The Asahi Linux project has released the first conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers for Apple silicon Macs

[Spindel]

Summary

The Asahi Linux project is a collaborative effort aimed at bringing the Linux operating system to Macs that contain M1 or M2 chips. 

 

Quotes

Quote

Unlike Apple's proprietary drivers for the GPUs integrated into the M1- and M2-series SoCs, which do not conform to standard graphics APIs such as Vulkan, OpenGL, or OpenGL ES, the drivers released by the Asahi Linux team are in line with these official standards. This means that users running Linux on Apple silicon can expect more stable and predictable performance from graphics-intensive applications

 

My thoughts

I don’t have any deeper thoughts than finding the asahi projects work on AS interesting. And in the long run this is a good thing that others will also reap the benefit from

 

Sources

  https://www.macrumors.com/2023/08/23/macs-running-linux-receive-major-update/

[TempestCatto]

inb4 Apple cease and desists them. Hopefully not though, getting an OS to run natively on Apple silicon would be pretty baller.

[sounds]

It's nothing short of incredible how Alyssa Rosenzweig has reverse engineered this GPU driver. With full acknowledgement of the cool people like Dougall Johnson who suggested to Alyssa to try the 00 instruction, Alyssa and Asahi Lina are the two-individual team that pulled it off.

 

Apple Silicon without this GPU driver is a niche. Apple Silicon with a fully conformant, open GPU driver is almost unbelievable: it's good hardware and hackable drivers too.

[Dracarris]

11 hours ago, TempestCatto said:

inb4 Apple cease and desists them. Hopefully not though, getting an OS to run natively on Apple silicon would be pretty baller.

Nothing points into this direction with Apple even specifically making it easy for them to boot into their own OS.

 

Reading their blog post, this is nothing but great news and a really fabulous achievement of the open-source community. Hopefully this pushes general-purpose RISC computing further. And it's great for folks that for whatever reason don't like macOS but love the M1/2 Macbook HW platform.

[Paul Thexton]

On 8/24/2023 at 5:11 AM, sounds said:

It's nothing short of incredible how Alyssa Rosenzweig has reverse engineered this GPU driver. With full acknowledgement of the cool people like Dougall Johnson who suggested to Alyssa to try the 00 instruction, Alyssa and Asahi Lina are the two-individual team that pulled it off.

 

Apple Silicon without this GPU driver is a niche. Apple Silicon with a fully conformant, open GPU driver is almost unbelievable: it's good hardware and hackable drivers too.

Asahi Lina (VTuber, not sure on their real name) has also done an enormous amount of work on this too. Their bug fixing YouTube streams have been really interesting to skim through (I don't have the patience to watch the multi-hour streams all the way through!)

 

https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina