Experimental OpenGL 3.1 Support For Apple M1/M2 Graphics On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Experimental OpenGL 3.1 Support For Apple M1/M2 Graphics On Linux

Experimental driver code available via the Asahi Linux "edge" packages allow for OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 to be exposed for Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs under this Arch Linux based OS...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-Asahi-OpenGL-3.1

[Lbibass]

Very neat! I love to see these progress reports.

[rene]

*wokring*

[hyperchaotic]

And if you look at mesamatrix.net they have implemented a good bunch of OpenGL features all the way up to 4.5. According to Alyssa a lot of this work will also benefit the Vulkan driver.

[dragorth]

Wasn't one of the selling points of Vulkan an easier to implement driver? Is it due to most Linux backends still using OpenGL so they focused on that to get usable software up and running, or were they running into issues with bring up?

With the numbers Michael just showed for Zink in another article, Zink looks like a viable alternative for light use cases and a great test suite for Vulkan bring up.

This is very nice to get up and running. This may also be the only way you will get to use GPU cards in those PCI-E slots on the new Mac Pro.

[AKSF_Ackermann]

This is very nice to get up and running. This may also be the only way you will get to use GPU cards in those PCI-E slots on the new Mac Pro.

This work is completely unrelated to that. This is for the internal gpu, for external ones, you will need the stock amd/nvidia driver and pray that they do not have broken support for cacheable memory on the pcie controller used for external slots.

[Beryesa]

Wasn't one of the selling points of Vulkan an easier to implement driver?

I don't think that's the case when it's reverse-engineered

[ravyne]

Wasn't one of the selling points of Vulkan an easier to implement driver?

A Vulkan driver should be thinner because it's less abstract comparing to modern GPU hardware than OpenGL has become over the years. Generally, the complexity of a GL driver for a modern GPU is due to spanning that gap with an abstraction that's performant, and that there's a lot that's left implicit in the GL API from simpler times -- which gives way to state-tracking and such, which, to my understanding, mesa/gallium help solve -- essentially, the Asahi Linux team can lean on the ecosystem for many of the hard parts of the GL implementation (not to mention tedious, error prone, boring) and not have to reinvent it themselves.

[mirmirmir]

Retro computing: bring your old Mac back to life with Linux 👨💻

[ssokolow]

Retro computing: bring your old Mac back to life with Linux 👨💻

Nahh. That's just good sense.

For me, it's not mac retrocomputing unless it's different enough from what we still use today to make the experience worthwhile as more than just "modern stuff, but slower".

That means a PowerPC or a 680x0 chip and either Mac OS 9 or older, A/UX, or a period version of PPC Linux from a retail or pseudo-retail release like the the sleeved install CDs Canonical were shipping out for free back in the day.