Asahi Linux's Apple M1/M2 Gallium3D Driver Now OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformant

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Asahi Linux's Apple M1/M2 Gallium3D Driver Now OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformant

The AGX Gallium3D driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew for providing reverse-engineered OpenGL / GLES support on Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware is now formally compliant with OpenGL ES 3.1...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-GLES-3.1-AGX-M1-M2

[MastaG]

OpenGL ES 3.1 should be sufficient to run most desktop environments with hardware acceleration.
I think it would be better to shift focus and resources to Vulkan instead because of DXVK, VKD3D and of course Zink.
Combined with Box64 or Fex and I would actually get a Macbook for work and some casual gaming on Linux

[LoveRPi]

Working on open source support for products from the most closed platform company. Great work but to what ends? Always one firmware update away from oblivion.

[Etherman]

Working on open source support for products from the most closed platform company. Great work but to what ends? Always one firmware update away from oblivion.

I guess one could duck those firmware updates by switching operating system now.

[gnattu]

Working on open source support for products from the most closed platform company. Great work but to what ends? Always one firmware update away from oblivion.

Technically it is not the "most closed platform" on arm64, we have even more closed platforms running Linux. Support for booting a "fully untrusted operating system" is part of the Apple Silicon Mac's platform feature and such feature is the reason why Asahi Linux exists. Contradict to lots of people's imagination, Apple updated their firmware to ease the load of "fully untrusted operating system", not make it harder. The untrusted kernel previously has to conform with the macOS boot ABI to pretend itself as a self-complied macOS kernel and has to be in the March-O format, but now it can be a flat ARM64 executable image and no more "macOS pretending" is needed. As Apple require this feature to enable use of custom kernels, they cannot remove the feature to let you boot Linux. The worst situation would be Apple removed the direct binary load mode and we have to go back to the "macOS pretending" way, but it does not make sense if they put resources to implement such mode in the first place.

[LoveRPi]

I guess one could duck those firmware updates by switching operating system now.

No guaranteed hardware future. If they ship new hardware with updated firmware to lock out, all of that work is moot. It is like PS3 Linux lockout.

As soon as people begin to find exploits to root the system and escape iommus, Apple will have almost no choice but to close various windows into the hardware.

NSA/CIA and all the security consultants for national governments are definitely watching the work closely so it is only a matter of time.

[kpedersen]

From their post:

Unlike ours, the manufacturer’s M1 drivers are unfortunately not conformant for any standard graphics API, whether Vulkan or OpenGL or OpenGL ES

Why did we pursue standards conformance when the manufacturer did not?

Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…

I am going to assume that they do understand Apple is already supporting a standard graphics API... Their *own* (by design) and they are just being purposefully obtuse about it.

It’s not too late though. They should follow our lead!

Hah. They did, over 10 years ago. They have been intentionally going the other direction since!

It seems strange to me that these guys have put in so much effort to support hardware manufactured by such a ridiculous company... and then indirectly moan and complain about the company that *they* chose to support in the first place. Were they honestly expecting any different?

Other than that... err, good job! Always fun to see little hacks and software running on platforms that weren't designed for it.

[Setif]

Nouveau (nvc0) driver is also OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenGL 4.5 Conformant.
see: The Mesa drivers matrix (mesamatrix.net)

[gnattu]

From their post:







I am going to assume that they do understand Apple is supporting a standard graphics API... Their *own* (by design) and they are just being purposefully obtuse about it.

It seems strange to me that these guys have put in so much effort to support hardware manufactured by such a ridiculous company... and then indirectly moan and complain about the company that *they* chose to support. in the first place.

How is that "moan" or "complain"? They supported APIs that Apple does not want to support, then pointing out the fact claiming that they are doing better than Apple, and that's just what happened. Apple does not care about cross-vendor compatibility but they do and they don't want their users to have Apple platform specific codes for each and every app. Your quoted sentences are basically saying "We did something Apple won't do and this is good for you".

[uid313]

Can any part of this Rust driver be used by someone who would like to make another Rust graphics driver?
Example if someone wanted to make a graphics device driver written in Rust for AMD, Intel or Nvidia?