Asahi Linux Enables Early Apple GPU Driver Support - WIP OpenGL 2.1 + GLES 2.0

[cooperate]

So what if the time for the vulkan driver to be functional is wayyyy longer than the time required for opengl?

That would mean the initial demo would take way longer and the Asahi Linux users would have to use software rendering until then.

And since vulkan is more complex, they could have a bug and not sure which code is to blame. It could be in the kernel GPU driver (wrong mmap) or in the userspace vulkan one.

A simple demo like opengl is less complex, means easier to debug and with earlier rollout, they can find out the bugs earlier.

that makes sense

[tornado99]

I'm using this as a test on a M1 Macbook and the gpu really makes the desktop much closer to a daily driver. If they can fix the sleep issues (it still drains the battery) and get external display support I would be very tempted to switch full time!

[danboid]

I doubt I'll ever buy any Apple Silicon but I still think this is amazing.

[xhustler]

I read it and that’s why I commented. I’m saying why waste time from the beginning on making the OpenGL driver when you can start with Vulkan right away? It’ll take a little longer to see results, but at least they’re not wasting effort. Maybe some numbers will help you understand. If, let’s say, it’ll take 1 month for the gl driver and 2 months for the vulkan one, then skipping OpenGL would allow to finish vulkan in 1.5 months. You see where I’m coming from?

Baby steps mate. The Asahi team is teething, has learnt to crawl and walk within an impressively short amount of time. Give them time to wow us some more.

[smitty3268]

If, let’s say, it’ll take 1 month for the gl driver and 2 months for the vulkan one, then skipping OpenGL would allow to finish vulkan in 1.5 months. You see where I’m coming from?

Assuming those timeframes, then it absolutely would have made sense to focus on vulkan only.

However, lets imagine an alternative: It'll take 1 month for the GL driver and 10 years for the Vulkan driver. And 9.9 years if they focus only on the vulkan driver.

In that case, I hope you'll agree it makes way more sense to do the GL driver first and get something up and running for people now while they wait on the better solution that will be coming later.

Now I don't know the actual timeframes involved for these drivers, but I do trust that the asahi devs involved probably have a better idea about this than anyone here does. And just from reading that blog post, it sounds like getting a full Vulkan 1.3 + extensions necessary to run Zink is probably going to be > 2 years. Just a guess, but i don't think it's coming right away. So getting something simple up in order to get accelerated desktop support is probably the right call.