Mesa 24.0 Gets Asahi AGX Gallium3D To OpenGL 3.3 For Apple Silicon Hardware

A set of 53 patches were upstreamed on Monday for syncing Mesa 24.0-devel against the latest Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver changes carried by Asahi Linux. This in turn is a big push for getting more of the open-source OpenGL functionality into Mesa for enjoying Linux on Apple M1 and M2 hardware.

The latest sync of Asahi AGX Gallium3D patches sent in by Alyssa Rosenzweig are able to get the driver to OpenGL 3.3 level features. This ads in geometry shaders, timer queries, and other OpenGL extensions for crossing off OpenGL 3.2 and 3.3 with this driver.

Those interested can see the merge request "asahi: Nov 5 sync: OpenGL 3.3" for all the details on the latest upstream efforts for this code now part of Mesa 24.0-devel. Mesa 24.0 stable in turn will be out in February or March of next year.

This is nice progress for the Asahi AGX Gallium3D but of course the latest upstream spec is OpenGL 4.6. It's also Vulkan that is most important these days for Linux gamers and other modern use-cases. The Mesa Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon hardware on Linux remains an ongoing effort. The Rust-written kernel DRM driver for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware also remains out-of-tree so far as another current barrier to enjoying the latest Apple Macs on Linux outside of the downstream Asahi Linux code.