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The first conformant M1 GPU driver

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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#141

Post by huijzer »

europeanNyan wrote: post #36
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

Based on reading Taleb, I have a theory and love to hear counterarguments if there are any:

Products are as good as the worst part. Apple‘s complete integration allows them to more easily fix the worst part since they have control over almost everything. Historically, "open" systems, as Bill Gates would call Windows together with the suppliers such as Intel and Dell, could get away with some bad aspects as long as they just threw in new CPUs with smaller transistors. Now that Moore‘s law and Dennard scaling have slowed down, fixing the worst part is the only way to find good improvements.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#142

Post by jasoneckert »

bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

I've been watching the Asahi Linux project from the beginning from the sidelines. I find it both exciting and fascinating for two reasons:

1) It's a project that a lot of people want to see happen, and

2) It's a stellar example of a well-executed open source project at all levels.

Moreover, Asahi has been my daily driver since the alpha was released back in March 2022. I migrated to Fedora Asahi Remix (their new flagship distro) earlier this month, which is excellent (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/fedora-asahi-remix/).

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#143

Post by zamadatix »

leedrake5 wrote: post #20

I assume that this primarily benefits games and not any deep learning right? The most attractive aspect of Mac M1 is the huge memory boost. Might not be great for training due to the inability to distribute across multiple cards, but it makes for a great inference engine for stable diffusion, llama, and other large models.

The compute shader portion is a good step but it's still not going to provide the interfaces most of these deep learning tools expect.

That said eiln wrote an ANE (Apple Neural Engine) driver which enables using the dedicated hardware for this instead of the GPU. It is set to be merged into linux-asahi in the future.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#144

Post by josephg »

mwint wrote: post #128
nly wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a limit of battery technology. Your Apple laptop will ha e shit battery life in a few years as well

I have an Apple laptop that is a few years old. It does not have shit battery life. Probably 90% of new. Did you research this statement before making it?

Yep. Apple battery health in system preferences will show you how much the battery has degraded since the device was new. My ~2yo M1 MacBook Pro still has 92% capacity compared to when it was brand new.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#145

Post by zamadatix »

htk wrote: post #19

Asahi and Alyssa are the titans of reverse engineering. Their work is pretty unbelievable. I would bet Apple is planning to hire them, or has tried already and they refused.

Valve already contracts Alyssa. Arguably they have more business use case for the skillset than Apple.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#147

Post by klausa »

zamadatix wrote: post #137
klausa wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use Windows drivers for your GPU on Linux?

Intel did. Obviously there is more to it than just setting a different target and hitting compile but it's also not a ridiculous question because of that measure alone. It'd require enabling reduced security mode to load kexts or a custom kernel as well as a good amount of additional code for interfacing it with the macOS kernel interfaces but the majority of the code would be reused. Not trivial by any measure but a…

You're right, I was being overly dismissive in my original reply.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#148

Post by insanitybit »

europeanNyan wrote: post #36
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

I've found that ChromeOS + Pixel 6 is fine. I have a Fitbit Sense 2 for a watch (I hate the idea of my watch telling me I have a meeting coming up lol).

ChromeOS is great. The host OS "just works" and I have a VM/container env to do development in. It feels secure, operationally straightforward, and low maintenance.

I don't really care a ton about my phone. It works, battery is fine. It makes phone calls, plays music. idk. I care way more about my laptop.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#149

Post by Salgat »

mirekrusin wrote: post #112
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

If Apple didn't care, they wouldn't release anything at all. But they did. It means somebody did care. But they failed, got beaten by almost one-man-army "team" that started running miles behind from another country behind chain of mountains. It's unreal. It's unreal because Apple has everything - talent, hardware and software and got beaten by reverse engineering the whole thing. Such a slap in a face.

We're kidding ourselves if we think Apple was putting an earnest effort into this.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#150

Post by digging »

paulddraper wrote: post #59
europeanNyan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

> yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time I miss the days when I charged my cell phone twice a week. It didn't take 100 mexapixel photos or display 4K cat GIFs, so I understand why. But I miss that battery life nonetheless.

I charge my Pixel 5 pretty infrequently, couldn't give a number though. I leave it in battery saver mode automatically when it's below 70%, and often I will just plug it in to a quick charging cable (the one from my steam deck actually) for 20 minutes to "top up" (may not fully charge but who cares). I only notice my battery life about once every other week. Other than frequent photography, I guess I don't do very much intensive processing on my phone though.
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