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Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

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Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nVidia only requires signed firmware starting from 2nd-gen Maxwell cards (released late 2014). There's a lot of existing nVidia hardware that could be fully supported.

> There's a lot of existing nVidia hardware that could be fully supported. But almost no users to justify the huge development effort. Many laptops from that era, for example, are completely unusable by now - only high end models had 16GB of RAM, most were limited to 4 or 8GB - and desktop builds of that age simply consume far too much electricity for the performance they offer. In contrast, investing work into curre…

Not everyone can afford to buy hardware. I'm stuck on a 2012 desktop with Intel graphics I found on the side of the road, plus some spare RAM an open source dev mailed to me. I expect there are a lot of folks with dumpstered computers (like those who go to FreeGeek) that could benefit from nouveau support for older GPUs.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#272

Great work, the v-tuber wierd thing doesn't affect of the value of this work.

Speak for yourself, I could barely understand the content due to the high pitch and speed of the vocoder. I hate video tutorials in general though, I really wish this was a blog post.

I agree, I didn't even watch the video.

What I meant, is that the result is still great (a GPU driver for M1) regardless of how bad the video is and how weird the entire thing is in general.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#273
post #245
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete speculation on my part, but I think the biggest appeal is supply side, that people can be Internet personalities with an avatar without sharing their real identity. That helps a lot of people who would like to start sharing content but are otherwise too shy, or for various reasons think they can’t/shouldn’t use their real identity. On the consumption side, I find the VTuber method to be more compelling than…

Maybe I'm old too, but I don't have a problem with avatars and virtual ones, it's the extremely high pitch and cartoony voices VTubere tend to have. And why does it have to be anime or furry aesthetic every time? Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding. Even better, gimme the sarcastic high pitch of Skeletor. I'd also be fine with, I dunno, Lara Croft or other virtual female character. Everybody has their own…

People don't do it probably because of copy rights. Don't know what constitutes enough change to the original character to be considered original work.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#274
post #39

"Please temper your expectations: even with hardware documentation, an optimized Vulkan driver stack (with enough features to layer OpenGL 4.6 with Zink) requires many years of full time work. At least for now, nobody is working on this driver full time3. Reverse-engineering slows the process considerably. We won’t be playing AAA games any time soon." From https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html

Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? It's an honest question. Even if someone (or a team) could somehow be paid for this work, by the time the results are usable, the hardware will be more or less functionally obsolete. And that is on top of the fact that ARM64 on MacOS will always be a small slice of the gaming pie, and ARM64 on Linux games and GPU applications virtually nonexistent.

Currently 60% of the CPU power is being used to do software rendering! If we can offload that to the GPU then it both frees up a lot of CPU capacity and ought to greatly improve battery life.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#275
post #245
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete speculation on my part, but I think the biggest appeal is supply side, that people can be Internet personalities with an avatar without sharing their real identity. That helps a lot of people who would like to start sharing content but are otherwise too shy, or for various reasons think they can’t/shouldn’t use their real identity. On the consumption side, I find the VTuber method to be more compelling than…

Maybe I'm old too, but I don't have a problem with avatars and virtual ones, it's the extremely high pitch and cartoony voices VTubere tend to have. And why does it have to be anime or furry aesthetic every time? Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding. Even better, gimme the sarcastic high pitch of Skeletor. I'd also be fine with, I dunno, Lara Croft or other virtual female character. Everybody has their own…

> Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding.

Oh my god I need this now

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#276
post #268

I don't get all the griping about "Wasted development effort" and "Apple doesn't have documentation". Linux was about making it work on different platforms from the very beginning. There was never any vendor support.

People take so much for granted. It was decades until the graphics cards manufacturers ever saw Linux support as a serious issue. Linux made itself a serious platform by this kind of "wasted effort" and if you go even earlier in the history of Linux, it itself was maintained by enthousiasts that many considered "wasted effort" because Linux was an amateur operating system that was never going to have vendor support or even run production grade software.

Cynics are gonna cynic. But it's people like Asahi that get shit done and move the world forward.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#277
post #142

I'm just getting old, I do not understand VTubers or the appeal.

Complete speculation on my part, but I think the biggest appeal is supply side, that people can be Internet personalities with an avatar without sharing their real identity. That helps a lot of people who would like to start sharing content but are otherwise too shy, or for various reasons think they can’t/shouldn’t use their real identity. On the consumption side, I find the VTuber method to be more compelling than…

There's a lot of interesting and creative work going on in the v-tuber space, and a lot of tech involved adjacent to VR and AR. It's unfortunate that Hacker News isn't more interested in it.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to take a non cynical take: at a business level Apple's hardware business was growing while other makers were having a hard time, and I think with their current advancement in processor tech and sheer production quality, they have captured most of the market they were probably expecting to capture. At this point, trying to expand the user base through sheer hardware improvement or trying to include fringe grou…

So what you are saying is that engineers at Apple have nothing to say about this?

They do, demonstrably, have some sort of say. The M1 Macs have had deliberate support for 3rd party OSes since more or less day 1 (just not exposed/advertised), and Apple made some early changes to enable Asahi. Some recent comments by marcan on the topic:

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1554395184473190400

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#279
post #19

This whole linux on Apple M1/M2 thing is the best proof that Linux is always a very good fit fort next gen hardware/software/developers. new hardware, arm based apple silicon here, is now challenging the monopoly of x86. after such a long waiting, we finally have a mature alternative platform to choose from - and it is performance is pretty good. new language, rust here, is getting its way into the linux kernel. this…

I agree, I find it amazing. I don't understand any of it, but it's like deep sea exploration to me. Poking around in the dark depths of a very complicated black box.

Re: Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1

#280
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm old too, but I don't have a problem with avatars and virtual ones, it's the extremely high pitch and cartoony voices VTubere tend to have. And why does it have to be anime or furry aesthetic every time? Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding. Even better, gimme the sarcastic high pitch of Skeletor. I'd also be fine with, I dunno, Lara Croft or other virtual female character. Everybody has their own…

People don't do it probably because of copy rights. Don't know what constitutes enough change to the original character to be considered original work.

Inventing a new cartoon or 3D character can't be harder than designing an anime avatar.
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