Mesa 23.2 Receives Asahi AGX Gallium3D Changes For OpenGL 3.1 + GLES 3.0

Following yesterday's news of OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 working on the open-source driver for Apple M1/M2 graphics with Asahi Linux using their "edge" channel, those patches to the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver have now worked their way into the upstream Mesa 23.2 codebase.

The upstream AGX code in Mesa had been at OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 but as of today it's now supporting OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0. Alyssa Rosenzweig had a set of 32 patches that she submitted via asahi: May batch of changes as a collection of the different patches she worked on the past month for this reverse-engineered, open-source Apple Silicon graphics driver. That included getting multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) in order and the other remaining work to get this driver over the GL 3.1 / GLES 3.0 finish line.

Now ahead of next quarter's Mesa 23.2 release those patches are now upstream. But still a significant barrier to making use of this open-source Apple graphics support on Linux is the matter of the Rust-written Apple AGX DRM kernel driver still being in development and presumably won't be mainlined still for some months. Until that Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver is mainlined, it will still be a hassle setting up the Apple Linux graphics stack on your own without rolling a custom kernel. Thus for most users running the Asahi Linux edge packages for this Arch Linux based distribution is the easiest way in the near-term to enjoy Linux on Apple M1/M2 hardware.