Asahi AGX Mesa Driver Prepares For Compute Kernels On Apple Silicon

The Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 graphics hardware has seen preliminary work merged into Mesa 23.1 for supporting compute shaders/kernels.

This weekend Alyssa Rosenzweig merged initial support for compute kernels into Mesa Git. This has the user-space Mesa driver side work for handling compute kernels but of course is dependent upon having the necessary support in the DRM kernel driver that has yet to be upstreamed into the Linux kernel. Support for images is also among the features still to be tackled.

In any event it's nice seeing this compute kernel/shader support coming together in Mesa 23.1 and the work happening in tandem both for the Asahi Rust-written DRM kernel driver and within Mesa.

Another important merge request that is pending is the Linux UAPI prep work to prepare for the (currently unstable) explicit sync Linux user-space API. In turn that merge request also drops the early macOS support from this driver that was used primarily during the early prototyping phase.