Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple's M1 GPU

[cytomax55]

Even though you're not paying Apple directly for the product by buying second hand Apple products and creating a second-hand market that adds value to the Apple product and people are willing to pay more knowing they can offload it later for a decent price....
I just feel you're still supporting the Apple company even though you're buying a second hand instead of a company that supports Linux but I do understand that the hardware is not the same so whatever to teach their own

[sverris]

Personally that's not for me never owned apple stuff but it seems to make a lot of people happy

I have not spent a dime on Apple-stuff in 20 years, but in a few years, Apple will send these M1-machines into EOL - and then it might get interesting to pick one up 2nd hand for a few bucks - and then one needs a decent OS running on it...

[abott]

It will end up like nouveau at best, but I'm not worried because I feel lucky enough to know what to buy and what to avoid.

Anyway kudos for the work, it will be very useful in the future.

As pointed out by another user, you have no idea what you're regurgitating. It won't end up the same as long as the reclocking isn't hardware locked. Which would pretty blow low, especially for Apple.

[vb_linux]

Remember that the reason that Nouveau sucks as bad as it does today isn't just because Nvidia provides no documentation, they actively and deliberately stonewall the project by packaging and licensing their firmware blobs in a way where Nouveau will never be able to do 3D rendering, video decoding, and power management without Nvidia's blessing for particular models and generations. While from what i've heard this kind of insurmountable problem hasn't been run into on the Apple reverse engineering effort yet.

Is Nouveau better than Nvidia for the old GPUs which are not firmware restricted? Is that the case, do they have vulkan support?

I have a 10 year old laptop with 750M, maybe I should give it a spin and find out

[cytomax55]

Personally that's not for me never owned apple stuff but it seems to make a lot of people happy

[jaxa]

Maybe one day there will be a actual apple hardware competitor thay people flock to when they want the build quality of apple but ability to run Linux on it

If by "build quality" you mean "SoC quality".

[torsionbar28]

My point is that in 2021 the primary thing limiting Nouveau is Nvidia deliberately stonewalling the project rather than just investing zero effort in FOSS like most companies

For a project as prominent as the Linux kernel, for a vendor to deny documentation is certainly a case of 'deliberately stonewalling'. Even more so with Linux being the dominant OS in the ARM ecosystem. This isn't a case of Apple being too busy to bother, or some such. This is Apple saying 'F U Linux'. I guess I can't really blame them, since the devices with M1 chip are all consumer/client devices, which is Apple's bread and butter, so they likely view Linux as a threat in this context.

Honestly, Apple is as bad as Microsoft in this regard. They consume and use plenty of FOSS, but they contribute nothing back to the FOSS community, unless it's specifically to help people develop for OSX. Here's their contributions - nothing of significance except tools to bring people into the Apple ecosystem.

[tildearrow]

Really impressive and promising work.

I really wonder why Alyssa didn't focus on developing a Vulkan driver first, though. As she herself said in the presentation, Metal is conceptually quite close to Vulkan, and the GPU lacks some of the hardware features required for full OpenGL support. Why not leave the OpenGL compatibility stuff to Zink?

I asked this as well in the other thread as well, and replies indicate that Alyssa has more experience with OpenGL than Vulkan, and that Metal is lower-level than Vulkan.

[SteamPunker]

Really impressive and promising work.

I really wonder why Alyssa didn't focus on developing a Vulkan driver first, though. As she herself said in the presentation, Metal is conceptually quite close to Vulkan, and the GPU lacks some of the hardware features required for full OpenGL support. Why not leave the OpenGL compatibility stuff to Zink?

[iskra32]

If you are forced to reverse engineer it is because there is no documentation.

Obviously yes, but thats not my point. My point is that in 2021 the primary thing limiting Nouveau is Nvidia deliberately stonewalling the project rather than just investing zero effort in FOSS like most companies, which puts Nvidia a league above Broadcom, Mali, Vivante and from what we know Apple in terms of being scum. It also means that the AGX driver has the chance to suck less than nouveau.