Laymen programmers vastly overestimate systems work because they mythologize it.
It's just attitude & elbow grease at the end of the day, and Asahi Linux clearly had plenty of both of those! Cheers.
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!