I don't expect any daily-driveable alternative operating systems on Apple systems since it's a continuously moving target, yet Apple doesn't have a such heavy-handed approach. They just do their thing and do not hinder things actively like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.
afaik you technically can, except that m1/m2 force pcie bars to be mapped as device memory (forbids unaligned r/w), so most gpu software (and drivers) that just issue memcpys to vram and expect the fabric to behave sanely will sigbus. it's possible to work around this, and some people indeed have with amdgpu, but it'd absolutely destroy performance to fix in the general case
so it doesn't really have anything to do with apple themselves blocking it but rather a niche implementation detail of the AS platform that's essentially an erratum
There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM.
I think this is more than just an erratum, even with newer chips. It's monopolistic behavior all too common nowadays.
> There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM
can you link to this? my intuition is that they're speaking on whether apple would include dgpus inside AS systems like they used to with nvidia and amd chips in macbooks, which i agree wouldn't make much sense atp
Whatever kernel or hardware facilities are available to Apple's own GPU driver, should be available to other GPU drivers. Anything else is myopic thinking, which I realize might be common for Apple, but it is also monopolistic.
Linux also allows userspace drivers with less performance I think, but I don't think DGPU use can be made performant because of AS hardware choices.
I am predisposed to ignoring link requests for things that can be easily googled.