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Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

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Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When talking about impressive performance of a "day 1" build I feel there is a difference between new drivers and new ports of existing drivers.

This isn't a port of an existing driver. It's completely new Kernel space + user space driver. Of course it makes use of the mesa "framework" but that doesn't mean the driver is 27 years old.

What do you think porting a driver to a completely new GPU means? Doing so will require new kernel space and user space code. The existence of these new components doesn't mean there is a completely new graphics driver. Only parts of it that are platform specific are new.

The graphics driver of a system spans from a talking to the hardware to exposing a graphics API such as OpenGL or Vulkan for applications to use. Splitting up the graphics driver into separate components and calling each component a driver is different from what I mean when I am referring to a driver.

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a port of an existing driver. It's completely new Kernel space + user space driver. Of course it makes use of the mesa "framework" but that doesn't mean the driver is 27 years old.

What do you think porting a driver to a completely new GPU means? Doing so will require new kernel space and user space code. The existence of these new components doesn't mean there is a completely new graphics driver. Only parts of it that are platform specific are new. The graphics driver of a system spans from a talking to the hardware to exposing a graphics API such as OpenGL or Vulkan for applications to use. S…

Mesa isn't a driver. Mesa is just an abstraction on top of the software that DRIVES the hardware (a driver), which is being written from scratch. Nobody (including the Asahi developers) but you subscribes to your definition of a driver. Drivers implementing Mesa may share next to nothing in common, so no, it's not a "port".

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#63

Wait, I can't even run it on amd64 right now! It's stalled at this point: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/com...

Wrong version! Arguably (my opinion) an illegitimate version. Another comment mentions some reasons to think that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33690135

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#64
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>day 1 driver Mesa is 27 years old.

I believe they're calling it Day 1 in the sense that the devs themselves are saying a lot of it is hacked together and not daily driver material for most of the users. A lot of releases and revisions before this is even upstreamed.

[deleted]

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#65
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is pretty incredible in a day 1 driver. It's already playable. What a great year this team has had. Thanks Alyssa, Yuka, and Lina.

>day 1 driver Mesa is 27 years old.

I don't think Mesa is referred to as a driver here and I'm not sure why it should be.

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#66
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if OpenGL 4.0-4.6 is less work in general. I'd argue implementing Vulkan gives the best ROI, since it gives all OpenGL after that without extra effort. And I don't think that few applications use it. Anything modern tries to. The rest are planning to move to it.

I believe, and I couldn't quickly find it in the docs, that Mesa provides certain OpenGL versions if you have implement certain OpenGLES version. For for example if you have OpenGLES3 you get OpenGL 3 for free via Mesa (These version numbers are made up, I don't actually know which OGL version can be implemented in terms of OGLES)

It's the other way around. GLES Versions become a subset of later OpenGL Versions.

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#67
post #20

At 28 FPS…

Yes, and at a really low resolution. That's okay, it's expected. Make It Work, Make It Right, Make It Fast. I personally didn't expect Asahi would get this far on steps #1 and #2 nearly as quickly as they have. It's bloody impressive.

It’s at a 2004 resolution at sub 2004 FPS and the title is clickbait claiming it “runs”, sorry but 28 FPS isn’t considered playable in my book. I’m just not as impressed by that as people pretend I should be. They should have waited and at least gotten a solid 60 before this should’ve been shown off. The sad state of the Apple (and Microsoft too) reverse engineering scene has been obliterated by lawsuits and this whole Asahi Linux thing is a fluke that someone hadn’t got shut down yet. It actually saddens me what shambles the Apple RE’ing scene is for it to be taking this long to achieve only this meager level of support. Seemingly only 2 or 3 people in the world are working on this? For the most powerful laptops in the world?

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#69
post #49

Now we still need Minecraft to become open source.

The state of open source Minecraft is nuanced enough to be interesting. The Minecraft ip and codebases are currently owned by Microsoft and have technically always been closed source, but the nature of the game and its development history are such that third party mods and modding apis are very common. Because the original edition of the game is written in Java, it's relatively easy to decompile and develop for. In f…

> EDIT: Turns out the Bedrock Edition modding api was discontinued earlier this year [5].

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Any day now they will announce the eventual deprecation of the original Java-based Minecraft.

Re: Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

#70
post #13

Already using Asahi Linux on my M1 Air; can't wait until the GPU stuff lands! Extremely impressive work by all involved!

As a hobby or are you actually getting some benefits?

I guess the biggest benefit is to be able to run Linux and stay away from macOS. For many of us this is a huge thing.
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