Live data from Hacker News

The first conformant M1 GPU driver

rosenzweig.io

261–270 of 699 posts

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#261
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/

The Github link there goes to marcan, who leads Asahi, but I want to primarily support this driver development. Is that an option? If so, where do I do that? If not, I'll just use this later today.

In Asahi Lina’s guest post[1] on the Asahi Linux blog she mentions “If you want to support my work, you can donate to marcan’s Asahi Linux support fund on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon, which helps me out too!”

So yes, donating to Marcan helps driver development too.

[1] https://asahilinux.org/2023/03/road-to-vulkan/

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#262
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/c/AsahiLina for those who aren't aware - some of the most incredible low-level programming work I've ever seen!

If only it weren't obscured behind unbearable levels of anime cringe. I guess I'm getting old.

I choose to see that as the cyberpunk future that we are living in. Everything ends with your avatar, just like Gibson foretold. What an amazing time.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 performanc…

That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to…

I was mistaken, I found a copy of Jobs' letter re:Flash and he does cite the proprietary nature of Flash and Apple's lack of control over the content served on its platform as the most important reason Flash was kept off the iPhone.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-ap...

  As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
I used OSX and Flash in the late 2000s so I have no problem believing that.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 5x battery life improvement seems like the baseline had some issues, unless your MacBook goes like a week without charging.

Most recent Thinkpad was X1 Carbon with Kubuntu, running intellij / browsers / docker would last around 3 hours or so. M1 Air is 15+. I also have a Anker 737 battery, with it I can double the macbook's battery if fully charged. The Thinkpad would only charge partially, so wouldn't even double.

That’s weird, I wonder which program did it.

I typically get a day of work out of my Zenbook flip 13; I haven’t really measured the battery performance rigorously because it is easily long enough that I don’t think about it (the battery indicator will say 14 hours, but those are of course pretty flaky). I’m a vim/Firefox with ads blocked guy though so I guess I must not be making it work very hard.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 performanc…

Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.

> more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did

TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them.

Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#266
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.

I thought she’s working for Collabora. But she’s still a student, so only part time.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#267
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/

The Github link there goes to marcan, who leads Asahi, but I want to primarily support this driver development. Is that an option? If so, where do I do that? If not, I'll just use this later today.

In addition to the other post: I don't think Alyssa takes donations but Ella Stanforth has a GitHub sponsor page for the Vulkan driver.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#268
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 performanc…

Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap.

There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either.

Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#269
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.

I bet Apple already tried and they refused due to NDA and non compete clauses, that or HR didn't validate their profile.

I don't think being able to reverse engineer your project is actually a good qualification for hiring you, considering your employees don't need to do that.

Also, isn't she a high schooler/freshman? There's always internships but it's best to do other things before grinding those out.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought she’s working for Collabora. But she’s still a student, so only part time.

She's doing all this while still being a student, unreal. I can't get over just how skilled some people are, and how far I myself am from them.
Post reply on HN