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OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

asahilinux.org

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Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#11
From a follow up post on Mastadon https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...:

"Also in this update:

We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines.

Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash.

Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably increasing single-core performance.

Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting too toasty on your lap.

Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone, thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad drivers.

A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with the headphone jack codec.

New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode.

U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control your bootloader.

And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#12
post #4

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware fr…

> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability

You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#14
post #4

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware fr…

A car with one seat seems 100% complete if your use cases only involve you driving it alone. Asahi Linux is absolutely in that kind of spot right now. For some people there is 0 reason to wait, for others it's not even worth booting. If you have fear it's not fully complete enough, I'd say trust those feelings. At least right now.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#15
Sample-rate shading is exceptionally rare (MSAA is rare-ish these days, but I only know of exactly one title that has shipped sample-rate shading), so requiring a basic compiler transform to handle it, especially when they can do so easily because of their tiler architecture, is pretty sane.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#16
post #9
post #4

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware fr…

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening. I mean it would be nice…

There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing them.

Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#17
post #4

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware fr…

> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

Specifically GPU drivers, which can dramatically impact performance. Especially if I am attempting to run any kind of ML workload from Linux. I'm assuming it's basically a non-starter at this point and one is forced to use Mac OS.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#18

The work of the Asahi team is incredible, and so much fun to watch unfold. I wander if now that you can get a rack mount Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (launched yesterday, the second coming of XServe), running server workloads on them with Asahi Linux becomes a viable route for some people?

This is what they have support for at the moment:

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-d...

Maybe not quite possible to do today but if Asahi keeps up the pace they've made so far I bet it will be soon.

It helps that Apple has popular hardware so there's a good bit of people out there interested in developing support for Apple processors.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#19
post #4

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware fr…

> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

E.g. the performance you can get out of the GPU at the moment is a subset of what you can get out of the hardware. Or as another more generic example, until this latest release CPU boost states weren't enabled due to lack of proper cpuidle driver which resulted in regressed single thread performance.

There is nothing inherent about running Linux that will require it be slower, in some cases it will/is even faster, but the lack of everything being fully supported does actually impact performance right now. It has been getting better with time.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#20
Thanks to the entire Asahi team, your work is truly incredible and so far beyond my pay grade that words fail me. I honestly recently tried and very much struggled to communicate why I was so amazed by your project when talking with friends.

For anyone interested into the GPU side, I can't recommend Linas streams[1] enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams

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