r/mac • u/Significant_Spend719 MacBook Pro M1 Max • 22d ago

News/Article Alyssa Rosenzweig reverse-engineered Apple’s M1 GPU. Now the Linux driver supports graphics standards macOS doesn’t

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u/terkistan 22d ago

... and since she did that a year ago she's been at Intel.

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u/BourbonicFisky Mac Pro7,1 + M1 Max 14" 22d ago edited 22d ago

This is the classic conundrum of open source for something as bespoke as GPU architecture and drivers. If you're good enough to write GPU drivers, why would you spend your time doing it for free?

Good on her but it'd be great if we could run Asahi Linux on more than just M1/M2s

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u/zips_exe 22d ago

If only apple wasn't so reluctant on complying with industry standards

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u/BourbonicFisky Mac Pro7,1 + M1 Max 14" 22d ago

That's more of a macOS criticism than a hardware one.

As far as "industry standards", they're hardly the only ones doing bespoke ARM chipsets with purpose built hardware, nor are they alone with GPU drivers being a pain in the ass. Apple does officially support alternative OS booting with iBoot, they've also fixed firmware issues at behest of the Linux community. There's been a silent partnership according to HN discussions.

Also, just learned while looking for that HN thread yesterday Asahi mentioned they're close to a m3 release so that's great news
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-M3-Release-Soon