“With those changes we're up to a 94% pass rate for dEQP-GLES2”

https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1470870852422053890

by mmastrac • 5 years ago

146 53 5 years ago

twitter.com

gjsman-10006• 5 years ago

"Implementing the GPU is the hard part."

"It will take Asahi Linux years to get graphical acceleration."

"Maybe they'll have graphics figured out by 2024 if they are lucky."

Doubters gonna doubt. OpenGLES 2 for Asahi Linux on the M1, 94% conformity, just 1 year later.

sudosysgen13• 5 years ago

I think that's pretty consistent? If it takes one year for OpenGL ES2 coverage, not even optimization, it will probably take two more years at least for proper optimized Vulkan/SPIR-V/OpenGL 4 support along with accelerated vidéo encode and decode support.

gjsman-10006• 5 years ago

True - but the 2024 cynics (as seen primarily on forums like Phoronix) doubted that there would be OpenGLES in this time frame.

coldtea• 5 years ago

They don't implement OpenGL ES2, they figure out the GPU / graphics drivers interfaces / etc, and OpenGL ES2 then works as more features are made available.

If they have coverage of the GPU, then Vulcan and so on will play for the features ES2 does. Besides you don't need support for all exotic features to run Linux with hw acceleration.

rrss• 5 years ago

this is great progress and Alyssa Rosenzweig is awesome, but afaik the gpu is not usable from Linux yet because the kernel driver is not yet written.

the asahi team is very talented, but I don’t think their progress means building a software stack for an undocumented gpu is not difficult.

gjsman-10006• 5 years ago

According to Hector Martin, writing the kernel driver will be easy as "all the magic happens in userspace." So even though the driver is running in userspace on macOS it won't be that much work to run in Linux, apparently.

phkahler2• 5 years ago

I'm still concerned about that weird back and forth between driver and firmware that she talked about in one of the blog posts. Not really a stable API it seems.

gjsman-10006• 5 years ago

They said it's no problem - just use a fixed version of the macOS Display Controller firmware of your choice. For example, they might target the macOS 12.1 version of the firmware, maybe upgrade to the macOS 12.4 version a year later... It's not stable but it's easily made stable.

acchow• 5 years ago

Will this follow the 80/20 rule?

ZiiS• 5 years ago

Yes they have done 94% of the work, only another 94% to completion.

whateveracct• 5 years ago

Laymen programmers vastly overestimate systems work because they mythologize it.

It's just attitude & elbow grease at the end of the day, and Asahi Linux clearly had plenty of both of those! Cheers.

nend• 5 years ago

Maybe, but layman programmers also tend to vastly underestimate the work needed to finish projects, because "it's easy, you just need to..."

I would assume the last 10% is going to be just as hard as the first 90%, just like most engineering projects.

sudosysgen13• 5 years ago

I fear you may be overly optimistic. Open source community graphics drivers are not a first, and you can go out and see how much success they have without corporate support.

Writing a truly high performance modern graphics drivers is really no small task. There is a reason why NVidia, AMD and Intel employ large teams to the task.

still_grokking2• 5 years ago

So why it's so hard to have open-source drivers for say Nvidia GPUs?

If you can reverse-engineer Apple's completely new chips it should be a breeze to do the same with already very well know chips form Nvidia, isn't it?

What's the difference? Is there any difference at all?

sudosysgen13• 5 years ago

The big issue with NVidia GPUs is that NVidia won't allow opensource drivers to set the clock rate on newer graphics cards.

However even on older cards where this is not an issue, community drivers tend to lag behind. It is far for a breeze. So far they are leveraging the Mesa driver infrastructure to implement OpenGL ES 2.0, which is a good beginning. The really hard part is supporting all of the latest technologies at a good performance. It's too early to know if that will be a breeze or not.

piinbinary• 5 years ago

What does a "discard if <condition>" instruction actually do?

etaioinshrdlu• 5 years ago

It allows a pixel shader to basically return fully transparent, letting previously drawn objects show through.

GeekyBear2• 5 years ago

According to Hector Martin in the last progress report, the Wifi driver is up next, then some not terribly demanding work on various drivers (like adapting the NetBSD driver for the real time clock, and getting the M1 iMac SKU with four USB ports to see all four) after which he will tackle the kernel driver for the GPU.

https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/

As an interesting aside, in the progress report he mentions that after he installed Arch Linux, even without support for the hardware GPU:

glxgears has no right to run at >60FPS with software rendering, but it does

Klinky• 5 years ago

When has glxgears ever been demanding[1]? I would hope a modern CPU could handle a few hundred vertices(guessing) at 60fps.

1. https://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Glxgears_is_not_a_Benchmar...

mappu• 5 years ago

On an Intel 7700k, using `LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1` to force llvmpipe, glxgears reports ~3900fps, compared to ~20000fps on GPU (RX570 amdgpu).

gpm• 5 years ago

He was livestreaming the wifi work today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kOlrBUKAfM

I only glanced at the last minute, sounds like it's not working, but pretty close (I could have interpreted his comments wrong though).

drewg123• 5 years ago

What functionality remains to make it a viable alternative to MacOS on an M1 13" MBP or MBA? It seems like wifi is the biggest remaining hurdle?

kelnos• 5 years ago

Parent posted a link to a blog post that has a table that lists how support for various hardware and drivers is going. From that I think you can make your own determination based on what matters to you.

ncmncm• 5 years ago

We don't deserve Alyssa.

“With those changes we're up to a 94% pass rate for dEQP-GLES2”

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