“With those changes we're up to a 94% pass rate for dEQP-GLES2”
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/
As an interesting aside, in the progress report he mentions that after he installed Arch Linux, even without support for the hardware GPU:
>glxgears has no right to run at >60FPS with software rendering, but it does
1. https://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Glxgears_is_not_a_Benchmar...
I only glanced at the last minute, sounds like it's not working, but pretty close (I could have interpreted his comments wrong though).
"It will take Asahi Linux years to get graphical acceleration."
"Maybe they'll have graphics figured out by 2024 if they are lucky."
Doubters gonna doubt. OpenGLES 2 for Asahi Linux on the M1, 94% conformity, just 1 year later.
If they have coverage of the GPU, then Vulcan and so on will play for the features ES2 does. Besides you don't need support for all exotic features to run Linux with hw acceleration.
OpenGL ES 2.0 is pretty simple in comparison, and you won't have to deal with undocumented features and so on.
It's also not as simple as coverage, you also need good performance, which means you need a good optimizing compiler for the GPU architecture, and that's not obvious either. Unless they are using Apple's drivers? I don't know that they are. From reading her website it seems they are not.
She's been writing progress reports as she goes. This one is from back in May.
>I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open source stack. We are passing about 75% of the OpenGL ES 2.0 tests in the drawElements Quality Program used to establish Khronos conformance. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa!
Gallium is a driver framework inside Mesa. It splits drivers into frontends, like OpenGL and OpenCL, and backends, like Intel and AMD. In between, Gallium has a common caching system for graphics and compute state, reducing the CPU overhead of every Gallium driver. The code sharing, central to Gallium’s design, allows high-performance drivers to be written at a low cost. For us, that means we can focus on writing a Gallium backend for Apple’s GPU and pick up OpenGL and OpenCL support “for free”.
I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying that we shouldn't underestimate how much work there is.
Even with the help of Mesa and years of effort, the nouveau backend for NVidia cards is still barely satisfactory even for day to day tasks, it's OpenGL performance is very poor even for basic applications. It's really not as simple as just coverage in practice.
This means that if you are running any form of unsigned driver (which would be any open-source driver such as Nouveau) on those cards, the chip will run at the slowest possible performance tier, and won't allow the firmware to crank the speed up. Only the signed NVIDIA driver can change the GPU speed, which is basically mandatory for a driver to be useful.
So - don't blame Nouveau for being behind, NVIDIA has made it so that open-source drivers are almost useless. In which case, why bother with improving Nouveau when the performance is going to be just terrible?
Oh, is it to ensure nerfing of FP64 performance for their consumer cards? Is that done at the driver level?
The only lockout solution is to lock speeds to the base clock completely.
No, the FP64 units aren't physically present on silicon in high numbers on the non xx100 dies.
However, limitations enforced just by the driver and its FW set:
- GPU virtualisation (see: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock)
- NVENC video encoder limitations to 2 simultaneous streams on customer cards
- Lite Hash Rate limitation enforcement to make GPUs less attractive for miners
The point I was making is that mere coverage is not enough for satisfactory performance. If it was the case, nouveau would have good performance on cards with reclocking support.
It doesn't, because it takes a lot of work on the backend to get good performance.
Otherwise it's not really feasible to watch high resolution, high framerate videos on a laptop. It absolutely murders battery life.
the asahi team is very talented, but I don’t think their progress means building a software stack for an undocumented gpu is not difficult.
Is that really an option? Can we drop in the binary blob at will, or will it break if Apple pushes an update?even if that's the case, dual booting may be impossible then. Unless that firmware is downloaded every boot.
It's just attitude & elbow grease at the end of the day, and Asahi Linux clearly had plenty of both of those! Cheers.
I would assume the last 10% is going to be just as hard as the first 90%, just like most engineering projects.
Writing a truly high performance modern graphics drivers is really no small task. There is a reason why NVidia, AMD and Intel employ large teams to the task.
The folks working on Asahi are terrific, and deserve credit where it’s due—most would have trouble contributing, especially at the pace they’re working at. They are experienced, driven, creative and overall good at what they do.
However, I think it’s also instructive to realize that ultimately, there really are plenty of top-tier developers out there who aren’t working on cool things like this, for one reason or another.
Asahi at least has funding. And while Patron funding isn’t new, it is relatively underutilized for open source. I believe the Patron model is the most promising avenue for open source projects to route money from willing participants. I may only contribute a relatively tiny amount, especially when you consider the wages you can get working for a well-funded SV company, but when you pool it altogether, it’s still nothing to sneeze at.
So in my mind, Asahi achieves success in the face of skepticism because it has the combination of great engineers and enough funding to meaningfully help the effort.
P.S. Even though I do that most graphics vendors have huge teams and Asahi is a strong outlier in this case, they probably have a lot of fish to fry that doesn’t yet or may never apply to the M1 graphics drivers. Valve has found success in writing their own Vulkan drivers; I’d love to know how much engineering effort went into that, both people and time. It might be a somewhat closer comparison. (Well.. not really, because it’s not taking into account the impressive reversing effort needed for M1, but perhaps in terms of actually writing the high level graphics drivers.)
P.P.S.: and also, I firmly believe that the ambition and drive to work on such hard problems is what breeds impressive engineers. In my opinion, you shouldn’t feel intimidated; you should feel inspired. Go out there and hack some hardware for yourself.
Indeed RADV is a good comparison, though it bears notice that the open-source existing AMD drivers probably also helped a fair bit! That being said, there seems to be 3 people but maybe only 2, and the RADV project has been going on for around three years now, though there are a lot of contributions from outside of Valve.
RADV compiles Vulkan to NIR, so there is also the backend that compiles NIR to assembly that needs to be performant.
Though perhaps the Asahi Linux team can leverage a lot of work done by RADV for their platform, which could speed things up a lot!
If you can reverse-engineer Apple's completely new chips it should be a breeze to do the same with already very well know chips form Nvidia, isn't it?
What's the difference? Is there any difference at all?
However even on older cards where this is not an issue, community drivers tend to lag behind. It is far for a breeze. So far they are leveraging the Mesa driver infrastructure to implement OpenGL ES 2.0, which is a good beginning. The really hard part is supporting all of the latest technologies at a good performance. It's too early to know if that will be a breeze or not.
So maybe by 2032 we will have some M1s with somehow HW accelerated graphics. At least it looks like that given the history of Nouveau.
I don't want to put the work down those people are doing! But the truth is likely that without vendor support this will never fly beyond some tech demos.
In any case, I truly wish them the best of luck.