Important news arrives from Asahi Linux (opens in new tab)a project that has attempted to run operating systems other than macOS natively and has had real success (opens in new tab) On Apple Silicon Macs. This has achieved an important milestone. A graphics driver that brings working OpenGL 2 support to the distribution. Meanwhile, the M chip’s journey towards mainstream Linux support has also taken a step forward.
Open source drivers for Apple GPUs are now available for testing on Asahi Linux. 🎉 https://t.co/Ja2GPowrLMDecember 8, 2022
The new driver, which has not passed the OpenGL conformance test and is mostly in alpha, allows desktop environments such as Gnome and Plasma to run hardware accelerated. The developer is still working on the driver and plans to add more OpenGL 2 features and extend Vulkan. “We estimated that we could ship OpenGL 2 drivers much sooner than Vulkan 1.0 drivers, and we wanted to get hardware accelerated desktops as soon as possible. So it makes more sense to support OpenGL first rather than diving into the deep end of Vulkan.” blog post (opens in new tab) Co-authored by Alissa Rosenzweig and Rina Asahi.
The driver is an opt-in release. This means that it should be installed on Linux-Mac using the pacman package manager. It’s unclear at this time if the driver will be able to run his Crysis, but Quake 3’s 4K 60fps seems to be within its capabilities, running the desktop at the same speed.
In other news, support for M-series chips in the mainline Linux kernel also saw significant improvements this week, adding an Apple Silicon CPU frequency scaling driver. under merger (opens in new tab) Included in the 6.2 release of the Linux kernel.
Hector Martin Asahi Linux (opens in new tab)‘s lead developer explains on kernel.org: (opens in new tab)Each CPU cluster has its own set of registers and frequency management is fully automated by hardware. The driver only needs him to write to one register. There is boosted frequency support, but the hardware only allows it when only a subset of the cores in the cluster are in non-deep idle. Deep idle is not yet supported, so these frequencies are not achievable, but the driver supports them. To avoid user confusion, it will remain disabled in the device tree until deep idle is implemented. This driver does not yet implement tuning of memory controller performance states associated with higher than normal CPU p-states. This will be done in a future patch. ”
