Apple Silicon Macs Running Linux Receive Major Gaming Update

[groove-agent]

Asahi Linux is getting there. I'm amazed that they have working openGL support at all given that Apple does not help with this at all (there is no documentation on how these things work internally). The fact that they've already achieved this and have been able to make it reasonably reliable means we will very likely see much improved support in the years to come.

Isn't OpenGL a really antiquated API? If so, why continue to develop it when we have Vulcan etc? I'm asking because I genuinely don't know.

 

[groove-agent]

Would this get rid of temporal dithering?

Sounds like something from Star Trek.

 

[ArkSingularity]

Isn't OpenGL a really antiquated API? If so, why continue to develop it when we have Vulcan etc? I'm asking because I genuinely don't know.

You're correct, OpenGL is quite dated. It's a "lowest common denominator" target for a lot of graphics acceleration (we have newer and faster APIs), but openGL is very well supported. Having it available is definitely a good thing.

I have a lot of confidence in the team that they will be able to get newer APIs working in the coming years. They've had to reverse engineer Apple's GPU architecture without any of their help, and a lot of the hardest work involved in that has already been done (and was required just to get the openGL drivers working at all).

Asahi is still young. Their userbase is likely to explode once Apple starts phasing out software support for the first generation Apple Silicon Macs, so I think its future is bright.

 

[seek3r]

Isn't OpenGL a really antiquated API? If so, why continue to develop it when we have Vulcan etc? I'm asking because I genuinely don't know.

One of the advantages is that implementing ES first helps with Vulkan, see my comment and link earlier in the thread

 

[ghanwani]

Sounds like something from Star Trek.

Pretty much is.

 

[ddavid]

Are we any closer to actually running Linux on M1/2 Macs? I'm seeing a lot of aspirational software planning, but nothing tangible.

 

[maternidad]

Are we any closer to actually running Linux on M1/2 Macs? I'm seeing a lot of aspirational software planning, but nothing tangible.

There are definitely many tangible things. In fact, Linux runs on Apple silicon Macs already. Here’s a presentation about Linux on Apple silicon that was streamed using Linux on an Apple chip.

 

[seek3r]

Are we any closer to actually running Linux on M1/2 Macs? I'm seeing a lot of aspirational software planning, but nothing tangible.

Closer? Aspirational? We’ve been there for a while… Asahi, what’s discussed in the article, runs native and is already pretty solid… you can install it anytime you want to try:

Asahi Linux

asahilinux.org