4 ms·
I'm not nearly as experienced as the blog post author, but I suspect the M1's GPU does not have any way of blitting to the screen other than driving it 'fully'
by q3k 6y ago
I'm not nearly as experienced as the blog post author, but I suspect the M1's GPU does not have any way of blitting to the screen other than driving it 'fully' - ie. using the standard command queue and shader units to even get the simplest 2D output.
- floatboth 6y agoIn embedded SoCs the GPU is typically "render only", and display is handled by a different hardware block ("display engine" etc), and of course both CPU and GPU can write to it. Well that's even true in desktop GPUs but it's just tightly coupled there, both blocks are on the same PCIe device so the support is in one driver. From the iPhone 7 Linux port we know that Apple is nothing special in terms of this (they have framebuffer working there)
- grishka 6y agoSo would the bootloader also include a rudimentary GPU driver to, for example, display the Apple logo, the boot device selection screen, the internet recovery UI and so on? One would think that they would've provided a simple framebuffer interface in the hardware for this kind of use case. (I'm more of a software kind of guy, I might be entirely wrong here tho)