The first conformant M1 GPU driver

Linux@lemmy.ml – 262 points – 11 months ago

Conformant OpenGL® ES 3.1 drivers are now available for M1- and M2-family GPUs. That means the drivers are compatible with any OpenGL ES 3.1 application.

Our reverse-engineered, free and open source graphics drivers are the world’s only conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for M1- and M2-family graphics hardware. That means our driver passed tens of thousands of tests to demonstrate correctness and is now recognized by the industry.

Why did we pursue standards conformance when the manufacturer did not? Above all, our commitment to quality. We want our users to know that they can depend on our Linux drivers. We want standard software to run without M1-specific hacks or porting.

An amazing accomplishment and a real feather in the cap for Rust.

When are we going to see this incorporated into the mainline kernel?

Traces of the Rust work gets merged in every version. They come in small pieces, and now the next version has even more abstractions that are needed for the M1 GPU driver to eventually get there.

How long til apple grabs that source and repacks it into one of their closed, proprietary drivers?

Why would they do that? They're intentionally not supporting OpenGL, so that people use their proprietary API

I would love to see Apple go down the route of actually supporting modern OpenGL and Vulkan on their hardware. The hardware is amazing but forcing software to rely on Metal just holding it back especially when it comes to games.

Well, they sort of support Vulkan via a translation layer called MoltenVK. This is how the Dolphin emulator was able to get GameCube games running on M1, for example.

That's probably the most that Mac users will get, unfortunately - the only games that Apple will care about are the ones exclusive to their Apple Arcade service, which will therefore use the Metal API anyway...

I hope they do not. I wish they stay stupidly stubborn until it's too late.

They're a 3 trillion dollar company, they can stay stupidly stubborn longer than any of us can stay alive

6 more...

7 more...

Wow the explanation of how they reverse engineered their way to pixel atomics was super interesting!

Apple beat by 2 people.

2 women, none the less :)

why did you feel the need to highlight they were women? It feels like you’re implying women are worse at programming, devaluing their effort.

Uh, no, because women are underrepresented in the software industry and there's a clear bias against non-males in this area. Only 5% of developers identify as female[1].

I only meant to celebrate diversity, and give a fuck you to this techbro society. I hope more non-males tune in to Asahi Lina's livestreams and realize to not give up an interest in programming because of their gender.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender/

Exactly this. And it shows a good example for other underrepresented genders that there are others too in the field and they are absolutely amazing; seriously in the top 1% of the devs.

There is no proof to be a bias against non-male in the programming world. As far as I know, any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn't the action of some oppression or shaming. Worse, countries that are less egalitarian are a more equal ratio of women and men, like India, as opposed to a lot of western countries. It'll never change unless you manage to brainwash a good amount of women into thinking they like programming, despite them not liking it.

any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming.

Sexism is not constrained to a single nationality, and the patriarchy is international.

Maybe you’re not aware, but what you just posted was a misogynistic screed. Do better.

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