OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

From a follow up post on Mastadon https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...:

"Also in this update:

We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines.

Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash.

Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably increasing single-core performance.

Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting too toasty on your lap.

Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone, thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad drivers.

A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with the headphone jack codec.

New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode.

U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control your bootloader.

And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."

"New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode."

This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature?

I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone as well.

> This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple

Yes, battery charge control is a hardware(/firmware) feature supported on other modern laptops as well, such as the Lenovo ThinkPads, but it's not a standard so it requires explicit driver and OS support.

OpenBSD recently added support for this as well for both of these implementations (Apple silicon and ThinkPads).

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168436150408382&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168458409622780&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168521616605492&w=2

I know certain Android/Samsung phones support this as well, not sure about iOS/macOS.

If your laptop firmware doesn't support it, here is one trick if you have a removable battery:

Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts. That will make the firmware think the battery is overheating. It will then refuse to charge, but will still happily discharge.

You can do that to keep your battery at 80% while still on AC power. Handy if you operate from AC power 99% of the time, yet don't want your battery to die from being stored at 100% charge and hot for many years.

> Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts.

Bad, very bad idea if you don't know what you are doing - depending on where the "smarts" in the BMS are, you may damage your battery or make your BMS think the pack is broken or prevent your BMS from recognizing a charge state mismatch (and in the worst case, a cell going undervoltage or reverse polarity) as you have a good chance that you cut off one of the cell balancer contacts. This trick only works with removable phone batteries.