Asahi Linux M1 GPU drivers can now run Windows games via Steam Proton | Hacker News Reader

Asahi Linux M1 GPU drivers can now run Windows games via Steam Proton

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From when I last checked, it still requires a custom 4K kernel as Asahi only ships with a 16K kernel, and FEX won’t work with those.

So you need to compile a custom kernel for FEX to run and Steam to work.

Still, great work from Lina and the Asahi team, very excited about getting full FEX support on stock kernels (I have a backlog of Humble Bundle games to try with this).

For whoever else who doesn't know wtf a 16k kernel is supposed to be: https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-202...

Aargh.

    <script>document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")&&(console.log("Hacker News is becoming worse than 4chan. Do better."),document.location="https://google.com")</script>

Wow, I haven't seen that since https://jwz.org used to redirect HN referrers to a certain old school NSFW internet meme. Plus, I don't think even he still pulls that kind of redirect BS these days.

Shame. We need more of those...

Just confirmed he still does that

Oops, sorry about that. I must have had something cached from when I verified that I had the correct tld, though in the end, jwz.com, jwz.net, and jwz.org all lead to the same place.

Of course they do, if you are loading them from your address bar. The bollock in a cup appears only if you click on a jwz.org link on HN.

Wow. That's infuriating. I had no idea until I saw these comments. Apparently these people are insanely petty and gifted developers.

Here the relevant text about 16k page size kernels:

> IOMMU 4K patches (in review): The M1 is peculiar in that, although it supports OSes that use either 16K or 4K pages, it really is designed for 16K systems. Its DART IOMMU hardware only supports 16K pages. These chips have 4K support chiefly to make Rosetta work on macOS, but macOS itself always runs with 16K pages – only Rosetta apps end up in 4K mode. Linux can’t really mix page sizes like that and likely never will be able to, so we’re left with a conundrum: running a 16K kernel makes compatibility with older userspace difficult (chiefly Android and x86 emulation), plus distros don’t usually ship 16K kernels; while running a 4K kernel runs into a major mismatch with the DART. This initially seemed like a problem too intractable to solve, but Sven took on the challenge and now has a patch series that makes Linux’s IOMMU support layer play nicely with hardware that has an IOMMU page size larger than the kernel page size! It’s not perfect, as it can’t support a select few corner case drivers (that do things that are fundamentally impossible to support in this situation), but it works well and will support everything we need to make 4K kernels viable.

For anybody who wants to read the whole thing: https://archive.is/Wc0XN

I guess Safari doesn't populate referrer then, because this was no issue for me.

Long-press and open in new tab is a good workaround until browsers wise up and stop sending referer headers.

This also works on desktop Safari. However it won't work on desktop Chrome.

How is the referrer still a thing in 2023?

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/smart-referer/ works well for me.

Without using addons:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130505

Note that some sites depend on referrer and might break if disabled.

Here's a list of them maintained by the extension mentioned above: https://gitlab.com/smart-referrer/smart-referer/-/blob/gh-pa...

Anyone have an option for Chrome they trust? Not only for this, but to fix the stupid Twitter behavior of hiding complete threads and showing "related tweets" if you are linked.

This is absolutely insane.

Does anyone know the context for that?

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110060225535294882

I actually kind of know marcan, but sorry, this is just too much of a low hanging fruit to let it just pass by.

*Ahem*

Complaining about people not reading the article and then denying those people the ability to read the article is 300% concentrated irony. Holy shit.

(I'm assuming the motivations behind the redirect are what marcan is complaining about. marcan's complaint by itself is valid, of course. People only reading headlines is nothing new.)

I don't get the reason behind his complaints about not 100% of all the comments being focused on the one topic. It's a discussion forum for humans, not a bureaucratic committee. Comment folding exists for a reason.

And while it sure can be frustrating when completely avoidable questions are asked, I don't get why that's so bad that one has to block the website. Especially considering 95% of comments to marcan's post linked above could be summarized as "haha orange site bad" - a lack of substance doesn't seem to be the issue.

I'm sure this frustration has a cause, but I struggle to see what that is.

I have talked to creators before about their projects ending up here. When you are doing a project or have an interest in something you haven't thought of everything. But you have probably thought of most things that spontaneously comes to mind. It isn't even just shitting on things that is the problem. Effectively shitting on something takes some interest, making claims or potentially having a point. It is the random bullshit that gets to you. The ignorance and the arrogance and even more so in combination because there is little you can do about it. It is many times as burdensome to read inaccurate things when you know better and even more so trying to correct them. So it quickly becomes Wargames. If you don't engage the bullshit spreads, if you do engage you waste all your time and it probably don't get much better anyway. So the only way to win is not to play at all.

I went back and read some of the discussion in the other thread. I didn't read everything because of time. What strikes me isn't the bad faith or poor form trying to expose someone or arguing a tangent on an interesting subject. It is how embarrassing it is. And how embarrassing it that they don't know how embarrassing it is. If I managed to even slightly get my point across you will understand why I can't explain why it is embarrassing. What I can say is that it isn't about just about being wrong or being rude. It about not knowing what they are talking about while being convinced that they have a point.

And no I don't think it is ironic. If you consider Hacker News a net negative blocking your blog from being published here is consistent with that view. More would if "all publicity is good publicity" wasn't such a strong idea in money making ventures.

It's also the case that most HN readers won't post comments about articles they read. This childish redirect nonsense affects them as well.

I feel like there is some additional context missing. It's not like HN readers were spamming him, or flooding his platform. It's just, from what I gathered from this mastodon thread, that the people didn't read the article, resulting in comments on HN not being interesting enough for him.

But blocking people just because they are reading HN and learning about Asahi through it seems kinda extreme and uncalled for.

It’s a shame because most of the top 10 top level comments ended up being just pure praise and admiration, and all the negative ones were downvoted or debunked. I think the main disagreement was the people speculating on the identity of Lina.

This is hilarious, you're actually speculating about "the real reason" after getting linked to the literal statement of why it was done with example comments given, most of which are doing exactly what you're doing here: irrelevant speculation and going of on tangents

If there is a basic archetype of a HN comment, yours is a perfect example of it

I follow Hector on Mastodon and he's posted a few times in the past about how he dislikes the HN comments and often finds them toxic. He didn't implement any anti-HN measures in his sites before though, so there was clearly something different this time. What I think elevated this from "ignore" to "block" were a few creepy subthreads relating to him and the identity of Lina that I am not going to repeat. Additionally I thought this was a shame because those nasty ones ended up being flagged and downvoted by the community, and drowned out by a boatload of comments saying how much people admired the work Hector, Lina, Alyssa and the Asahi crew are doing. So he's under the impression that most HNers are dumb idiots who dislike him and and are comofortable doxxing people, which I don't think is the case.

However if you're looking for the basic archetype of a bad HN comment I think yours is actually much more appropriate. Very poor form :-/

Hector had no problem spreading salacious rumours about Richard Stallman a couple of years back.

He loudly supported a hateful and slanderous campaign that resulted in RMS having to step down from the FSF.

Now he comes along and for whatever reason he's decided to adopt this weird hentai alter ego, which is very obviously him... but for some reason we're not allowed to mention it - because? ...actually I have no idea why.

But he certainly doesn't mind dealing in rumours when it's against people he decides deserve it.

Naw, pointing out the obvious while making fun of someone is the archetype of reddit I think. Toxicity on HN is more indirect here.

I'm gonna take this moment to thank Asahi Lina and the other developers for their work and inspiration. Thank you. I wish I had even a small percentage of the reverse engineering skill you guys have.

The irony of those comments... it's almost like I landed on Twitter.

Why doesn't HN strip referrer headers?

It's the browser that sends the Referer (sic) header.

It would be fairly trivial for HN to add rel=noreferrer to links

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

Linux has come a long way in terms of gaming. Literarily all my steam games run on Linux without issue, rig being a 3090 amd ryzen. I am surprised at how stable everything is and how well the ui works (kde, xfce, and openbox - the latter for focused work).

It's ironically more compatible than windows itself for some old games

That's been true since at least the Vista days.

This is with OpenGL and DXGL not Vulkan. Vulkan is needed to run more recent games. https://github.com/sponsors/Ella-0

Does anyone here use Asahi as a daily driver? I’m curious to try it on my M2 MBP.

I used to use it on my M1 MBP. For M2 MBP only the 13" is supported, 14" and 16" still need some "minor" work to let the components know how to initialize in those models. Since I switched to M2 MBP I haven't been able to use it lately and miss it :).

For day to day the biggest pain points for me were the lack of speaker, microphone, and webcam support. Bluetooth and 3.5mm audio worked fine though. GPU support was useable for browsing and whatnot before so with the recent massive speedup and continued OpenGL support improvements I can only imagine it's even better now. Wi-Fi, touchpad, keyboard, screen brightness, and USB all seemed to work fine for me. I think HDMI out, DP alt mode from the type c, and thunderbolt were all unsupported as was touch-id. Battery life was worse than macOS but still better than a normal laptop (for my usage pattern at least). Software side it's ALARM (Arch Linux ARM) based and "I use Arch btw" so I had no complaints. Users who prefer other distros may not like that and while it's possible to get certain other distros running the experience isn't as good and seems complicated. Wayland is the officially recommended display server option and XWayland works fine in it for running X11 only apps. Early on the 16k pages created a lot of headache but that seemed out of the way towards the end of me having the M1. Some Electron apps were slow to upgrade to a Chromium base which included the 16k page support. I never really messed with FEX or anything about running x86 and/or Windows stuff on it, just native packages. The installer was pretty straightforward to use.

For detailed feature support tables this page has the info https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

Oh and you can swap the command/option keys around to the non-Apple way if you want:

  echo 'options hid-apple swap_opt_cmd=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/hid-apple.conf

You can get closer to the stock PC layout with:

   options hid_apple swap_opt_cmd=1 fnmode=2 swap_fn_leftctrl=1

(CtrlFn⊞AltSpaceAlt⊞), except for the double-swapped right-option which acts as Win instead of the expected Ctrl.

There is a `rightalt_as_rightctrl` patch[2 which doesn't work with Asahi yet, but there's plans to upstream it. However, marcan was planning to make some massive changes in the apple-hid driver, so it might take a while.

[2]: https://github.com/free5lot/hid-apple-patched/issues/1

Using it on M2 Air, but only as my driver while travelling. What I wrote elsewhere:

> Asahi works great on Apple Silicon. There’s a small collection of software (like Widevine/Zig) that isn’t available on Asahi/ARM64, and some important features that are still in progress (Speakers/Webcam/Mic/External Monitors). GPU and Sleep support is still experimental, but the device is usable enough for me (No critical showstoppers so far).

Widevine has since been solved in a great hack[0].

[0]: https://gist.github.com/DavidBuchanan314/c6b97add51b97e4c3ee...

I have the M1 MBP. I use it as a daily driver for my personal computing (I have another company-owned laptop). Currently, I'm doing a little programming in rust and some photo work in Darktable. Of course many others things work too. I also compiled and ran some 7+ years old C++ projects successfully.

Only thing I'm missing is standby. It sounds a little ridiculous that I have an expensive laptop at home and I need to boot it every time.

so how does this work? QEMU?

e: i checked linas mastodon and apparently it's using FEX

https://fex-emu.com/

It's explained in the video, it uses https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX

ah sorry, I only watched the first minute or so since it didn't seem like the type of video that would dwell much on technical details like that

Will FEX ever leverage the hardware that Apple design for Rosetta 2 trickery? It seems like a heavy lift for a general purpose emulator, but at the same time there's probably a bunch of performance wins to be had.

Hardware TSO support actually simplifies emulation. I don't know if FEX uses it yet but it seems simple.

I am waiting for Asahi support to land on the new 2023 MBP. Hopefully it lands before the end of the year.

I wish crossover/wine on macOS were as good as proton.

I like running macOS and it's a pain to have to reboot or run Windows in a VM just to play a game.

This will be great once ready. That and audio are the biggest features I'm awaiting.

According to https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support there's at least partial audio support for every machine except the models introduced so far this year, using the 3.5mm output. The built-in speakers are still disabled by default while they work on the software required to drive them at reasonable loudness without burning them out. It's not clear to me whether audio over HDMI works for the models where they already have HDMI support.

The speaker issue is being fixed as we speak: https://www.youtube.com/live/p8SBgFk_1mI?feature=share.

How does it compare to crossover?

Not much different from Proton, they're both based on Wine. They're probably the most similar stack layer. Everything else (x86 emulator, graphics driver, OS) is completely different.

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