Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel

[andre30correia]

who cares?

[drakonas777]

The AGE of ARM is here. x86 is legacy.

Legacy != dead. There is still a market for 486 compatible SoCs in embedded systems - I'll see how long will it take to completely deprecate all that x86 asm handcrafted software in all markets Also I'll see how much of x86 based enterprise is going to switch to ARM platforms, considering they even are not very comfortable with switching from Xeon to EPYC due possible compatibility-related issues. And at last - I'll se how Windows ecosystem is going to adopt ARM, if they were struggling with 32bit->64bit transition until, like yesterday.

So yeah. It will take some time. That legacy tech migh still be relevant after multiple decades I'm afraid.

[Markopolo]

Is the support good enough to start running PTS on it for some benchmarks?

[DrYak]

That does not mean there will never be non-Apple ARM laptops with good Linux support.

...say Hello! to Pine64's PineBook Pro, and its mainline kernel (and u-boot) support.

[WorBlux]

Apple would never release M1 GPU/VPU firmware, so don't hold your breath for mainline Linux support at all.

It wouldn't be the first time a driver was supported without firmware in the kernel tree. It would only by a major obstacle if Apple actively opposed it, but I suspect they will maintain their officially neutral position on the matter.

There will never be proper support for Apple hardware under Linux, because Apple don't want that to happen. That does not mean there will never be non-Apple ARM laptops with good Linux support.

There are a good number of VPU, NPU and GPU drivers and libraries being integrated into the kernel and major distributions. For the M1, I think the GPU is the largest challenge, but also the most likely to determine how popular desktop Linux on the M1 or successors will be. Though cracking the other two bring up interesting possibilities.

[rene]

Apple would never release M1 GPU/VPU firmware, so don't hold your breath for mainline Linux support at all.

the firmware is in the device's flash and loaded by the firmware. Linux does not need to touch it and can just start poking it to draw things ;-)

[moriel5]

The graphics situation will be interesting, because I wouldn't be surprised if it was purpose-built for Metal, where maybe it lacks the instructions necessary to do Vulkan or OpenGL.

Not to mention, the connection to Imagination GPU IP, which we all know how how that went with Intel, as well as nowadays with some Mediatek SoCs and every iDevice.

[archsway]

The graphics situation will be interesting, because I wouldn't be surprised if it was purpose-built for Metal, where maybe it lacks the instructions necessary to do Vulkan or OpenGL.

The GPU does at least support some of the features that are only in OpenGL and not Metal or GLES.

[jokeyrhyme]

It's already possible to map much/all of Vulkan to equivalent Metal APIs: https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/

[miskol]

I would like to see some benchmarks