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OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

asahilinux.org

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Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#211

Post by stirlo »

mfuzzey wrote: post #202
psanford wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to do so You are describing how most OSS software has been developed. I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it. A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing Arm issues in the…

>A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user space) While I don't have Apple hardware so haven't been closely following Asahi I dont't think that is true. Linux has supported Arm for years (more like decades) now. They've been doing excellent work on support for Apple specific hardware sure, generic Arm not so much since it was mostly done.

If you follow Hector Martin the lead Asahi dev he's encountered a number of bugs and race conditions in ARM linux systems which were never previously exposed because there weren't blazing fast ARM chips out there that could trigger them.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#212

Post by mixmastamyk »

vulcan01 wrote: post #191
mixmastamyk wrote: post #115

How much do you need macos around to use it? Sounds like the original install and then for firmware updates? I’d like to keep telemetry to a minimum and not use macos if possible.

Yes, that's right; I generally pop back in to macOS every so often to check for OS updates (which update the firmware as well - no way to just update the firmware).

I seem to remember there being a tiny recovery partition or cut-down version of macos or something maybe from boot CD (we have an old iMac).

Also found this:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-upda...

Still I'd rather have no MacOS.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#213

Post by stirlo »

JCWasmx86 wrote: post #30
kytazo wrote: post #3

Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom. I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capabl…

Would you say buying e.g. a Mac mini for 2.3k€ just to run Asahi Linux is worth it?

For €2300 I assume you're looking at an M2 Pro model? Note that neither the M2 or M2 Pro Mac Mini currently have working display outputs[1] so no you should not. Apple changed the way the display outputs work in M2 so they're now dependant on Thunderbolt/DP alt mode support which is not implemented for any Apple silicon machine yet.

On the other hand a cheap M1 Mac Mini would make a great machine to try it out. The M1 Mac Mini is the best supported machine currently.

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

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#214

Post by stirlo »

DCKing wrote: post #7

I wonder if the new Mac Pro's full PCI Express support resolves any limitations that prevents people from using GPUs over Thunderbolt on existing Apple Silicon hardware (this is apparently a hardware limitation). Although the Mac Pro's PCIe extensibility makes it a pretty mystifying niche product from Apple without providing memory and GPU expandability, once Asahi Linux gets running on there you should be able to no…

@Marcan shared some technical details around their PCI Express implementation recently here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557

It seems they didn't make any massive changes and instead just put switches on the existing PCI-E Lanes. That probably doesn't bode well for full GPU support :(

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#215

Post by kelnos »

microtonal wrote: post #119
acomjean wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an AMD Linux laptop I’ve been using for work. It’s great. The battery life is great, it’s quite fast with a lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged in). Build quality isn’t bad, plus affordable and lots of ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015 Mac book pro. Linux is the way to go. I don’t blame people with apple hardware for wanting it. I just don’t feel the x86 side is…

Two years ago or so I bought a ThinkPad with an AMD Ryzen CPU, there was a lot of hype about them. How Linux laptops were finally competitive, speed, driver, and battery-wise. The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it would discharge o…

Was the laptop advertised as supporting Linux, or, if not, did you at least do your research ahead of time to ensure that everything worked properly? Because clearly it didn't, so I expect Linux support was already known to not be in a great place before you bought it.

And yes, that sucks. We should have first-class support. It's no wonder macOS gained popularity among developers. But I've been running Linux on laptops for 15+ years now (even on Macs), and I've seen how it's changed from barely-working and having to futz with things at every kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I really have little patience for futzing around with things; I want something that works so I can do useful things on it). But, again: you need to choose your hardware carefully.

For reference, I had a 2016-model Razer Blade Stealth, which had no issues with Linux. Then in early 2019 I bought a 2018-model Dell XPS 13 that worked flawlessly (except for the fingerprint reader, which I knew ahead of time and accepted as ok). For the past yearish I've been using a Framework Laptop, which has had some problems (unrelated to Linux; Windows users have the same problems), but the hardware support on Linux has been solid.

Meanwhile, I'd constantly hear problems from my friends with Macs about how it could never stay connected to a wireless network after a couple hours (requiring a reboot to fix), or would frequently "beachball" under not that much load, or how the yearly major OS update would usually break their development setup. I used macOS on and off between 2005 and 2017 or so, and ran into plenty of issues as well.

While I certainly agree there's some laptop hardware that you just shouldn't run Linux on, the still-kicking Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field somehow causes people to ignore or explain away all the issues macOS has.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#216

Post by IshKebab »

freedomben wrote: post #61
jb1991 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been multiple reports of the last couple years that Apple has been informally internally helping the Asahi Linux team to make it run well on their hardware. Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course, but they are aware of the interest and are helping make it happen, in an unofficial capacity.

> Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course Why?

Yeah that's nonsense. They already have bootcamp.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#217

Post by viraptor »

hedora wrote: post #176
zamadatix wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

Has anyone tried Steam under Linux? It's quite bad under MacOS (2016 casual games stutter, and there is no 32 bit support). I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux, but I don't see any options to run steam / proton under rosetta either.

> Has anyone tried Steam under Linux?

Through FEX, yes https://vt.social/@lina/110068264684987710

> I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux

It does these days! https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#218

Post by smoldesu »

imiric wrote: post #196
psanford wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia/Nouveau is a good example. I've had a number of laptops with nvidia graphics. For most of that time Nouveau was _more stable_ than the official nvidia drivers. Linux clearly was a second class citizen for nvidia for most of the last 20 years. Maybe go back and rewatch linus' rant about nvidia if you need a reminder about how terrible they have been historically. Nvidia now only sort of cares about linux becaus…

See, now I just think you're gaslighting me. Nouveau has never been more stable, or nearly as performant as official NVIDIA drivers. I've had the exact opposite experience from you on every laptop I've had since Nouveau was released, so we must live in different universes. > Linux clearly was a second class citizen for nvidia And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :) Anyway, I think we've exhausted our argumen…

It's not gaslighting: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html

Nouveau is an awesome project, but for later cards it's basically a dead project. You can get some features to work, but without proper power management there's no justifiable reason to daily-drive it. The proprietary driver is by no means perfect (particularly for Wayland) but it's the only real option if you own a modern card.

> And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)

They must be awfully curious about why Xserve failed, then.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#219

Post by themulticaster »

aseipp wrote: post #42
kytazo wrote: post #3

Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom. I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capabl…

The compute accelerator story on mainstream, non-patched Linux, with upstream software isn't that good at the moment. You're going to be waiting a while before you can do fun stuff like organize layers across the Neural Engine and GPU for ML models, something CoreML can do today. Compute using graphics APIs exists, but it isn't really the same and loses out on many features people practically want and are used to, an…

Is the Neural Engine/CoreML used in "normal" desktop apps on macOS, or is it limited to specialized ML centered apps? In other words, where should I expect performance improvements if there was a hypothetical Mesa for compute accelerators? Spontaneously, I can only think of image editors like Photoshop offering AI-based tools.

Re: OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

#220

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

nsonha wrote: post #144
ac29 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System76? Framework? Even Dell has a number of Linux laptops. If your requirements are "must run an Apple designed ARM processor", then yes, your choices are pretty limited.

ANY arm processor, do tell

Any? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Flex_3_Chr... is dirt cheap and runs PMOS quite well. Actually Chromebooks in general are a good bet when combined with PMOS - or even not combined with PMOS, if you can work with a normal Linux VM on top of ChromeOS.
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