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Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? It's an honest question. Even if someone (or a team) could somehow be paid for this work, by the time the resu

Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? It's an honest question. Even if someone (or a team) could somehow be paid for this work, by the time the results are usable, the hardware will be more or less functionally obsolete. And that is on top of the fact that ARM64 on MacOS will always be a small slice of the gaming pie, and ARM64 on Linux games and GPU applications virtually nonexistent.

SkyMarshal 4y ago
Same reason people bothered with Linux back in the 90s. It's about the journey not the destination. It's fun, enlightening, and there's a chance it becomes something big and impactful in the future.
Denvercoder9 4y ago
Gaming is not the only thing that uses a GPU. A driver that's complete/performant enough to run a Linux desktop and web browser is already useful.
- 4m1rk 4y ago
  To me the whole point of using open source tech is the freedom. I want to have options, hardware or software. When Apple tries hard to remove itself from that list I probably won't fight to keep it there. I just cross it out of my list as if it doesn't exist. So I simply don't use Apple products. What do I miss?
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Machine learning
rrss 4y ago
note it’s probably a lot less effort to add support for M2’s GPU than starting from scratch and having to reverse engineer everything. So eventually the gap between hardware release and fairly complete driver support could close quite a lot.
bri3d 4y ago
There's a much lower standard than "AAA gaming" which still delivers massive value to most users in running a desktop environment. Also, the Apple GPU has evolved from PowerVR roots dating back to the 1990s. It is fairly safe to assume that the next generation of Apple GPU will share enough with the current generation that in 3 years, supporting whatever new hardware exists will be incremental rather than transformative ground-up work. This was already the case for M1 into M2.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I don't really understand what's the difference between AAA game and Google Chrome? I thought that modern applications heavily use GPU acceleration. Is it some subset of GPU commands that's required for desktop, compared to AAA game? Is it possible that Google Chrome will crash the OS with some tricky CSS animation (may be in the future version)?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >I don't really understand what's the difference between AAA game and Google Chrome? Hundreds of GPU features the latter doesn't use in normal hw-accelerated rendering of webpages... except maybe in doing WebGL content (and even less much fewer and older features than what AAA games want)
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Also don't need so much performance so it can be easier
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Right, because WebGL 2.0 is basically 2010 GPU hardware, while the upcoming WebGPU is targeting 2014 hardware.
  - shmerl 4y ago
    Games can trigger a lot more GPUs paths due to their creative usage of shaders.
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robert_foss 4y ago
Why bother? Because the next generation of hardware will be able to use most of the software written for the current generation, and after a few generations the hardware will be well supported very quickly. Additionally there's a lot of shared code between the different linux graphics drivers through Mesa, the linux userspace graphics driver framework.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ThatPlayer 4y ago
Box86 translates plenty of x86(-64) games to be playable on ARM. https://youtu.be/Of93GBCEbug https://youtu.be/Of93GBCEbug Shows some native games, but also Skyrim and Metro Last Light working on ARM.
acomjean 4y ago
You can't tell people who are doing the work what to work on.. but considering there is a mountain of linux development for people with the expertise to be done for more open platforms. This work pretty much only helps one of the richest companies and Apple shows very little inclination to help by providing documentation or support (they let an alternative OS boot seems to be the extent of it).
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  Maybe it's the reverse engineering aspect that makes it interesting. Those of us in that line of work already spend our time at work turning docs into device drivers. It would be like working at Apple without getting paid.
- jorvi 4y ago
  And yet Linus used a MacBook Air as his daily driver for many many years. The XPS series might have caught up for a while, but until they flip over to ARM, Apple laptops simply blow anything else out of the water. What’s wrong with trying to run Linux on that?
  - lmm 4y ago
    It sets the wrong incentives. Companies that are more developer-friendly, publishing specs and so on, should be rewarded for it.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      In principle I would agree, but the world isn't black and white. First of all, in the PC world, there are few machines which are completely and well documented. That Linux runs on so much PC hardware is more due to the popularity than great documentation. NVidia just recently finally open sourced their drivers. Could Apple improve the documentation a lot? For sure! Bu on the other side, the ARM Macs are a very nice platform, so I can understand the desire to use it. There is no competition at the moment, so it would be wrong too, to not support Linux there.
  - 4y ago
mfuzzey 4y ago
GPUs tend to evolve over time rather than change radically. So even if the hardware is obselete before the work is finsihed the driver for the next generation will start from a much better point than the first one. Also it will be useable for at least some usecases, even if not AAA games, before the hardware is obselete.
simonh 4y ago
Because AAA games aren’t everything. > a basic OpenGL driver is doable by a single person. I’m optimistic that we’ll have native OpenGL 2.1 in Asahi Linux by the end of the year. That should be enough to be very useful to a lot of users.
gigatexal 4y ago
Getting this off the ground has a chance to get this to snowball. Imagine it gets to rough but useable and it’s in the kernel. Then more and more folks can iterate on it. It’s development rate will increase.
rand0m4r 4y ago
The answer could be: because they like it. People do great stuff with computers and programming and I think this is a good example. Passion is what it's all about.
- coldtea 4y ago
  This is not about just doing it for passion or for hacking fun despite being worthless of something. There's a very pragmatic reason that makes it very useful! The "why bother" is missing the crucial point, that the most important use of the GPU driver for Asahi would be HW accelerated desktop (and driving external monitors, etc) - it's not like a GPU driver for M1 is useless if no AAA games aren't supported...
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    I totally concur, AAA games aren’t really the main driver for desktop Linux anyway.
deaddodo 4y ago
Why bother building a contemporary computer kit on MOS6502 chips[1]? Because people want to. Who is anyone to be the arbiter of those desires, no matter the practical applications (which this has a ton of, as alluded to via the other repliers)? 1 - https://eater.net/6502 https://eater.net/6502
pcwalton 4y ago
Your desktop that you're using to post this is likely using GPU acceleration to composite your windows. Not having GPU acceleration for graphics is a killer with today's HiDPI displays. The CPU generally can't keep up, and even when it technically can it is extremely power inefficient.
- winnie_ua 4y ago
  By the way, I am reading and replying not using desktop, but using Android phone :-) But you are right -- modern desktops are using a GPU heavily. For worse or best(10-15 years ago everything worked without GPU help and compositors. Was not as fancy looking). P.S. I like how HN works on mobile. And how lightweight it is. Made by real hacker wizards, of long lost arcane knowledge of the webcraft!
coldtea 4y ago
>Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? Because most of us looking into Asahi don't care for playing AAA games with it. We want Linux on our Mac laptop, with hw acceleration for the desktop and apps.
- Underphil 4y ago
  What AAA games would even run on an M1?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - simonh 4y ago
    With the upcoming updates to Metal, in principle quite a few.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - p1necone 4y ago
    Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly (30-60fps) with low-midrange dedicated gpus which is effectively what the M1 performs like on paper (I think it's in the ballpark of the NVidia 1050/1050ti/1650). You just have to lower the settings and resolution to get that smooth performance - think base model last gen console/nintendo switch levels of visual fidelity rather than up to date gaming pc/current gen console levels of visual fidelity. It's kinda fun squeezing performance out of woefully underpowered hardware - LowSpecGamer on youtube is a channel dedicated to this kind of stuff.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly I think the parent's point is "what AAA games would run on the M1, even if they finish GPU support, given that we're talking about ARM Linux?"
imiric 4y ago
> why bother? I wonder the same thing, but from an ideological perspective. Why should the free software community promote Apple hardware by making it more accessible to OSS enthusiasts, when Apple only cares about OSS when it directly benefits them? Apple makes great hardware, but they're actively hostile to everything free software stands for. If Apple cared about this user base, they would work on this themselves. That said, from a technical standpoint, this is nothing short of impressive, so kudos to the team. I can't even imagine the dedication and patience required to work on this project.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Right now, Apple makes arguably the best laptop hardware on the market thanks to its chipset. Why should you be forced to choose between non-free software and subpar hardware? Why not liberate the hardware?
  - imiric 4y ago
    Because it will always be an uphill battle, where the biggest beneficiary will be Apple. I'm not saying the OSS community should boycott Apple, but maybe let's not help them sell more machines. I think there are plenty of "good enough" laptops that run Linux just fine, so I'd rather use those than have the relatively "best" hardware, but have to fight it to run the software I want, deal with any incompatibilities, and fear that it might break at any point. Standard Linux on supported hardware has plenty of issues; I can't imagine what the experience is like on completely opaque hardware, as much progress as the Asahi team has made. It's like a reverse Hackintosh project, which has always been a painful experience.
    - malermeister 4y ago
      I think that is all personal preference. I'd rather hack around incompatibilities than settle for "good enough" while macOS gets best of class hardware.
    - winnie_ua 4y ago
      I agree. If you know that you want to use Linux on it. You should support honest vendor with money, not one who is actively against you.
zeckalpha 4y ago
Just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU
nicoburns 4y ago
Currently 60% of the CPU power is being used to do software rendering! If we can offload that to the GPU then it both frees up a lot of CPU capacity and ought to greatly improve battery life.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

Same reason people bothered with Linux back in the 90s. It's about the journey not the destination. It's fun, enlightening, and there's a chance it becomes something big and impactful in the future.

Denvercoder9 4y ago

Gaming is not the only thing that uses a GPU. A driver that's complete/performant enough to run a Linux desktop and web browser is already useful.

4m1rk 4y ago
To me the whole point of using open source tech is the freedom. I want to have options, hardware or software. When Apple tries hard to remove itself from that list I probably won't fight to keep it there. I just cross it out of my list as if it doesn't exist. So I simply don't use Apple products. What do I miss?

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Machine learning

rrss 4y ago

note it’s probably a lot less effort to add support for M2’s GPU than starting from scratch and having to reverse engineer everything. So eventually the gap between hardware release and fairly complete driver support could close quite a lot.

bri3d 4y ago

There's a much lower standard than "AAA gaming" which still delivers massive value to most users in running a desktop environment. Also, the Apple GPU has evolved from PowerVR roots dating back to the 1990s. It is fairly safe to assume that the next generation of Apple GPU will share enough with the current generation that in 3 years, supporting whatever new hardware exists will be incremental rather than transformative ground-up work. This was already the case for M1 into M2.

vbezhenar 4y ago
I don't really understand what's the difference between AAA game and Google Chrome? I thought that modern applications heavily use GPU acceleration. Is it some subset of GPU commands that's required for desktop, compared to AAA game? Is it possible that Google Chrome will crash the OS with some tricky CSS animation (may be in the future version)?
- coldtea 4y ago
  >I don't really understand what's the difference between AAA game and Google Chrome? Hundreds of GPU features the latter doesn't use in normal hw-accelerated rendering of webpages... except maybe in doing WebGL content (and even less much fewer and older features than what AAA games want)
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Also don't need so much performance so it can be easier
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Right, because WebGL 2.0 is basically 2010 GPU hardware, while the upcoming WebGPU is targeting 2014 hardware.
- shmerl 4y ago
  Games can trigger a lot more GPUs paths due to their creative usage of shaders.
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

robert_foss 4y ago

Why bother? Because the next generation of hardware will be able to use most of the software written for the current generation, and after a few generations the hardware will be well supported very quickly. Additionally there's a lot of shared code between the different linux graphics drivers through Mesa, the linux userspace graphics driver framework.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ThatPlayer 4y ago

Box86 translates plenty of x86(-64) games to be playable on ARM. https://youtu.be/Of93GBCEbug https://youtu.be/Of93GBCEbug Shows some native games, but also Skyrim and Metro Last Light working on ARM.

acomjean 4y ago

You can't tell people who are doing the work what to work on.. but considering there is a mountain of linux development for people with the expertise to be done for more open platforms. This work pretty much only helps one of the richest companies and Apple shows very little inclination to help by providing documentation or support (they let an alternative OS boot seems to be the extent of it).

colonwqbang 4y ago
Maybe it's the reverse engineering aspect that makes it interesting. Those of us in that line of work already spend our time at work turning docs into device drivers. It would be like working at Apple without getting paid.
jorvi 4y ago
And yet Linus used a MacBook Air as his daily driver for many many years. The XPS series might have caught up for a while, but until they flip over to ARM, Apple laptops simply blow anything else out of the water. What’s wrong with trying to run Linux on that?
- lmm 4y ago
  It sets the wrong incentives. Companies that are more developer-friendly, publishing specs and so on, should be rewarded for it.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    In principle I would agree, but the world isn't black and white. First of all, in the PC world, there are few machines which are completely and well documented. That Linux runs on so much PC hardware is more due to the popularity than great documentation. NVidia just recently finally open sourced their drivers. Could Apple improve the documentation a lot? For sure! Bu on the other side, the ARM Macs are a very nice platform, so I can understand the desire to use it. There is no competition at the moment, so it would be wrong too, to not support Linux there.
- 4y ago

mfuzzey 4y ago

GPUs tend to evolve over time rather than change radically. So even if the hardware is obselete before the work is finsihed the driver for the next generation will start from a much better point than the first one. Also it will be useable for at least some usecases, even if not AAA games, before the hardware is obselete.

simonh 4y ago

Because AAA games aren’t everything. > a basic OpenGL driver is doable by a single person. I’m optimistic that we’ll have native OpenGL 2.1 in Asahi Linux by the end of the year. That should be enough to be very useful to a lot of users.

gigatexal 4y ago

Getting this off the ground has a chance to get this to snowball. Imagine it gets to rough but useable and it’s in the kernel. Then more and more folks can iterate on it. It’s development rate will increase.

rand0m4r 4y ago

The answer could be: because they like it. People do great stuff with computers and programming and I think this is a good example. Passion is what it's all about.

coldtea 4y ago
This is not about just doing it for passion or for hacking fun despite being worthless of something. There's a very pragmatic reason that makes it very useful! The "why bother" is missing the crucial point, that the most important use of the GPU driver for Asahi would be HW accelerated desktop (and driving external monitors, etc) - it's not like a GPU driver for M1 is useless if no AAA games aren't supported...
- chris_wot 4y ago
  I totally concur, AAA games aren’t really the main driver for desktop Linux anyway.

deaddodo 4y ago

Why bother building a contemporary computer kit on MOS6502 chips[1]? Because people want to. Who is anyone to be the arbiter of those desires, no matter the practical applications (which this has a ton of, as alluded to via the other repliers)? 1 - https://eater.net/6502 https://eater.net/6502

pcwalton 4y ago

Your desktop that you're using to post this is likely using GPU acceleration to composite your windows. Not having GPU acceleration for graphics is a killer with today's HiDPI displays. The CPU generally can't keep up, and even when it technically can it is extremely power inefficient.

winnie_ua 4y ago
By the way, I am reading and replying not using desktop, but using Android phone :-) But you are right -- modern desktops are using a GPU heavily. For worse or best(10-15 years ago everything worked without GPU help and compositors. Was not as fancy looking). P.S. I like how HN works on mobile. And how lightweight it is. Made by real hacker wizards, of long lost arcane knowledge of the webcraft!

coldtea 4y ago

>Totally non-sarcastic question: then why bother? Because most of us looking into Asahi don't care for playing AAA games with it. We want Linux on our Mac laptop, with hw acceleration for the desktop and apps.

Underphil 4y ago
What AAA games would even run on an M1?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 4y ago
  With the upcoming updates to Metal, in principle quite a few.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- p1necone 4y ago
  Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly (30-60fps) with low-midrange dedicated gpus which is effectively what the M1 performs like on paper (I think it's in the ballpark of the NVidia 1050/1050ti/1650). You just have to lower the settings and resolution to get that smooth performance - think base model last gen console/nintendo switch levels of visual fidelity rather than up to date gaming pc/current gen console levels of visual fidelity. It's kinda fun squeezing performance out of woefully underpowered hardware - LowSpecGamer on youtube is a channel dedicated to this kind of stuff.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Basically all AAA games will run relatively smoothly I think the parent's point is "what AAA games would run on the M1, even if they finish GPU support, given that we're talking about ARM Linux?"

imiric 4y ago

> why bother? I wonder the same thing, but from an ideological perspective. Why should the free software community promote Apple hardware by making it more accessible to OSS enthusiasts, when Apple only cares about OSS when it directly benefits them? Apple makes great hardware, but they're actively hostile to everything free software stands for. If Apple cared about this user base, they would work on this themselves. That said, from a technical standpoint, this is nothing short of impressive, so kudos to the team. I can't even imagine the dedication and patience required to work on this project.

malermeister 4y ago
Right now, Apple makes arguably the best laptop hardware on the market thanks to its chipset. Why should you be forced to choose between non-free software and subpar hardware? Why not liberate the hardware?
- imiric 4y ago
  Because it will always be an uphill battle, where the biggest beneficiary will be Apple. I'm not saying the OSS community should boycott Apple, but maybe let's not help them sell more machines. I think there are plenty of "good enough" laptops that run Linux just fine, so I'd rather use those than have the relatively "best" hardware, but have to fight it to run the software I want, deal with any incompatibilities, and fear that it might break at any point. Standard Linux on supported hardware has plenty of issues; I can't imagine what the experience is like on completely opaque hardware, as much progress as the Asahi team has made. It's like a reverse Hackintosh project, which has always been a painful experience.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    I think that is all personal preference. I'd rather hack around incompatibilities than settle for "good enough" while macOS gets best of class hardware.
  - winnie_ua 4y ago
    I agree. If you know that you want to use Linux on it. You should support honest vendor with money, not one who is actively against you.

zeckalpha 4y ago

Just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU

nicoburns 4y ago

Currently 60% of the CPU power is being used to do software rendering! If we can offload that to the GPU then it both frees up a lot of CPU capacity and ought to greatly improve battery life.