Apple doesn't offer upgrade paths from
| n-2 to n-1.
|
| You need to either remember to upgrade before the next major
| release comes out, or stockpile the installation image before
| it's gone from System Preferences.
|
| Fail to do either, and you're effectively forced to upgrade to
| the just-released version against your will.
| pvtmert wrote:
| They do, literally first hit of "older macos download" is
| this:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683
|
| For latest 4 versions, you need to use appstore. Before those
| 4, you can directly download ISO/DMG from a "S3" bucket...
| aasasd wrote:
| Is there any sort of lower-level logging and monitoring in MacOS
| that would help with diagnosing such issues? I'm spending some
| time on a wonky wifi network, and so far it seems that it's high
| time to finally read about networking internals starting with ip
| and wifi protos, before I can even theorize about where to look
| and what to fiddle.
|
| In related news, behavior of bluetooth headphones likewise seems
| mysterious and impenetrable, especially with Android.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't understand though how a "network scan" (I assume sending
| a broadcast packet and receiving a response) can raise ping time
| from 3 to 150 ms.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Apple is really big into custom proprietary WiFi protocols (see
| also: AirDrop). So while AirPlay was originally limited to the
| local network, it now also apparently works over WiFi direct -
| and presumably that requires some sort of WiFi scan, in turn
| requiring the radio to switch channels which causes latency to
| tank.
| bscphil wrote:
| This is a good question but I don't think any of the other four
| replies have understood it. Judging by the original article,
| this problem appears when AirPlay devices are _on the same
| network_ and _the same subnet_ as you. All that should be
| required to scan for devices on your network is sending a
| broadcast packet, as you have indicated.
|
| What others are claiming effectively amounts to saying that the
| Macbook needs to disconnect from your network, scan for _access
| points_ , and then reconnect to the network. Which would
| certainly cause latency issues, that much is true, but that's
| _surely_ not the kind of scanning that is actually being done
| here? Why would a scan for access points be necessary?
| saltcured wrote:
| I am not a Mac user, but as I understand the topic, it is
| using the radio for location and proximal device detection.
| It is not a LAN feature that would work via broadcast in the
| current WiFi LAN nor would it work if using only a wired LAN
| with WiFi disabled.
|
| It puts the radio into a different mode to listen for nearby
| devices, whether to talk to them or to use them as landmarks
| for location sensing. This requires scanning radio channels,
| not just continuing to listen to the channel where you expect
| to receive further packets from an associated access point.
| bscphil wrote:
| That certainly seems like a plausible thing that could be
| happening, but the specific claim of the article is that
| this is an issue with Airplay, which to my understanding
| involves devices that are connected to your router / access
| point, not free standing devices with their own access
| points that have to be scanned for.
|
| There might very well be latency issues involved with the
| WiFi radio scan modes on Macs, for all I know, but I don't
| think they could be related to this specific issue with
| AirPlay?
| pvtmert wrote:
| rule 1: medium "air" shared with everyone else rule 2: it can
| use wifi direct, eg: doesn't have to be in the same network
| rule 3: your wifi card may have single antenna for a given band
| (2.4 or 5 GHz). Such that, you can only transmit or receive.
| rule 4: interference causes packetloss (eg: 2 people pressing
| talk in a radio)
|
| given those rules and wifi 2.4 band having 14, 5GHz band having
| 190 or more channels. I would say having been able to send
| things back and fort is still pretty damn good :)
| pvtmert wrote:
| side note: each channel may have different width (20, 40 or
| 80mhz)
|
| frames may have other phsical properties that need to match.
| so, too many options and just a physical limitation...
| NavinF wrote:
| As weird as it sounds, $3000 machines still only come with one
| radio so it can only tune to one frequency at a time. Similar
| latency spikes happen when roaming between access points. WiFi
| is a mess and will be for the foreseeable future. Personally I
| just use a 10G ethernet card and some cheap optics.
| saltcured wrote:
| If you understand how TV used to be (before streaming), a
| network scan is more like you are trying to watch a program but
| your annoying brother has the remote and periodically cycles
| through all the channels to see if there is something more
| interesting to watch. He often does it during a commercial
| break but sometimes does not get back before the break ends and
| sometimes he just does it in the middle of a part of your
| program that he doesn't understand or thinks is boring.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A Wi-Fi network scan involves listening for beacons on all Wi-
| Fi channels which involves a frequency change. Thus during the
| operation the Wi-Fi card essentially leaves your current
| frequency (and stops being able to transmit/receive packets)
| and scans all the other ones.
| jorl17 wrote:
| I wonder if this is related...
|
| When I upgraded to Monterey (well, a beta, actually), I was met
| with a horrible bug that made me want to trash my laptop: my
| AirPods would randomly "cut out" for a couple of seconds for
| seemingly no reason. Sometimes it would take 5 minutes, sometimes
| 2 h. It was infuriating.
|
| I spent dozens of hours trying to figure it out. Disabling apps,
| enabling other apps, tracing logs, killing random applications,
| seeing if it was load-related, trying reboots. At one point I was
| half-convinced it only happened after coming back from
| hibernating (not suspending). I tried desperately to "fix" the
| bluetooth module, disable and re-enable handoff, delete internal
| settings, copy old bluetooth modules from older versions, working
| mostly tethered... Nothing seemed to fix it, until I found a
| message deep in the logs that led me to try to disable "AirPlay
| Receiver".
|
| Voila! It was instantly fixed. I documented my workaround here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/qjgqjx/i_think_i...
| and it seems it's spread a bit like wildfire through the
| internet. I should have put up a donation link :D
|
| What that journey taught me was that AirPlay, Wifi, Bluetooth and
| the like are serious messy beasts on macOS. I work with BLE
| sometimes while developing and I'm aware of how messy it is, but
| it seems that macOS has so many features that it makes it far
| worse.
|
| In any case, my workaround is still working and I occasionally
| still get people thanking me for finding it. I doubt they really
| know how much time I spent, and how insane I nearly went, just to
| find that (un)ticking a little box would solve all of my
| problems.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > AirPods would randomly "cut out" for a couple of seconds for
| seemingly no reason
|
| It is for this sort of reason that I prefer dumb analog devices
| such as headphones to "smart" devices with as lot of complexity
| built in. Also, they're cheaper.
| janeerie wrote:
| When I upgraded to Monterey, my AirPods started giving me robot
| voice on any call. It appears to be a conflict with my Logitech
| keyboard and mouse. I've switched to USB connection for those,
| but it's not an ideal solution.
| ketzo wrote:
| > how much time I spent, and how insane I nearly went, just to
| find that (un)ticking a little box would solve all of my
| problems.
|
| Ain't that the way.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| Apparently having location services enabled causes all manner of
| problems with Zoom calls over WiFi as well. Locations services
| invoke periodic WiFi scans like you get when you click the WiFi
| drop down.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, I recently disabled all location services on my M1 Mac
| mini after suffering over a year with constant wifi dropouts,
| not even poor latency but just no network for a few second
| every minute. Not sure who at Apple thinks this is an OK
| experience.
|
| Generally their network stack is a mess. Trying to bridge
| ethernet to wifi just fundamentally doesn't work. The
| forwarding is randomly reconfigured every time the machine
| wakes up. I think they aren't paying attention to system level
| functionality.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's funny, a lot of Apple's networking code is cribbed
| straight from the notoriously wonderful OpenBSD codebase. How
| did they manage to screw that up?
| pvtmert wrote:
| bridging uses physical layer afaik, which is why wifi +
| ethernet are not compatible with each other. especially when
| wifi is encrypted...
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Bridging is a layer 2 operation, and both WiFi and wired
| ethernet are identical in that regard (and bluetooth
| ethernet encapsulation). It does work, on other operating
| systems.
| sharno wrote:
| I have a non-Apple TV that supports AirPlay and sometimes when I
| try to get my iPhone to play something on it while the TV is
| disconnected (completely off) it causes my ASUS router to drop
| the WiFi signal completely for a few seconds.
|
| I have a feeling that the iPhone keeps searching the network and
| my router cannot keep up with the requests or something? Not sure
| but that's a theory I didn't get a chance to investigate
| antux wrote:
| This goes to show why Activity Monitor is such a great tool for
| troubleshooting and killing suspicious processes that hog
| resources.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| It's especially useful on the new M* macs. You can narrow down
| and see what apps or processes are using Rosetta.
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| Yet another reason why the Touch Bar is 100% Epic Fail!
| hoosieree wrote:
| I hit a touch bar function accidentally at least once or twice
| a day. It looks cool, but the functionality is garbage.
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