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The first conformant M1 GPU driver

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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#221

Post by Dylan16807 »

freedomben wrote: post #115
matthew-wegner wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that clarification was pre-edit? I'm aware of people's sensitivity to putting demands on efforts like this, which is why I tried to frame it as the genuine curiosity it is. This sort of low-level work is out of my depth. Is there painstaking probing to find different addresses/states between a Max and an Ultra? The M2 Ultra has two GPU variants (60-core and 72-core), although the Pro and Max also have GPU…

Yes I would have put it in the original (pre-edit), but better late than never :-) Yeah I've never done GPU driver hacking so I can't answer your question with optimal specificity, but there's always something new. It's usually (but not always) backwards compatible, but Apple is a special case since they are their only supported customer. That means that they can iterate very fast with flagrant disregard for backward…

> Yes I would have put it in the original (pre-edit), but better late than never :-)

Huh? The clarification is in the original (pre-edit). It's the second sentence.

"Right, but that clarification was pre-edit?" wasn't a hypothetical, it was making a claim.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#222

Post by marzullo »

insanitybit wrote: post #138
sharts wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When most people you know use iMessage then Android is a bad experience. Also, as someone who switched from Pixels and other Android devices to the Apple ecosystem . It’s nice that everything “just works.” It’s kind of like running BSD or Debian stable after having been on Fedora/Arch/etc.

> When most people you know use iMessage then Android is a bad experience. Isn't this because Android uses open standards for its SMS and iOS refuses to do so?

This is correct. Google put a lot of effort into making carriers adopt RCS (which has most of the functionality of iMessage), but Apple will not adopt it to keep their "competitive advantage."

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

I use an iPhone now but these kinds of business tactics and the others mentioned here really make me wish there were more competitive products on the other end.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#223

Post by colechristensen »

gumby wrote: post #211
softfalcon wrote: post #197

I wonder if support for OpenGL, Vulkan, etc will improve now that Apple is partnering with nVidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc around the OpenUSD rendering/animation/CAD/3D-scene format? Considering the whole schtick of OpenUSD is "one file format that renders consistently everywhere" (paraphrasing), I would be surprised if Apple doesn't use it as a means to cement more 3D software vendors into macOS land. It's r…

> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." The iMac and early OS X went big on open standards, and Jobs made a point of pointing this out: USB for the iMac, JPEG, MPG, mp3, Postscript etc for OSX. IP/TCP built in. They even paid the danegeld for .rtf. Then as they clawed their way ba…

> "Apple likes open standards when it is weak."

Everyone does. AMD is the same. The market leader focuses on features, the runners up try to take them down with openness. The competition is good for consumers, but the motivation is one of self-interest, not the common good.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#224

Post by arcanemachiner »

tornato7 wrote: post #170
BlackjackCF wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. The XPS’s hard drive died within two years and I had to replace it. The keyboard and touchpad also don’t hold a candle to MacBooks.

I bought a MacBook Pro in 2013 and my mom bought a Dell XPS at around the same time. Her laptop died, she got a Lenovo Yoga. That one died within a year and was replaced for free. The new one died after two years. When the M1 Air came out I gave her the old MacBook Pro, which she still uses every day, going strong (aside from battery life, but it's mostly plugged in). It has essentially outlived 4 Windows laptops. I…

I bought a mid-range Acer laptop in December 2012. I used that thing as my daily driver until 2018 until I finally got a desktop. In 2020 I repurposed that laptop as a server and it's been running ever since. For tens of thousands of hours.

My point is that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. Perhaps I'm pretty lucky in this sense, but I have had great longevity out of all of my hardware, and I have owned very few Apple devices.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#225

Post by klausa »

dlivingston wrote: post #172
klausa wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine any reasonable argument that would make Apple be a target for an anti-trust action for _Macs_. I understand skepticism and not always giving corporations the benefit of the doubt, but they _clearly_ spent a lot of time and resources to make third-party OSes viable on Apple Sillicon Macs.

> _clearly_ spent a lot of time and resources to make third-party OSes viable on Apple Sillicon Macs. This actually isn't clear to me -- can you explain? Besides keeping an open bootloader [0], I'm not aware of any affirmative actions Apple has taken. [0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Open-OS-Ecosystem-on...

The open bootloader didn't magically appear one night in Apple's git repository.

It boots in a notably different way than iOS machines do, and has some (AFAICT) pretty unique capabilities, including a fully-verified signed-boot of macOS partitions, while allowing third-party kernels at the same time.

Asahi's "Introduction to Apple Silicon" [0], and specifically "Security modes, Boot Policies, and machine ownership" paragraph outlines some of that, Apple's "Platform Security" [1] whitepaper does too.

Asahi's docs also explicitly state the same thing [2].

If you still don't think that shows significant amount of work and care were put into deliberately allowing third-party OS's to work on those machines, I don't think I can convince you otherwise.

[0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web

[2]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Apple-Platform-Secur...

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#226

Post by i_am_jl »

gumby wrote: post #211
softfalcon wrote: post #197

I wonder if support for OpenGL, Vulkan, etc will improve now that Apple is partnering with nVidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc around the OpenUSD rendering/animation/CAD/3D-scene format? Considering the whole schtick of OpenUSD is "one file format that renders consistently everywhere" (paraphrasing), I would be surprised if Apple doesn't use it as a means to cement more 3D software vendors into macOS land. It's r…

> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." The iMac and early OS X went big on open standards, and Jobs made a point of pointing this out: USB for the iMac, JPEG, MPG, mp3, Postscript etc for OSX. IP/TCP built in. They even paid the danegeld for .rtf. Then as they clawed their way ba…

>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts.

Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one.

At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome.

The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#227

Post by klausa »

Klonoar wrote: post #212
baby_souffle wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really disappointing to see everyone bashing Apple when it's clear to anyone paying attention that they made a conscious decision to leave the door open for 3rd party development. Maybe I'm just a jaded grey-beard but I suspect that this is more of a "placate the anti-trust regulators" play and not a genuine olive branch offering. Apple gets to say "see, look! Not only are we not locking people out - there's a…

This is one moment where I really hate what happened to Twitter, since I feel like I recall a tweet from Marcan ages ago pointing out that Apple has fixed some things regarding 3rd party OS support. That is to say, unless I am truly off my rocker and remembering a fever dream: it's not just a "placate the anti-trust regulators" play. I'm pretty sure I've also seen it mentioned on HN itself that Linux is still used wi…

I remember reading that too, but I think it was on mastodon — I don't feel like tracking down that particular thread now, but maybe that helps you on your search :)

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#228

Post by ajdude »

alberth wrote: post #42

For clarity, this isn't the first conformant linux drivers. Apple themselves are not conformant to OpenGL® ES 3.1. So this is literally the first conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers for M-Series, for any operating system (Apple or Non-Apple). Hence why the call to action to donate to the team. https://asahilinux.org/support/

I love what they're doing, but last time I clicked a link for asahilinux on hacker news I was taken to a pop up that specifically said that readers from Hacker News are not welcomed on their site and couldn't read their content.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#229

Post by nwellinghoff »

AnonMO wrote: post #210
nwellinghoff wrote: post #194

I really wish nerds would stop supporting Apple hardware and software. It is so closed and everything is a giant pain. Its one thing for the average non-techie that does not want to do anything advanced and just wants to swallow the blue pill. But for an actual techie to support a system that is the antithesis of general purpose compute...Can you even be considered a true techie anymore? I just don't get it.

When you realize the world isn't strictly dividen it categories such as blue or red. you might begin to understand why people do what they do. also let me ask you a question since you're obviously for free and open source. how much have you contributed to riscv development or donated to move their cause forward? are you actively maintaining any open projects? because if you read the post the authors stated that they…

Who are you responding to? By closed I meant they artificially restrict you from doing things in the name of selling more devices. Like running VM clusters for testing unless you run it on "apple hardware" when there really is no requirement. Removing support for 3rd party GPUs. Having to buy a million dongles that use proprietary connectors (not really a problem anymore). Limiting what you can control at the OS level. Not letting you run what you want. The list goes on. I obviously think what the asahi linux team has done is bad ass. Just think us nerds have to force ourselves off the tech giants or the end result will likely be; you won't be able to easily buy something you actually control.
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