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OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

(asahilinux.org)
512 points simjue | 3 comments | 06 Jun 23 13:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.677s | source
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nightski ◴[06 Jun 23 14:20 UTC] No.36213208[source]▶
This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion.

I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

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viraptor ◴[06 Jun 23 14:26 UTC] No.36213309[source]▶
> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability

You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

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1. Timon3 ◴[06 Jun 23 14:52 UTC] No.36213726[source]▶
Does the CPU run at similar frequencies between Mac OS and Linux (since they're writing their own drivers this isn't guaranteed)? Is the scheduling done similarly? Are there any special hardware modes you have to activate with e.g. binary blobs?

There are a bunch of factors that could affect performance even under the same OS (try underclocking your CPU or play around with schedulers). Given the mostly non-existent documentation from Apple I'd strongly suspect that average-case performance will stay worse on the Linux side for a long time.

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2. hedora ◴[06 Jun 23 19:02 UTC] No.36217530[source]▶
The currently top-rated top-level HN comment goes into those details. This release significantly improves CPU power management, to the point where it should be similar to MacOS.

Some of this stuff is handled by binary blobs that get installed/upgraded by MacOS, and are running by the time Linux boots.

With the previous release, power per watt and absolute performance were already better than high-end x86 laptops, so if your question is "is this faster and more power efficient than my other Linux laptop?", the answer is probably yes.

If you're asking if it will beat MacOS's perf/watt in all scenarios, the answer will be no for a long time. However, it is probably already beating MacOS in many practical scenarios.

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3. MBCook ◴[07 Jun 23 01:46 UTC] No.36221747[source]▶
Right. Everything I’ve seen implies they’re both using the hardware the same way (no “limp mode” or such).

Linux tends to be faster because the kernel is just far better optimized than Apple’s appears to be. Massive sums of money (and person hours) have been spent speeding up Linux networking, file systems, scheduling, etc. and it was all sent back to mainline.

Apple’s kernel team can’t possibly compete based on resources alone. They do their best but MS, Google, Amazon, Redhat, and so many others are constantly improving Linux to squeeze out every last drop of performance.

So in many ways Linux is better optimized. I remember one of the developers posting a few weeks ago about just how much faster code compilation was under Linux, because the file system layer is so much better. It was like 6x or something. Sort of an accidental ideal benchmark for stressing that.

But you won’t be disappointed.