Linux M1 GPU driver passes 99% of the dEQP-GLES2 compliance tests

https://twitter.com/linaasahi/status/1583444549648543744

by tpush • 4 years ago

545 175 4 years ago

Pet_Ant• 4 years ago

From https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle/+/main/doc/dEQ... it looks like drawElements (dEQP) is:

drawElements (dEQP) is a very robust and comprehensive set of open-source tests for GLES2, GLES3+ and EGL. They provide a huge net of coverage for almost every GL API feature.

So this is some CSS Acid test for OpenGL Embedded Systems (GLES).

AbacusAvenger• 4 years ago

It's more than that, it's the official conformance tests:

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/VK-GL-CTS/blob/main/external...

lynguist• 4 years ago

It was unnecessary to mention Acid. Acid was meant to test cherrypicked unimplemented features, not to test coverage.

rnk2• 4 years ago

How far along is running a regular linux desktop os with working ui on an m1? Recently there were articles that Linus had been using an M1 running some version of linux but there were some aspects of the system that weren't working well, believe it was the ui, maybe he was even in text mode.

delroth• 4 years ago

See https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support . The laptops are very usable as a daily driver on Linux already, but not 100% is supported and depending on your specific requirements some of the missing hardware support might be a deal breaker. You can very much run a normal Linux desktop with a working UI, that's been working for months, it just doesn't have hardware rendering acceleration (but the CPU is fast enough to make this tolerable).

rnk2• 4 years ago

Thanks. My use case is normal linux use, but I need to occasionally run x86 code in a linux vm. So (1) running linux, (2) running a different arch vm, (3) some gui apps.

I have already been reading the state of running x86 vms on macos on an m1, it is slow but my friends claim usable. Add it on an early linux impl on native m1, then x86 vm.

Why am I torturing myself? I want to get back to having a great fanless system like I used to have on a google pixel laptop, where they had underclocked x86 but running without a fan was great.

criddell• 4 years ago

Is the battery life when running Asahi Linux close to what it is with macOS?

robear• 4 years ago

Support matrix - https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

You can run a GUI but it would currently run on the CPU not GPU. Reports are that the UI is quite snappy running on the CPU. The basic Asahi install is Arch with KDE. Linus apparently put Fedora on his travel laptop. What Linus was complaining about is Chrome support, which is coming or maybe is already available - https://twitter.com/asahilinux/status/1507263017146552326?la...

david_allison• 4 years ago

Besides Asahi, I've done dev work on arm64 Ubuntu running under Parallels (GUI works fine).

JLCarveth• 4 years ago

Not Linux per se, but there was a post recently about OpenBSD support for M2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274679

trenchgun• 4 years ago

It is based on Asahi.

anthk4• 4 years ago

That's OpenBSD -stable, the -current edition, that's it, "rolling" "release", already had it.

mkurz2• 4 years ago

I am using Arch/Asahi Linux on a new MacBook Pro M1 Pro since July as daily driver. I mainly use IntelliJ IDEA for Java and Scala development in KDE (which is installed by default if you choose the UI install). For IntelliJ you have to download the aarch64 JBR yourself and set it in a config file. However upgcoming version 2022.3 will support aarch64/arm OS out of the box... So far it works very very good. Rendering is done by the CPU, but the machine is so fast it's not really an issue (at least compared to my old Thinkpad). However can't wait for the GPU driver to arrive, looking at the posted tweet., I guess that should happen within the next few weeks. For Zoom calls (which I don't have so often) I still have to switch to macOS right now, but AFAIK USB 3 support should work also soon, so I can use my Elgato Facecam soon hopefully. I can listen music/watch youtube with my Pixel Buds Pro via Bluetooth, no problem. Suspending/closing the lid doesn't freeze the userspace yet, but this is already fixed and will arive soon: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1582363763617181696 In the last 4 months I only heard the fan once or twice, when opening dozens tabs that run aggressive adds (animations), but with the upcoming GPU driver that will not be an issue anymore. And by "hear" I mean like "what is this quite noice...? or that's the macbook fans..." - when I start my old Thinkpad, it's like a airplane in the runway preparing to start. Battery life is quite good actually, this week I was taking my Macbook out for lunch and working in a coffee for like 2,5 - 3 hours, doing Java/Scala development (but not much compiling actually, just hacking in the IDE) afterwards I had like 69% left. Also it barely gets hot - it does a bit sometimes in the ads scenario above, but most of the time it stays cool. It does get a bit hot when charging (which is normal according to other users).

Personally, after a long time Thinkpad and Dell XPS user, I am so happy about my Macbook, which is my first, they will have to try hard to win me back. And I am saying this as non Apple user (never had an iPad, MacBook, iPhone, whatever). Asahi + Macbook Pro is really really great and IMHO, even in it's early stage and IMHO for Linux enthusiastics will be the killer device in the upcoming years.

BTW: I bought the Macbook in April and gave macOS a serious chance (after being a pure Linux user since 15 years). Tried to set it up for my needs... But I gave up in July, I just can't handle it, for me it's like a toy. It's good for people (like my wife) who browse the internet and do some office work, but for software devs that need to get shit done fast and like to have an open system its... kind of crap (just my pesonal opionion).

biomcgary• 4 years ago

My experience is almost exactly the same. The M1 Air is my first Apple product. I don't like Mac OS after trying it (too dev unfriendly), but love the hardware. I was only willing to purchase the Air because of Asahi Linux (as a backup to giving Mac OS a shot).

whywouldyoudo2• 4 years ago

How far along is running a regular linux desktop os with working ui on an m1?

The total number of people who will be doing this will number in the hundreds. Not to diminish what an interesting achievement it is.

rowanG077• 4 years ago

Impressive! Is this the same test suite that was already ran on OSX using Alyssa's user space driver but now on Linux using the Rust kernel driver?

If so that seems to be shaping up REALLY well!

yewenjie• 4 years ago

Can somebody explain how much of the work on M1 GPU can be reused for M2?

3836293648• 4 years ago

The vast majority of it. She and Alyssa discussed it during their talk at the Xorg conference.

_fizz_buzz_• 4 years ago

Do they get help from Apple? Is there documentation of the M1? This is such a massive achievement!

leidenfrost• 4 years ago

The only help is from the bootloader side and by not having Apple actively obscuring things.

Conpared to other reverse engineering projects, the M1 macs are not a moving target and they dont have to encounter new lockdowns every time, unlike other reverse engineering scenarios lile the cracking scene or emulators

lostlogin• 4 years ago

not having Apple actively obscuring things.

This seems quite a big deal for Apple - and said as a long time Apple user.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Do they get help from Apple?

Indirectly. Apple made some changes in the past that were likely geared towards helping them. Was on kernel not gpu though I think:

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994

Don't think they got active help in the "here's the docs" sense

Wowfunhappy2• 4 years ago

In context of GP's question, I think this counts as a "no". Apple added a very small feature to make booting Linux easier, which we can safely assume was put there for the benefit of Asahi. Apple broke Asahi's old method in an update, so provided an alternate stable interface.

singhrac• 4 years ago

Also another drive by question, but I was surprised that the Apple TVs have A-series chips. Has anyone worked with Asahi on the A-series? I assume the performance isn’t great but curious about the technical challenges.

galad872• 4 years ago

The A-series don't support booting from a third party OS, unless someone found a security issue that can be exploited to make it boot something else it won't be possible to run Linux on it.

GeekyBear4• 4 years ago

If you pick up an older device running on an A11 SOC or earlier, they have an unpatchable vulnerability in the bootloader code, so those devices could be repurposed with worrying about a locked bootloader.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/devel...

dlivingston• 4 years ago

AFAIK, the latest A-series chip to boot Linux is the A7/A8 (so, iPhone 7-ish): https://konradybcio.pl/linuxona7/

my123• 4 years ago

A7-A11 via checkm8.

syntaxing• 4 years ago

Does this mean there’s a decent chance to get this working in UTM? How much is this stuff transferrable to QEMU?

NobodyNada• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that GPU acceleration in virtual machines uses a "passthrough" method where the graphics calls on the guest system are simply translated to public APIs on the host system, and go through macOS's GPU drivers as usual. VMWare Fusion has had this capability on M1 since about a month or two ago.

This project is designed to provide an open-source replacement for macOS's GPU drivers in order to boot Linux bare-metal, so it solves an entirely different problem. Maybe some of the knowledge will carry over -- especially the userspace side of things Alyssa was working on -- but as far as I know this is not automatically transferrable.

fulafel2• 4 years ago

GPU passthrough is the opposite, there the hypervisor exposes the HW to a guest and the guest runs the bare-metalndriver.

viraptor2• 4 years ago

For utm the interesting tech is venus / virgl (https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2021/11/26/venu...) Like the other comments say this work is not really applicable to qemu.

2bitencryption• 4 years ago

* clean-room M1 GPU driver created by (seemingly) one dev in a matter of months

* an excellent POC of Rust drivers on Linux

* the dev live-streamed almost every minute of development

* the dev is a virtual anime girl

So far I'm LOVING 2022.

gpm2• 4 years ago

by (seemingly) one dev

I think Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina both did pretty substantial work on this?

dottedmag• 4 years ago

GPU driver is mostly by Alyssa, DCP (display controller) is mostly by Lina.

kelnos• 4 years ago

I believe Rosenzweig was responsible for the user-space bits; this post is about the kernel driver, which (as I understand it) was done entirely by Asahi Lina.

(Both of them deserve a ton of praise, of course.)

nicce• 4 years ago

It is impressive. I remember reading something related to new abstractions in chip level. The most of the GPU drivers are actually on some specific chip and it works similarly regardless of the OS. Kernel developers actually develop against this new abtraction layer and not directly against GPU. Does someone has more information about this, or was this nonsense?

outworlder• 4 years ago

That's even acknowledged in the tweet thread.

sorenjan• 4 years ago

Aren't they the same person though? I've only seen small parts of a presentation, this vtuber stuff is not for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XSJG5xGZfU&t=21330s

dylan604• 4 years ago

one "anime" girl, 2 "anime" girls, 10 dev bros, I don't really care at this point. Color me impressed at the skillz required to make this to the point it is in the time it is. Way past anything I might dream about doing myself. So many kudos to any/all involved male/female/other doesn't matter in the slightest for the possibility to use the hardware to whatever I want.

robert_foss• 4 years ago

Mesa lets OpenGL(ES) drivers to share a lot of code. This doesn't take anything away from this achievement however.

foobarian• 4 years ago

Having seen some of Rosenzweig's work and talks, I would say "twenty devs".

pas• 4 years ago

interesting! can you share some details?

jancsika• 4 years ago

the dev live-streamed almost every minute of development

Is there an archive of this dev work?

tbodt• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/AsahiLina

mdp20216• 4 years ago

So far I'm LOVING 2022

Stoical irony.

Edit: Look: you can be excited by some tech advance, but no - 2022 remains part of an ongoing global disaster. The above quoted sentence is hardly manageable. The best it deserves is to be read like some twisted humour.

mechanical_bear5• 4 years ago

“Ongoing global disaster”

Life is good and only getting better :- Not sure where this “global disaster”, but then again I’m not a Doomer.

a13692099932• 4 years ago

2022 remains part of an ongoing global disaster.

Which of the several dozen currently ongoing global disasters are you referring to, and, bluntly, why should we care?

NavinF2• 4 years ago

Eh it's not so bad in the US. Sure the economy isn't doing too good and gas prices are still high, but most people are overall doing alright. If there was a literal disaster, 9mm wouldn't be selling for $0.20

shepherdjerred• 4 years ago

Ah yes, I sure do miss YEAR_IDENTIFIER where nothing went wrong.

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

Can someone explain the virtual thing?

Who's running this operation.

arlort• 4 years ago

The dev is Asahi Lina (I presume a pseudonym https://twitter.com/LinaAsahi ) and when she livestreams the coding sessions instead of a video feed there's an avatar (an animated anime girl) and the voice is modulated to fit the part as well

A random stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbVQWo0kh9Q

Teknoman117• 4 years ago

* the dev is a virtual anime girl

Who had "skilled Linux kernel vtuber writes reverse engineered drivers for Apple hardware" on their 2022 bingo cards?

modshatereality• 4 years ago

Well that's bad news for anyone hoping this driver would ever be upstreamed, linux requires real identity for participation.

schaefer• 4 years ago

Sorry for the off topic question, but can a person dual boot Mac OS and a native Linux install on the M1???

thrtythreeforty• 4 years ago

Yes. That's what happens by default when you run the Asahi installer

rvz• 4 years ago

The correct straightforward answer is, not yet. (The installer is neither reliable or stable)

This is why everyone else (non-developers) are waiting for a reliable release first rather than trying it out, something goes wrong and another person will find out and say: 'it's not ready for general use.'

torpv12• 4 years ago

Your first sentence is not accurate as, by default, the Asahi installer sets up a separate partition for dual-boot purposes. The Asahi developers have even recommended keeping this configuration in order to receive future firmware updates from Apple.

GeekyBear4• 4 years ago

Apple designed a new bootloader that enforces security settings per partition and not per machine, so not only can you run a third party OS, doing so does not degrade the security when you boot the Mac partition.

glial• 4 years ago

I had to read that three times to make sure I was reading right. That's very...open...of them.

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

I can't wait till we get a Linux iPad Pro

speedgoose• 4 years ago

I’m afraid most of the Linux classic applications will not be designed with multitouch inputs in mind. It may improve eventually, with newer software being created.

noveltyaccount• 4 years ago

But with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, could be a compelling form factor

mdp20216• 4 years ago

It's open, we will add the gestures.

sofixa3• 4 years ago

iPads don't have the open bootloader of the Macbooks that would allow that.

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

That's an obstruction, but usually someone eventually finds a way around that part. But we never get a usable OS for the hardware even if we can run arbitrary code. We have been able to run linux on older iphones for a while now but I'm not sure it's ever been a useful thing to do.

fsflover• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883

lamontcg• 4 years ago

Are we any closer to eGPU support for apple silicon?

mulderc• 4 years ago

I am skeptical that we will ever see that.

fragmede3• 4 years ago

given that thunderbolt 3 is basically PCI, the only far fetched part would be having to write a 3rd party driver for the card. Given the high end businesses that exist in this world to work with video on the (eg Davinci on the iPad which was recently on the front page), combined with a demand for absolute highest end GPU performance, I think there's a business case for it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to be open source though.

rollcat• 4 years ago

Under macOS? Not until Apple acts, I guess.

nicoburns4• 4 years ago

Presumably on linux this would "just work" (assuming drivers for the IO ports are written)?

amaranth• 4 years ago

I remember seeing this wasn't possible because the CPU uses 16KB page tables but GPUs only know how to work with 4KB but I can't find the reference anymore. I don't know if this just requires a change in VBIOS or a whole new GPU but it would mean it's up to nvidia, AMD, or Intel to make a Mac-specific GPU even though no Apple Silicon devices have PCIe slots so it would only be for the small minority of Mac users inside the small minority of eGPU users.

THENATHE• 4 years ago

How likely is this to make some kind of stride in the macOS gaming world? Perhaps some kind of "headless" Linux VM that functions similar to parallels or wine that can essentially then run a proton layer to bring macOS up to par with Linux gaming. Can someone with more knowledge than me explain if that is feasible in the coming months/years?

sofixa3• 4 years ago

I don't think that's at all the goal or even vague direction of the Asahi Linux project. It's to replace macOS, not to run as a VM within it.

It's already possible to do what you want, with Parallels and any modern arm64 Linux distro, as long as the games are compiled for arm64 / you're willing to take the performance hit of emulation.

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

Not really macos gaming but it could be a bit thing for macbook gaming. My only laptop is a macbook and its powerful enough to run many of the games I play but they only run on windows/linux.

whywouldyoudo2• 4 years ago

How likely is this to make some kind of stride in the macOS gaming world?

It doesn't make any strides unfortunately.

Perhaps some kind of "headless" Linux VM

Linux narrowly supports the Steam Deck's goals. It doesn't make sense to use on a device like a Mac.

Can someone with more knowledge than me explain if that is feasible in the coming months/years?

An end user is best served by Parallels. Overall, it doesn't make sense to run Windows-only games on a Mac.

smoldesu13• 4 years ago

You might see a few games like Diablo 2 or DOOM running, but modern games are almost totally out of the question. The biggest roadblock is getting a complete Vulkan driver, which is at least a few years off. That would allow for DXVK to run, which enables the majority of Proton titles.

And then there's the issue of the stack itself. It's hard enough getting Wine and DXVK to run on hardware designed to run Windows/DirectX respectively, but running it through Rosetta/Box86, on Asahi, using half-finished video drivers, is probably not great for stability. Just my $0.02.

Edit: I thought you were talking about Asahi gaming. The state of Proton on MacOS is hopeless (Valve devs abandoned it after the Catalina announcement), but you can definitely run it in a VM if you're so-inclined. Wouldn't necessarily be any faster than using Windows in a VM, but it's still an option.

MayeulC• 4 years ago

Box86, Box64, or FEX-Emu. The latter is quite promising.

tmdh• 4 years ago

Well, this could be done this way,

1. A Linux VM which has steam installed on it. 2. A project like virglrenderer[1] for macOS and which processes Vulkan commands from the VM with virtio-gpu and sends data back. (I don't exactly know how it's done.)

This would allow games on the Linux VM's steam run at near-native GPU performance. On the CPU side, there still a need for instruction emulation like QEMU. Or, Apple posted somewhere that you can run x86_64 Linux binaries inside the VM with the help of Rosetta. or an ARM64 Linux VM with Steam running via FEX-Emu.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/virgl/virglrenderer

mechanical_bear5• 4 years ago

Awesome work, glad to see such progress. Why is this person using such a weird voice modulation? Or are they using a text to voice to engine? It makes it difficult to understand.

dheera• 4 years ago

I'd do that if I posted videos online, I hate hearing my voice.

jamiek88• 4 years ago

Well our best emulator writer in decades killed themselves over harassment for being non binary via kiwi farms murderers (not the right word but nor is simply troll) so why risk the attention if you don’t want it?

It’s tough out there in the culture wars.

Rest in peace Near you magnificent person.

mechanical_bear5• 4 years ago

I understand the sentiment, but if anything this draws more attention.

kevincox• 4 years ago

Because they want to.

I agree that it makes the videos hard to watch for me, but it's their choice to use and and my choice if I want to watch.

jl6• 4 years ago

This seems like a remarkable achievement for proprietary hardware. Doesn’t this sort of thing take years for the open Nvidia drivers?

fulafel2• 4 years ago

Here's the Freedreno story:

https://lwn.net/Articles/638908/

So in mid-2012 he decided to do something about it. He was working for TI at the time, so PowerVR-based GPUs (as used by TI) were off-limits. He found some hardware that had an Adreno 220 and started to reverse engineer it. He began work on a Gallium driver in November 2012. By early 2013, he had most of the "normal stuff" working. He could run GNOME Shell and some games on the hardware.

So it's been done before, but of course Freedreno's Rob Clark is undoubtedly exceptionally good as well.

You have to wonder if the M1 situation would be different if he had been working for another company... (M1 GPU is PowerVR descendant and there hasn't been a open source driver for that lineage historically)

For me it's a bit surprising that there are not more people working on it, the M1 having been out for 2 years already and this having wider appeal than the Freedreno initial users audience.

But, maybe the 1 person way is better, since the Nouveau history seems to be people coming and going and work progressing in fits and starts: https://lwn.net/Articles/269558/

(Also the nouveau people were first to start, so they cleared way and paid a lot of dues saved by subsequent projects)

edit: also nouveau history is somewhat chronicled in the early newsletters starting from the early 2006 days: https://people.freedesktop.org/~mslusarz/nouveau-wiki-dump/N...

fomine3• 4 years ago

Latest nouveau story https://lwn.net/Articles/910343/

Linux M1 GPU driver passes 99% of the dEQP-GLES2 compliance tests

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