Four-Person Dev Team Gets Apple's M-Series GPU Working On Linux (arstechnica.com) 55
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the brave people running Linux on Apple Silicon, their patience has paid off. GPU drivers that provide desktop hardware acceleration are now available in Asahi Linux, unleashing more of the M-series chips' power. It has taken roughly two years to reach this alpha-stage OpenGL driver, but the foundational groundwork should result in faster progress ahead, writes project leads Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina. In the meantime, the drivers are "good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games."
The drivers offer non-conformance-tested OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series Apple devices. That's enough for desktop environments and older games running at 60 frames per second at 4K. But the next target is Vulkan support. OpenGL work is being done "with Vulkan in mind," Lina writes, but some OpenGL support was needed to get desktops working first. There's a lot more you can read about the interplay between OpenGL, Vulkan, and Zink in Asahi's blog post.
The drivers offer non-conformance-tested OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series Apple devices. That's enough for desktop environments and older games running at 60 frames per second at 4K. But the next target is Vulkan support. OpenGL work is being done "with Vulkan in mind," Lina writes, but some OpenGL support was needed to get desktops working first. There's a lot more you can read about the interplay between OpenGL, Vulkan, and Zink in Asahi's blog post.
Re:I too (Score:4, Interesting)
i never saw the point of making apple hardware support anything that apple didn't want its hardware to support, simple because apple hardware isn't special in any way except in being more expensive, so it would be best to just ignore it. even if you do it to promote free systems (and that's being a bit naive in this brave new world we live in) this just perpetuates closed hardware.
anyway, to each their own, the hills to die on are countless.
It is special (Score:2)
It‘s processor has a lot of specialized cores. Its not the fastest thing out there, it’s not bad, but it is one of the most interesting processors to hit the desktop market.
Re:I too (Score:5, Informative)
Before the M1, there wasn't much needed to get their hardware to work: it was mostly generic Intel crap, with their own EUFI boot firmware. It wasn't special.
On laptops, the construction is generally better than any comparable laptop made by any other vendor, as well, which makes it appealing in that way.
The M1 and M2 laptops, however, are a game changer: it's a fully fanless, solid state laptop with what's effectively unparalleled battery life: discounting the display, and the thing will run for many, many hours doing computationally complex work. Even with the display, it's far better than any other battery powered device I've seen - all while being faster and generally more capable than comparable laptops by a long shot.
So until something changes and another manufacturer makes a laptop with competitive specs, there's honestly nothing else out there from my perspective. This is the laptop hardware I've been waiting for 15+ years to come to fruition.
(The GPU ain't no slouch, either.)
- signed, a lifelong IBM -> Lenovo -> Dell laptop user
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Apple laptops have been poor for years. There always seems to be some ridiculous flaw, like the keyboards or the number of ports. The recent ones are a little better, but you can still get a lot laptop for a lot less money elsewhere, with comparable build quality.
While the fanless models are interesting, their performance is limited too. You can buy similar low end laptops from other manufacturers and just set the cooling profile to "passive" in Windows to make it fanless. And then you can unlock that perfo
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Yeah, I had issues with the 2019 keyboards. They were junk. I and everyone else on my team had at least one keyboard on those fail. Thankfully, Apple fixed that.
I just looked at a couple Asus Ryzen 6000-based systems. The cost and features are in line with the M1 laptops at a glance, except you're not getting 20+ hours from those judging by any of the reviews I just quickly looked up. There's a difference between real and advertised battery life, and I'd be surprise to get 8 hours out of an extended battery
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I've been looking at the Lenovo Z16. You can get one with a Radeon GPU and dedicated VRAM, or the CPU integrated one that shares system RAM.
22 hours battery life for video, 18 for office type stuff. That's way more than I need and I can't imagine many people need that much; it's more than two work days without a charge, and the charger is the same one you use for your phone.
What's putting me off is the same stuff that I don't like about Macs. Soldered in RAM, only 3 USB C ports, keyboard is part of the top
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That's one of the fascinating things about the Apple Silicon macs - for whatever reason, they are markedly more efficient with memory than an x64 machine. 16GB, or even 8GB as it is with the entry level ones, is comparable if not superior to some of the machines I've used with 32GB+ - especially Windows machines, which seem to like to consume all your resources and crash a lot.
I've yet to have an issue with 16GB on the M1 with video editing + encoding + other concurrent tasks, all while on battery.
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I don't think it has anything to do with the CPU. MacOS is quite aggressive with memory, more so than Windows. Having a fast SSD really helps because swap is accessible at gigabytes per second.
I don't find Windows is bad with RAM. I have an old laptop that can't take more than 4GB and it runs Windows 10 just fine. The issue is that for my main machine I do a lot of RAM intensive stuff that no amount of optimization will help with.
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I don't think the tradeoff is necessarily worth it, and I'm using a cheap Ryzen 3 laptop already so I'm not in the market regardless, but the M1 macs are Apple's first attractive hardware in a long time. I prefer something a little more maintainable (which is about how much better my machine is in that regard.)
However, eventually these machines will be abandoned by Apple, probably before their time. So it's nice that by that point, there will be a solid alternative to MacOS.
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Apple generally supports hardware for longer than most manufacturers so why do you think they would abandon these?
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you don't remember the beige power pc days where some models had lifespans of weeks
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Do I remember Apple from over 20 years ago before Jobs came back? Sure. I also don't really know what that has to do with the Apple of today who supports iPhones for 6+ years- about twice what most manufacturers do.
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And my point was that Apple supports their end users longer than most manufacturers. It should not have been a difficult idea to comprehend.
Re: I too (Score:2)
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I have an early 2009 mac mini. It runs Windows 10 perfectly fine. All hardware functional. But these days it runs linux headless. I use it as a media server.
Seriously, what kind of hardware do you think is in 15 year old intel macs ? The same kind of hardware that is in any other computer of that era: Core2duo processors, DDR3 memory, NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards, etc. You can find shit-tons of macbooks, macbook pros and mac minis of that era on fleabay, all of them being able to run macos, windows, and eve
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I used phones as an example- they also support their laptops for a long time but that's more difficult to compare.
> I can install Windows 10 on my 15 year old Sony Viao, all hardware on it functional.
Your 15 year old Sony Vaio does not support TPM 2.0 and thus cannot support a bunch of different encryption types that you probably want like FDE on Windows 10.
I also notice you did not mention Windows 11. Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 chip which did not come out until 2014 so anything older than that proba
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...which is why that's time period is considered one of Apple's lowest points as a company. Even so, my late-2003 iBook G4 is still happily chugging away. I use it when I need to transfer data from some Firewire-only device. They've always built the hell out of their hardware.
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I have a G4 that works fine, the specific model was scrubbed from production within a few months, apple has a long history of being abusive to their userbase, why this would change now I dunno. The only reason it hasnt been that bad in the computer segment is they were using commodity hardware
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You could also install Windows on a 10 year old Mac. Or you could keep running the version of MacOS you're on because the install images are still completely available.
Regardless- my point was that Apple doesn't abandon hardware. Or do you know a PC brand can you get service by the manufacturer after more than 7 years?
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Apple generally supports hardware for longer than most manufacturers so why do you think they would abandon these?
Nice weaselling about apple, but no. Apple make the hardware and the OS. They need to continue supporting the OS for the machine to continue to be useful. In PC land, the OS and hardware vendors are decoupled and the OSs have much longer support windows, so you don't need the hardware vendor to "support" the machine.
My daily home machine is an 11 year old thinkpad. It runs an up to date OS (ubun
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The _whole point of this thread is Linux support for M-series Macs you dolt_.
So yes I'm comparing HARDWARE SUPPORT since that was the god damned point. Parent claimed Apple would abandon them "before their time* (wtf that is supposed to mean) and I was pointing out that that was a silly comment.
Or do you know a fucking PC that has manufacturer hardware support for longer than 7 years?
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The _whole point of this thread is Linux support for M-series Macs you dolt_.
No, you utter fuckwit, that doesn't mean Apple are supporting the platform.
So yes I'm comparing HARDWARE SUPPORT since that was the god damned point.
Yeah because by doing a silly comparison that makes no real world sense, you can kinda sorta make Apple look like they don't suck. When reality they do. I don't get you fanbois. You KNOW Apple aren't good in this regard, which is why you make silly comparisons. So why the pretence?
Buy
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> Uh.. apple dumped 2016 macbook pros in their latest version of macos. So my 8 year old
8 years is 2014 FFS, not 2016- unless you posted this from the future.
> You think 8 years is reasonable for an expensive "pro" machine?
I have a three year refresh cycle on my laptop (same as every company I have worked for) and then it goes to my wife who uses it for another three years. After that- it gets donated and people can stick whatever they want on it. So for me- it absolutely is reasonable. I cannot imagi
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A laptop is perfectly functional after 3 years. Admitedly, my Macbook is not fine but that's because Apple's well known weak butterfly keyboard. Thinkpads are fine for twelve years or more. Your company chooses three years because that benefits them, that's fine. But we are talking about people being FORCED to refresh by the company selling the laptop to you. That's a lot different. $666 a year for a laptop for a small company is insane.
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Re: (Score:2, Troll)
I evaluate new hardware for my company- Windows, Linux, and Mac laptops, as well as a few other devices.
Nothing I've tested in the PC space comes close to the performance, battery life, size, and build quality of the new 14" and 16" MacBook Pros.
My evaluation report on the 14" Pro basically found two small flaws- 1. The notch was too large for just a camera. If it was going to be that big, it should have included facial recognition and 2. The HDMI port should have been 2.1 instead of 2.0. Everything else wa
Impressive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well done to all four of them.
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I cannot even imagine how difficult it must have been to reverse engineer something like this.
Well done to all four of them.
I can imagine. It's hard enough to get the hardware working when you have the datasheets. (Though I guess some hardware manufacturers now hand-hold you through it. Back in the day though, we were setting bits in our drum memories by hand with a magnetized needle!) Doing it blind is a whole new level of hell.
Well done indeed. And better them than me.
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What I want to know is how. It's a difficult thing to do - GPU drivers are not simple devices you can figure out from a trace.
I mean, did they reverse-engineer the driver from macOS, or did Apple somehow include portions of the driver as header files or what?
You've got a black box and while you can communicate with it at a basic level, you have no idea to its actual ISA internally, its instruction set, its machine code representation, etc. At the same time, you need to figure out how to command it to do thi
Re: Impressive. (Score:3)
I follow one of the devs on mastodon. They've written quite a bit about the work. They looked at traces from MacOS, but there was also a lot of trial same error to figure out the protocol, message structure and offsets for each firmware version.
They first wrote a user mode driver in python for rapid iteration and then once it was stable ported the code to Rust and moved it into the kernel.
Re: (Score:2)
It's great work but all the proprietary hardware means Linux will always be a second-class citizen on Mac hardware,
Same as the user, then.
Apple supports Linux, GPU, Mac desktop integration (Score:2)
It's great work but all the proprietary hardware means Linux will always be a second-class citizen on Mac hardware, it will always be incomplete and behind.
Apple actually supports Linux, not in the dual boot sense but in the virtualization sense.
macOS' Virtualization Framework has let people create console Linux VMs for a while now. With the recent release of macOS Ventura GUI Linux VMs are supported on Apple Silicon CPUs. With full GPU support, integration with the host macOS desktop for transferring files, etc.
Linux may be a second class citizen to Apple, not being allowed to dual boot, but it is not incomplete and behind when run from Apple's virtuali
Smooth desktop experience? (Score:2, Troll)
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Guess you haven't used Linux in recent years, especially with Wayland. Can't speak for NVIDIA hardware, but with Intel and AMD it's been very smooth and responsive for years now.
Small team = efficient team (Score:3)
In every group of N people, the number of possible communication lines between different members is equal to N*(N-1)/2. This means that for 3 people we have 3 possible lines of communication - the triangle. For N=4 we have 4*3/2 = 6 lines, a.k.a. the square + diagonals, and so on. The critical number happens to be number 7 for which the team has the maximum of 21 possible conversations happening at the same time. Beyond 7 members, the work environment becomes chaos. But go below 7, and you'll up with a highly-efficient, tight-knit group of people who know what they are doing and get to the finish line in time, making impossible-in-larger-groups miracles happen with ease every day.
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Teams of teams can achieve larger goals, that's the theory behind middle managers. If only fewer of them were worthless.
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If you use a hierarchy of teams, operating on the same idea (so, basically a quaternary tree), you ought to be able to keep things efficient.
There are other tools that can help with managing large, complex projects (critical path analysis is one) that tend to get overlooked a lot.
working ON Linux?! (Score:2)
Developers (Score:2)
If anybody remembers the "byuu" drama a year or two back (byuu being the online name of the developer of the higan/bsnes emulation software), byuu allegedly committed suicide in Japan. Despite his claims of a passport release, there was never a death certificate, obituary, or any public record that verified his death. There have been rumors floating around that one of these developers, Asahi Lina (who is an anime Vtuber--which I had to google), is actually byuu.
I have no idea if true or not. It would be nic
Re: Developers (Score:2)
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I watched a little bit of one of the Asahi Lina coding stream. I guess it's a sign that I am getting older, but I don't get the Vtube stuff, or the feaux-girlish giggling while coding.
Title has it backward (Score:1)
Just to nitpick, "Apple's M-Series GPU Working On Linux" should read "Linux Working On Apple's M-Series GPU".
Re: Title has it backward (Score:2)
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Do you get Linux working on {pick a video card} or do you get {pick a video card} working on linux?
The title is correct.
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You get the {pick a video card} working with|under|using|from Linux.
The video card itself does not execute software in the Linux environment.
The title is wrong.