Early Gallium3D Work Has Begun Around Apple's M1 GPU With New "AGX" Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Early Gallium3D Work Has Begun Around Apple's M1 GPU With New "AGX" Driver

Alyssa Rosenzweig has continued her work reverse engineering and understanding Apple's M1 GPU with the ultimate goal of writing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Apple M1 GPU on Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Early-Gallium-For-Apple-M1

[microcode]

Guessing the hardware supports these unused indexing modes and such to hedge against risk in the WebGPU standardization process. If WebGPU ends up supporting things that Apple's GPUs do not, that's a PITA for them.

It'd be cool if the forthcoming kernel driver is dual-licensed (like AMDGPU and the intel kernel drivers), so that it could be put into OpenBSD's DRM driver collection as well. :+ )

[V1tol]

I would go with implementing Vulkan driver first just because Zink already exists in a pretty good shape. Not trying to diminish the merits with all that reverse engineering stuff - that's undoubtedly amazing job done. Just thinking out loud here.

[unic0rn]

I would go with implementing Vulkan driver first

what's stopping you?

[tildearrow]

what's stopping you?

Lack of programming knowledge or not having the hardware?

[schmidtbag]

I would go with implementing Vulkan driver first just because Zink already exists in a pretty good shape. Not trying to diminish the merits with all that reverse engineering stuff - that's undoubtedly amazing job done. Just thinking out loud here.

I thought the same thing though I think it's fine to stop at OpenGL 2 and then move to Vulkan. I think it would be a mistake to do all of OGL before getting Vulkan support.

[Boland]

Guessing the hardware supports these unused indexing modes and such to hedge against risk in the WebGPU standardization process. If WebGPU ends up supporting things that Apple's GPUs do not, that's a PITA for them.

It'd be cool if the forthcoming kernel driver is dual-licensed (like AMDGPU and the intel kernel drivers), so that it could be put into OpenBSD's DRM driver collection as well. :+ )

The features are there because the M1 still has to support OpenGL on macOS. Although OpenGL runs on top on Metal, so Metal must support the features privately at the very least. They’re just not user accessible.

WebGPU is only targeting the supported feature sets of Dx12/Vulkan/Metal. If one of the apis doesn’t support a feature, they’re not including it in WebGPU.

[StillStuckOnSI]

I would go with implementing Vulkan driver first just because Zink already exists in a pretty good shape. Not trying to diminish the merits with all that reverse engineering stuff - that's undoubtedly amazing job done. Just thinking out loud here.

I imagine a Mesa dev is much more familiar/comfortable with the Gallium infrastructure. Only having to write the backend code to get a lot of functionality for free is also a plus, AIUI there's not a lot of code sharing between all the various Vulkan drivers?

[andre30correia]

this a nice thing untill the driver become to good and apple axe the efford

[StarterX4]

There's a lot of work to do with M1 GPU yet. Hope it won't end up like Nouveau.