After having announced lots of new stuff Recently, the Asahi Linux project just took a big step forward: support for Apple GPUs with (partial) display acceleration.
The premier article explains in great detail how Apple’s GPUs work, and there’s one thing to understand: Apple uses an atypical architecture. To sum up, there is an ARM coprocessor, the ASC, which sits between the GPU and the operating system. This coprocessor runs its own real-time OS (RTKit) and actually manages calls to the graphics part. This intermediary forced Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Linya to develop a driver in an unusual language: Rust. Indeed, the Mozilla language is much more suitable than C for the architecture chosen by Apple.
In the second, the developers explain that the driver is currently capable of supporting OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs, which is sufficient to achieve hardware acceleration on desktop environments and on old titles, such as Quake III Arena. . As a reminder, this game made the heyday of the Power Mac G4 regarding twenty years ago, when some developers were still a little interested in Macs.
If you don’t follow the news of API versions, OpenGL is currently in version 4.6 (2.1 dates from 2006) and OpenGL ES — its simplified counterpart for mobile devices — is in version 3.2. Both APIs are considered deprecated (although still in use) and the one that replaces them is called Vulkan. This is obviously one of the next steps in the development of Asahi Linux. The instructions needed to install the driver are available on the project sitefor the few people adventurous enough to attempt to install GNU/Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac.
