"Honeykrisp" Is A New Vulkan Driver For Apple M1 On Linux - Derived From The NVK Driver

While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support with Apple Silicon on Linux has been maturing nicely and is quite capable these days, the Vulkan support hasn't been coming together as quick or for as long. But a new Apple Silicon Vulkan driver was recently started by Asahi Linux / Mesa developers and is looking positive for being able to become a compliant Vulkan 1.3 driver for the Apple M1 on Linux.

Alyssa Rosenzweig has spent the last month working on "Honeykrisp" as a new Mesa Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon that isn't yet upstreamed into Mesa. Interestingly, Honeykrisp started out as a fork of the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver. No, Apple Silicon isn't secretly using NVIDIA graphics IP or anything like that but with a lot of boilerplate code to Mesa Vulkan drivers, Rosenzweig started from there... Rather than starting from scratch, the Honeykrisp driver forked from NVK and began removing NVIDIA specific elements while tieing into the Apple Silicon hardware and the in-development Apple Silicon Rust-written DRM kernel driver.

In one month of daily hacking, Alyssa has gotten the Honeykrisp driver to pass the Vulkan 1.3 conformance test suite (CTS) that is needed for it to become a conformant Vulkan API implementation.

The Honeykrisp Vulkan driver for Apple hardware isn't yet upstreamed to Mesa but for now can be found via Alyssa's development tree.

See this blog post for more details on the effort. Moving forward the plan is to implement more features needed for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton. Eventually the hope is to get to the point of being able to enjoy nice Windows games on Apple Silicon using Wine / Steam Play and an x86 emulator.