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Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

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Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#281

Post by sph »

puyoxyz wrote: post #275
sph wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm old too, but I don't have a problem with avatars and virtual ones, it's the extremely high pitch and cartoony voices VTubere tend to have. And why does it have to be anime or furry aesthetic every time? Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding. Even better, gimme the sarcastic high pitch of Skeletor. I'd also be fine with, I dunno, Lara Croft or other virtual female character. Everybody has their own…

> Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding. Oh my god I need this now

Personally I can't stop thinking about Skeletor doing code review lol

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#282

Post by krapp »

sph wrote: post #280
ranguna wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't do it probably because of copy rights. Don't know what constitutes enough change to the original character to be considered original work.

Inventing a new cartoon or 3D character can't be harder than designing an anime avatar.

It is actually harder. The anime aesthetic was literally designed to facilitate easier 2D animation. Notwithstanding the aesthetic itself being very popular (and thus more familiar to designers), many "non-anime" v-tubers like Layna Lazar or Juniper Actias will tend to incorporate anime elements because it's what they know and it's easier to implement, even if they're not trying to follow the "virtual idol" model set by Hololive and the like.

Also, one has to consider that this is an entertainment market almost exclusively bound to Twitch and Youtube, and it's counterproductive having an avatar that isn't going to appeal visually to the masses, generate clips and be supported by the algorithm.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#283

Post by dontlaugh »

cylon13 wrote: post #252
mnd999 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t like your implication that ARM is the only way to do this. The Apple chips are fast and low power because they are good designs built on a very modern fabrication process. It’s perfectly possible to build such chips with other designs and instruction sets, for example x86_64 or risc-v, in the same way it’s pretty common to build cheaper slower ARM processors. Plenty of folks at Intel and AMD are doing that ri…

There are fundamental issues with x86 that make it impossible to match the efficiency of ARM. Variable length instruction coding for instance, which means a surprising amount of power is dedicated to circuitry which is just to find where the instruction boundaries are for speculative execution. Made sense in the 80s when memory was scarce and execution was straightforward, but now it’s a barrier to efficiency that’s…

And sadly this partly applies to RISC-V too. It only achieves competitive density with the (optional) instruction compression, which makes instructions vary in length. Not as big of a problem as on x86, but still a fundamental limitation.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#285

Post by SXX »

coldtea wrote: post #261
p1necone wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly (30-60fps) with low-midrange dedicated gpus which is effectively what the M1 performs like on paper (I think it's in the ballpark of the NVidia 1050/1050ti/1650). You just have to lower the settings and resolution to get that smooth performance - think base model last gen console/nintendo switch levels of visual fidelity rather than up to date gaming pc/current gen…

> Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly I think the parent's point is "what AAA games would run on the M1, even if they finish GPU support, given that we're talking about ARM Linux?"

Actually Apple itself already released Rosetta for Linux VMs. I hope it might also be usable with Asahi to run Steam.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#286

Post by withinboredom »

cylon13 wrote: post #252
mnd999 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t like your implication that ARM is the only way to do this. The Apple chips are fast and low power because they are good designs built on a very modern fabrication process. It’s perfectly possible to build such chips with other designs and instruction sets, for example x86_64 or risc-v, in the same way it’s pretty common to build cheaper slower ARM processors. Plenty of folks at Intel and AMD are doing that ri…

There are fundamental issues with x86 that make it impossible to match the efficiency of ARM. Variable length instruction coding for instance, which means a surprising amount of power is dedicated to circuitry which is just to find where the instruction boundaries are for speculative execution. Made sense in the 80s when memory was scarce and execution was straightforward, but now it’s a barrier to efficiency that’s…

That sounds false to me. If that were solely the case, then the CPU could pad the instructions coming in and pretend they are all the same length.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#287

Post by MaKey »

dotnet00 wrote: post #89
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #18

Some added context: Many may be reading this the first time and wondering, What gives with the NVIDIA drivers (Nouveau)? To put it simply, NVIDIA screwed third-party drivers by requiring a ever-changing encrypted and signed blob, hidden deep within the proprietary driver package, to be sent to the GPU every time it boots. Otherwise, you can't change the clock speed of your NVIDIA GPU from the boot clock speed, which…

Hasn't NVIDIA been making pretty big steps towards a compromise on that front with the open source linux drivers they released a few months ago?

They didn't release open-source Linux drivers, just GPU kernel modules (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981).

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#288

Post by _ph_ »

lmm wrote: post #244
jorvi wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Linus used a MacBook Air as his daily driver for many many years. The XPS series might have caught up for a while, but until they flip over to ARM, Apple laptops simply blow anything else out of the water. What’s wrong with trying to run Linux on that?

It sets the wrong incentives. Companies that are more developer-friendly, publishing specs and so on, should be rewarded for it.

In principle I would agree, but the world isn't black and white. First of all, in the PC world, there are few machines which are completely and well documented. That Linux runs on so much PC hardware is more due to the popularity than great documentation. NVidia just recently finally open sourced their drivers.

Could Apple improve the documentation a lot? For sure! Bu on the other side, the ARM Macs are a very nice platform, so I can understand the desire to use it. There is no competition at the moment, so it would be wrong too, to not support Linux there.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#289

Post by amelius »

pdpi wrote: post #278
amelius wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you are saying is that engineers at Apple have nothing to say about this?

They do, demonstrably, have some sort of say. The M1 Macs have had deliberate support for 3rd party OSes since more or less day 1 (just not exposed/advertised), and Apple made some early changes to enable Asahi. Some recent comments by marcan on the topic: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1554395184473190400

I don't see engineers having a say here. Instead, I see a lot of praying, begging and hoping in that thread.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#290

Post by _piif »

SXX wrote: post #285
coldtea wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly I think the parent's point is "what AAA games would run on the M1, even if they finish GPU support, given that we're talking about ARM Linux?"

Actually Apple itself already released Rosetta for Linux VMs. I hope it might also be usable with Asahi to run Steam.

Box64 actually comes quite close to Rosetta in terms of translation speed and apparently that's with optimizations which have yet to be implemented[0]. Would make sense to just use that instead.

[0] https://box86.org/2022/03/box86-box64-vs-qemu-vs-fex-vs-rose...

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