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This is good of course but it's an uphill battle - just reverse engineering the Apple GPU and making a decent driver for it in itself is going to be a huge prob

This is good of course but it's an uphill battle - just reverse engineering the Apple GPU and making a decent driver for it in itself is going to be a huge problem. Look at nouveau - we still don't have any way to reclock NVidia GPUs. Getting good experience and good battery life with reverse engineered hardware is impossible. Then there's going to be new gen hardware and firmware updates for existing ones to keep up with.

marcan_42 6y ago
Thankfully, Apple loads most firmware for us in the bootloader, so we don't have the blob problem that Nouveau does. This includes parts related to power management. Nouveau has an uphill battle because Nvidia is actively hostile, and because they have to support dozens of chips. We are starting with one. I do not expect for us to end up in a Nouveau situation with poor performance/PM over time. It will take time, of course, but I fully expect we will make it happen.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Very happy to hear you're optimistic - more power to you! I might even sign up if I end up buying one of the m1 Macs :) Is the WiFi chip in the M1 Macs a solved problem or did that need to be written from scratch as well? Just curious.
SXX 6y ago
On top of what Marcan posted: keep in mind that back when Nouveau development started Linux open source graphics stack was young and had no mature drivers to look at. Only in last 4 years graphics stack feature and performance parity thanks to Intel, AMD and Valve. Today LLVM is well-developed for GPU drivers and there is tons of other ready-to-use code for OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. E.g RADV was initially created by two developers only and now it is better than AMD official Vulkan implementation. On top of this modern GPUs are now less complex to develop drivers because they'e decoupled from display controllers and hardware no longer have fixed pipelines.

marcan_42 6y ago

Thankfully, Apple loads most firmware for us in the bootloader, so we don't have the blob problem that Nouveau does. This includes parts related to power management. Nouveau has an uphill battle because Nvidia is actively hostile, and because they have to support dozens of chips. We are starting with one. I do not expect for us to end up in a Nouveau situation with poor performance/PM over time. It will take time, of course, but I fully expect we will make it happen.

blinkingled 6y ago
Very happy to hear you're optimistic - more power to you! I might even sign up if I end up buying one of the m1 Macs :) Is the WiFi chip in the M1 Macs a solved problem or did that need to be written from scratch as well? Just curious.

SXX 6y ago

On top of what Marcan posted: keep in mind that back when Nouveau development started Linux open source graphics stack was young and had no mature drivers to look at. Only in last 4 years graphics stack feature and performance parity thanks to Intel, AMD and Valve. Today LLVM is well-developed for GPU drivers and there is tons of other ready-to-use code for OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. E.g RADV was initially created by two developers only and now it is better than AMD official Vulkan implementation. On top of this modern GPUs are now less complex to develop drivers because they'e decoupled from display controllers and hardware no longer have fixed pipelines.