Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed

Asahi Linux developer Asahi Lina has posted an update on the ongoing work bringing up their Rust-written DRM kernel driver along with the AGX Gallium3D Mesa OpenGL driver as well as progress towards the in-development Vulkan driver too.

The reverse-engineering open-source driver effort for enabling Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics on Linux remains ongoing. The kernel driver remains out-of-tree but the Asahi Linux repository continues shipping snapshots to its users. The Rust DRM abstractions continue maturing and the kernel driver continues working on new functionality around synchronization and other features that will become more important in the Vulkan world. There's also been work on compute support, performance optimizations, support for multiple GPU jobs, and more.

Asahi Lina concludes the project's latest blog post with some promising numbers on the OpenGL side:

So what does this all mean for users of the Asahi Linux reference distro today? It means… things are way faster!

Since the Mesa driver no longer serializes GPU and CPU work, performance has improved a ton. Now we can run Xonotic at over 800 FPS, which is faster than macOS on the same hardware (M2 MacBook Air) at around 600*! This proves that open source reverse engineered GPU drivers really have the power to beat Apple’s drivers in real-world scenarios!

Not only that, our driver passes 100% of the dEQP-GLES2 and dEQP-EGL conformance tests, which is better OpenGL conformance than macOS for that version. But we’re not stopping there of course, with full GLES 3.0 and 3.1 support well underway thanks to Alyssa’s tireless efforts! You can follow the driver’s feature support progress over at the Mesa Matrix. There have been many, many other improvements over the past few months, and we hope you find things working better and more smoothly across the board!

More details via the latest blog post on AsahiLinux.org.