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OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

(asahilinux.org)
512 points simjue | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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kytazo ◴[] No.36213178[source]
Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom.

I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capable of.

For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless manner coupled with anything else running.

Really thank god for asahi being a thing.

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imiric ◴[] No.36214314[source]
> at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run

Sure there is. You just haven't run into it yourself.

Faster, cooler and more power efficient hardware is great. I just don't think that it makes up for depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to do so.

And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. If all your software runs on it, great. If not, good luck depending on yet another translation layer.

I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. The new AMD mobile chips are certainly in the ballpark of what Apple silicon can do, so I won't be missing much.

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psanford ◴[] No.36214810[source]
> depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to do so

You are describing how most OSS software has been developed. I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it.

A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user space). That work will benefit everyone using Arm systems, not just folks running asahi on Apple hardware.

Its good for there to be more hardware architecture competition! I'm glad I can run my server workloads on the Arm servers in AWS that are 20% cheaper than the equivalent x86 machines. I'm glad that I can run the software I like (linux) on legitimately nice hardware (m2 air). You can make different decisions on what architectures are best suited for your needs, but the competition in the market improves the options and prices for everyone.

I've been using Asahi since the fall of 2022. When I first started using it a lot of software was broken because of bugs in that software that had never been exposed before (specifically around page sizes larger than 4k). All of that software has now been fixed. Support for linux/arm will only continue to improve as more people use it.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[] No.36215428[source]
Point me to the Apple contributed drivers in the kernel please.
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psanford ◴[] No.36216120[source]
Why does Apple need to contribute to this work to make it somehow legitimate or good? I own some nice hardware (an m2-air), I want to run Linux on it. Asahi allows me to do that! Why can we not celebrate that the asahi team is bringing oss to new hardware?
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2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[] No.36216924[source]
They don't need to. I keep seeing that Apple does no less than other companies w/ regard to Linux. Well- where are their kernel contributions then? Lenovo and Dell (my two laptop manufacturers) contribute.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux...

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psanford ◴[] No.36217015{4}[source]
> I keep seeing that Apple does no less than other companies w/ regard to Linux.

Where did I make that claim in this thread?

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1. 2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[] No.36217515{5}[source]
> in an ecosystem hostile to OSS

> You are describing how most OSS software has been developed.

Nope. Disagree here

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2. psanford ◴[] No.36217904[source]
Cool, thats a different claim than what you said above but at least one I can actually engage with.

I've run linux on many Dell and Lenovo systems over the last 25 years. Most of those systems were fully unsupported by the manufactures for anything but windows. And yet, random people on the internet contributed to make that hardware (mostly) work. I've not seen any particular improvement in the driver situation since Dell started selling linux certified systems.

Its not really surprising though, Dell is just an integrator. All they do for their systems with linux pre-installed is to pick hardware that already has drivers. They took a little bit of work out of needing to research if a given configuration is likely to work or not with linux (which is good). They don't really deserve much credit beyond that.

Its also a little funny because most drivers from hardware manufacturers suck. I don't know why, but most hardware companies are terrible at writing software. Its easy to list off hardware companies that have a long history of shipping mediocre, buggy linux drivers: nvidia, amd, broadcom, realtek, (maybe i should just list every nic and wireless chipset manufacturer). Some of these companies have gotten better and have learned how to be good kernel contributors, but they were mostly bad for years and years. Thankfully in some of those cases random people on the internet reverse engineered the hardware and contributed from scratch drivers to the kernel. Most of the time I've been happier with the experience of running those from scratch drivers than what hardware manufactures ship.

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3. mfuzzey ◴[] No.36218763[source]
Absolutely. A large part of the reason is that in the OSS world the architecture is optimised to make as much as possible common between drivers for different hardware.

For example for GPU drivers Mesa has tons of common code (NIR, GLSL parser etc) that is shared by all drivers with just the hardware specific parts being per driver whereas closed source vendor drivers reinvent the wheel each time.

Similarly for kernel wifi drivers there is a single MAC802.11 stack shared by all drivers.

Vendor drivers have an initial head start since those writing them have access to internal documents describing the hardware interface and don't have to do reverse engineering. But, over time, OSS drivers can be better as improvements to common code help all drivers.

In fact I think the best way hardware vendors could help OSS is not to provide drivers but documentation.