Apple M1 Mesa Code Begins To Run glmark2

While the Apple M1 Linux support is off to a great start and using Asahi Linux is offering good CPU performance and most functionality working to at least some degree, the biggest blocker remaining is getting the Apple M1 3D graphics working. The latest progress on that front is the Mesa code working to begin correctly render glmark2, a basic OpenGL / GLES benchmark.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on the Panfrost driver stack at Collabora has been leading the Apple M1 graphics reverse-engineering and driver writing effort. Without the support of Apple, it's up to the reverse-engineering, open-source community to tackle both the DRM/KMS kernel driver and the user-space Mesa driver support. So far Alyssa's and Asahi's focus has been on getting a working Gallium3D OpenGL driver before thinking about Vulkan support.

Rosenzweig shared this weekend the progress of getting glmark2 successfully running for the Apple M1 with this Mesa code. This Mesa code appears to still be tested under macOS, but at least progress is being made with this open-source effort:

Woo, got it!!!

if you don't dance when you fix your bugs, I don't know what you're doing programming~ pic.twitter.com/g6RLyytfuw

— Alyssa Rosenzweig (@alyssarzg) May 9, 2022

It was just this weekend prior to that milestone that it was still a battle for glmark2 success:

What do you want from me, bunny?! pic.twitter.com/qYzxovr1qD

— Alyssa Rosenzweig (@alyssarzg) May 8, 2022

While mainline Mesa has mainlined early M1 code since last year, the most active work-in-progress code continues to happen within the Asahi/Mesa repository until that code is eventually all reviewed and upstreamed. So far there isn't yet any kernel-side DRM/KMS driver for the M1 upstreamed to the Linux kernel but will come in due course.