9 ms·

Minecraft Running on Asahi Linux with Open Source GPU Drivers

376 points by pimeys 4y ago

wkdneidbwf 4y ago
this whole project has been amazing to watch develop. not only is this technically impressive, it seemed like it happened _so fast_. really talented people!
- phkahler 4y ago
  And the Apple GPU kernel driver is written in Rust, so it kinda proves that concept as a side effect!
  - simcop2387 4y ago
    Yea I'm really waiting for the day that we see it get far enough along to push for mainlining it. It'll be a really cool testament to both the work being done by Lina and Alyssa and also the work that was done by the kernel team to even enable Rust to work there in the first place.
    - phkahler 4y ago
      I think a lot of people might say something like "It might be OK for simple drivers, but what about something like a GPU" knowing that GPU drivers are probably the most complex. But now we can use this the opposite way and say "well if they can write a GPU driver in Rust, surely it could be used for the simpler devices." The driver complexity argument is shattered, and the blog posts suggest it's better - confirming fearless concurrency and no memory management issues! So weird that this seems to be the very first Rust written driver.
      - simcop2387 4y ago
        It's the first non-trivial one, but not the first entirely. The patch set I believe comes with a simple NVME driver to prove that the system itself works. I'm curious if we'll see some network drivers ported to it because of the concurrency and memory management benefits. They tend to be just as performance sensitive as GPUs and even more security focused since they pretty much explicitly handle untrusted input (externally and internally) in ways that lots of devices don't do.
unknownaccount 4y ago
At 28 FPS…
- smcl 4y ago
  It's a start - remember this developer has basically bootstrapped linux on Apple's custom hardware and this is the early stages of the latest area she's focussed on (getting the GPU working). This has been an impressive project, it'll no doubt continue.
  - fastball 4y ago
    Minor correction but most of the "bootstrapping" work unrelated to the GPU has been done by Hector Martin, Alyssa's focus has always been on the GPU side of it.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Ah apologies, it's Alyssa who I usually see in relation to Asahi Linux so maybe I over-attributed it to her :)
- xbar 4y ago
  Which is pretty incredible in a day 1 driver. It's already playable. What a great year this team has had. Thanks Alyssa, Yuka, and Lina.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >day 1 driver Mesa is 27 years old.
    - boarush 4y ago
      I believe they're calling it Day 1 in the sense that the devs themselves are saying a lot of it is hacked together and not daily driver material for most of the users. A lot of releases and revisions before this is even upstreamed.
ah- 4y ago
It doesn't just run Minecraft, it now runs a smooth gpu accelerated GNOME desktop including things like Youtube videos: https://cdn.masto.host/sigmoidsocial/media_attachments/files/109/378/885/573/443/988/original/e6e6e768255fa676.png https://cdn.masto.host/sigmoidsocial/media_attachments/files... This doesn't yet work out of the box but the next few months will be very exciting.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Man, that's so cool. When things became quiet around the GPU work and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. That hope is back!
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    > and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. I think the quote you're thinking of was a reference to modern OpenGL and Vulkan support, not accelerated graphics in general. Older OpenGL is a lot easier to implement, and sufficient for an accelerated desktop and games like Minecraft. Marcan and Alyssa have been saying for a while that we were on track to get GPU acceleration in the near-ish future.
    - shmerl 4y ago
      May be Vulkan can be the first priority since OpenGL can be provided by Zink when it's in good shape.
      - dagmx 4y ago
        Vulkan is a lot more work to get to, with far fewer applications using it. It would be a worse ROI, and take significantly longer to make an OS that can be a daily driver for most people.
        shmerl 4y ago
        Not sure if OpenGL 4.0-4.6 is less work in general. I'd argue implementing Vulkan gives the best ROI, since it gives all OpenGL after that without extra effort. And I don't think that few applications use it. Anything modern tries to. The rest are planning to move to it.
renewiltord 4y ago
These open-source GPU driver guys are sick! About two decades ago, I had a Via Unichrome integrated GPU and the OpenChrome project had me able to run games on Linux. It was sick. I played Unreal Tournament (which had a Linux version that worked better for me than on Windows), and I think at one point my introduction to open source was having to modify another game's source code so that it would allocate less GPU memory for a texture (the texture then kind of smeared over the rest of the screen, but it was for a UI element so the game was still playable). Love to see there are people still doing that stuff today, especially since this stuff is probably more complex than then.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Yeah, I have massive respect for those developers. I wonder how they learned to do what they do. Adding Linux support for hardware is some kind of super power.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > These open-source GPU driver guys are sick! I believe it's guys + girls specifically for this project edit: it might just be girls? Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    No genderedness intended! My dialect has guys as gender neutral noun!
bil7 4y ago
absolutely insane development pace. Congrats to the asahi team
tpush 4y ago
Already using Asahi Linux on my M1 Air; can't wait until the GPU stuff lands! Extremely impressive work by all involved!
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  What’s your battery life like compared to macOS?
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    I'd also like to know. We recently had an interesting thread about Linux power management and efficiency on laptops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644165
  - DefineOutside 4y ago
    I've get around 6 hours on asahi linux. MacOS battery is at least twice as good - not sure since I've never ran out of battery on MacOS. Sleeping works on macOS so I always have to remember to turn off the laptop on linux. Good for taking notes though, the CPU dips to 40 FPS on desktop sometimes and can't play videos.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      Thanks for answering. This is totally without hardware graphics acceleration, right? As my understanding is that gpu drivers are still an experimental work in progress. If so, it’s pretty cool that you still get 6 hours even with that handicap. I’m excited to see how it looks once the GPU works well.
      - DefineOutside 4y ago
        Yes, no GPU acceleration. All on the CPU. Mainly on google docs though and other websites, nothing very intensive.
      - urthor 4y ago
rowanG077 4y ago
Totally awesome that this is now working. But performance seems relatively lackluster for now. But it's good they are focusing on getting it to work first before getting it fast.
DefineOutside 4y ago
This is impressive for 12 render distance (You can see this by D: [render distance] in F3). Lower resolution and looking upwards does help though. Also, minecraft does a draw call for every single text in F3 which significantly lowers FPS. This might be playable at 60 FPS with sodium (beats optifine in performance) and a lowered view distance.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Now we still need Minecraft to become open source.
- 63 4y ago
  The state of open source Minecraft is nuanced enough to be interesting. The Minecraft ip and codebases are currently owned by Microsoft and have technically always been closed source, but the nature of the game and its development history are such that third party mods and modding apis are very common. Because the original edition of the game is written in Java, it's relatively easy to decompile and develop for. In fact, Mojang Studios has been including a deobfuscation map with each snapshot release of the game for a few years now which would allow you to decompile the Java edition of the game and use the same names that they use internally [0]. Though, most modders prefer to use the mappings provided by modding apis like forge and fabric due to tradition and licensing conflicts. Depending on your definition of Minecraft, there's also plenty of open source implementations of Minecraft Classic, a much older version of the game that's easy to reimplement but apparently still has an active community [1]. Then of course there's Minetest, an independent totally open source voxel game that happens to have a lot in common with Minecraft [2]. I should probably also note that there's something of a conflict in this area surrounding the other edition of Minecraft, Bedrock Edition, which is written in C++ and therefore difficult to decompile and mod. Bedrock Edition is much more closed than Java edition in a number of ways, such as including a store built into the launcher for buying maps, texture packs and skins whereas these would need to retrieved externally (usually for free) on Java edition. However, Bedrock Edition does have a first party modding api, a more feature rich internal scripting system with the concept of "behavior packs" [3], and has led to the development of a number of tools used by mod authors for both editions, such as Blockbench [4]. Ultimately Java Edition and its community have the legacy of Notch and Mojang with a long history of community contribution while Bedrock Edition was only developed after the Microsoft acquisition and is much more in Microsoft's style. EDIT: Turns out the Bedrock Edition modding api was discontinued earlier this year [5]. [0]https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Obfuscation_map https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Obfuscation_map [1]https://wiki.vg/Category:Minecraft_Classic https://wiki.vg/Category:Minecraft_Classic [2]https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ [3]https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/documents/behaviorpack https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document... [4]https://www.blockbench.net/ https://www.blockbench.net/ [5]https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/creator/article/removing-the-additional-modding-capabilities-feature https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/creator/article/removing-the...
thanatos519 4y ago
Wait, I can't even run it on amd64 right now! It's stalled at this point: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/commit/4c7dadf29df543856db9b73f8a7b220e65d489a2 https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/com...
- Deukhoofd 4y ago
  That's the Bedrock edition, not the Java edition. Entirely different beasts.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Wrong version! Arguably (my opinion) an illegitimate version. Another comment mentions some reasons to think that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33690135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33690135
55555 4y ago
If you choose to use Linux as your daily driver instead of MacOS, why? Just curious.
- nick_meister 4y ago
  As someone who has a MBP M1 sitting there and barely used, I’m asking myself the same question, but targeted to MacOS users.
  - drexlspivey 4y ago
    Why did you buy it then?
    - aliqot 4y ago
      In the early days, RISC and other non x86 hardware was the future to some of us. Whether the OS is good or not, I wanted to try it out, as a newer era in CPU architecture and a possible competitor to the dominant architecture. To me the hardware is very much not the problem here, when I disregard non-serviceable parts. The OS is just as quirky as linux, and has some elements that are comparable to linux (the terminal is much more posix-y than windows cmd), however your options are limited in ways that you may have grown used to as a linux user: - no alternative DE's, WM's or the ability to compute without either one. (both are in my submission history with 0 solutions, i've asked.) - no customization (top car can't go away, bottom bar can't slide out like powerpc mac) - no involvement in the bootloader - no upgrading hardware without 'tricking' the OS - no alternative drivers/firmware options the list goes on, and like I said, just as quirky as linux so most of us just 'make do' with MacOS as 'good enough' on what is probably the most performant and efficient laptop I've ever owned. I never knew how much fan noise, vibration, and hot fingers negatively impacted me until I put hands on my old laptop.
    - nick_meister 4y ago
      Company bought it for me
- smoldesu 4y ago
astrostl 4y ago
I wonder if this would work on 32-bit systems? I had an old one and was surprised to see that Minecraft wouldn't run on it because of a video driver issue. It's odd to me to consider x86 hardware actual trash even when computationally capable of running something at a useful speed.

376 points by pimeys 4y ago

this whole project has been amazing to watch develop. not only is this technically impressive, it seemed like it happened _so fast_. really talented people!

phkahler 4y ago
And the Apple GPU kernel driver is written in Rust, so it kinda proves that concept as a side effect!
- simcop2387 4y ago
  Yea I'm really waiting for the day that we see it get far enough along to push for mainlining it. It'll be a really cool testament to both the work being done by Lina and Alyssa and also the work that was done by the kernel team to even enable Rust to work there in the first place.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    I think a lot of people might say something like "It might be OK for simple drivers, but what about something like a GPU" knowing that GPU drivers are probably the most complex. But now we can use this the opposite way and say "well if they can write a GPU driver in Rust, surely it could be used for the simpler devices." The driver complexity argument is shattered, and the blog posts suggest it's better - confirming fearless concurrency and no memory management issues! So weird that this seems to be the very first Rust written driver.
    - simcop2387 4y ago
      It's the first non-trivial one, but not the first entirely. The patch set I believe comes with a simple NVME driver to prove that the system itself works. I'm curious if we'll see some network drivers ported to it because of the concurrency and memory management benefits. They tend to be just as performance sensitive as GPUs and even more security focused since they pretty much explicitly handle untrusted input (externally and internally) in ways that lots of devices don't do.

unknownaccount 4y ago

At 28 FPS…

smcl 4y ago
It's a start - remember this developer has basically bootstrapped linux on Apple's custom hardware and this is the early stages of the latest area she's focussed on (getting the GPU working). This has been an impressive project, it'll no doubt continue.
- fastball 4y ago
  Minor correction but most of the "bootstrapping" work unrelated to the GPU has been done by Hector Martin, Alyssa's focus has always been on the GPU side of it.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Ah apologies, it's Alyssa who I usually see in relation to Asahi Linux so maybe I over-attributed it to her :)
xbar 4y ago
Which is pretty incredible in a day 1 driver. It's already playable. What a great year this team has had. Thanks Alyssa, Yuka, and Lina.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >day 1 driver Mesa is 27 years old.
  - boarush 4y ago
    I believe they're calling it Day 1 in the sense that the devs themselves are saying a lot of it is hacked together and not daily driver material for most of the users. A lot of releases and revisions before this is even upstreamed.

ah- 4y ago

It doesn't just run Minecraft, it now runs a smooth gpu accelerated GNOME desktop including things like Youtube videos: https://cdn.masto.host/sigmoidsocial/media_attachments/files/109/378/885/573/443/988/original/e6e6e768255fa676.png https://cdn.masto.host/sigmoidsocial/media_attachments/files... This doesn't yet work out of the box but the next few months will be very exciting.

solarkraft 4y ago
Man, that's so cool. When things became quiet around the GPU work and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. That hope is back!
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. I think the quote you're thinking of was a reference to modern OpenGL and Vulkan support, not accelerated graphics in general. Older OpenGL is a lot easier to implement, and sufficient for an accelerated desktop and games like Minecraft. Marcan and Alyssa have been saying for a while that we were on track to get GPU acceleration in the near-ish future.
  - shmerl 4y ago
    May be Vulkan can be the first priority since OpenGL can be provided by Zink when it's in good shape.
    - dagmx 4y ago
      Vulkan is a lot more work to get to, with far fewer applications using it. It would be a worse ROI, and take significantly longer to make an OS that can be a daily driver for most people.
      - shmerl 4y ago
        Not sure if OpenGL 4.0-4.6 is less work in general. I'd argue implementing Vulkan gives the best ROI, since it gives all OpenGL after that without extra effort. And I don't think that few applications use it. Anything modern tries to. The rest are planning to move to it.

renewiltord 4y ago

These open-source GPU driver guys are sick! About two decades ago, I had a Via Unichrome integrated GPU and the OpenChrome project had me able to run games on Linux. It was sick. I played Unreal Tournament (which had a Linux version that worked better for me than on Windows), and I think at one point my introduction to open source was having to modify another game's source code so that it would allocate less GPU memory for a texture (the texture then kind of smeared over the rest of the screen, but it was for a UI element so the game was still playable). Love to see there are people still doing that stuff today, especially since this stuff is probably more complex than then.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
Yeah, I have massive respect for those developers. I wonder how they learned to do what they do. Adding Linux support for hardware is some kind of super power.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> These open-source GPU driver guys are sick! I believe it's guys + girls specifically for this project edit: it might just be girls? Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- renewiltord 4y ago
  No genderedness intended! My dialect has guys as gender neutral noun!

bil7 4y ago

absolutely insane development pace. Congrats to the asahi team

tpush 4y ago

Already using Asahi Linux on my M1 Air; can't wait until the GPU stuff lands! Extremely impressive work by all involved!

School-Cotton 4y ago
What’s your battery life like compared to macOS?
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  I'd also like to know. We recently had an interesting thread about Linux power management and efficiency on laptops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644165
- DefineOutside 4y ago
  I've get around 6 hours on asahi linux. MacOS battery is at least twice as good - not sure since I've never ran out of battery on MacOS. Sleeping works on macOS so I always have to remember to turn off the laptop on linux. Good for taking notes though, the CPU dips to 40 FPS on desktop sometimes and can't play videos.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Thanks for answering. This is totally without hardware graphics acceleration, right? As my understanding is that gpu drivers are still an experimental work in progress. If so, it’s pretty cool that you still get 6 hours even with that handicap. I’m excited to see how it looks once the GPU works well.
    - DefineOutside 4y ago
      Yes, no GPU acceleration. All on the CPU. Mainly on google docs though and other websites, nothing very intensive.
    - urthor 4y ago

rowanG077 4y ago

Totally awesome that this is now working. But performance seems relatively lackluster for now. But it's good they are focusing on getting it to work first before getting it fast.

DefineOutside 4y ago

This is impressive for 12 render distance (You can see this by D: [render distance] in F3). Lower resolution and looking upwards does help though. Also, minecraft does a draw call for every single text in F3 which significantly lowers FPS. This might be playable at 60 FPS with sodium (beats optifine in performance) and a lowered view distance.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

Now we still need Minecraft to become open source.

63 4y ago
The state of open source Minecraft is nuanced enough to be interesting. The Minecraft ip and codebases are currently owned by Microsoft and have technically always been closed source, but the nature of the game and its development history are such that third party mods and modding apis are very common. Because the original edition of the game is written in Java, it's relatively easy to decompile and develop for. In fact, Mojang Studios has been including a deobfuscation map with each snapshot release of the game for a few years now which would allow you to decompile the Java edition of the game and use the same names that they use internally [0]. Though, most modders prefer to use the mappings provided by modding apis like forge and fabric due to tradition and licensing conflicts. Depending on your definition of Minecraft, there's also plenty of open source implementations of Minecraft Classic, a much older version of the game that's easy to reimplement but apparently still has an active community [1]. Then of course there's Minetest, an independent totally open source voxel game that happens to have a lot in common with Minecraft [2]. I should probably also note that there's something of a conflict in this area surrounding the other edition of Minecraft, Bedrock Edition, which is written in C++ and therefore difficult to decompile and mod. Bedrock Edition is much more closed than Java edition in a number of ways, such as including a store built into the launcher for buying maps, texture packs and skins whereas these would need to retrieved externally (usually for free) on Java edition. However, Bedrock Edition does have a first party modding api, a more feature rich internal scripting system with the concept of "behavior packs" [3], and has led to the development of a number of tools used by mod authors for both editions, such as Blockbench [4]. Ultimately Java Edition and its community have the legacy of Notch and Mojang with a long history of community contribution while Bedrock Edition was only developed after the Microsoft acquisition and is much more in Microsoft's style. EDIT: Turns out the Bedrock Edition modding api was discontinued earlier this year [5]. [0]https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Obfuscation_map https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Obfuscation_map [1]https://wiki.vg/Category:Minecraft_Classic https://wiki.vg/Category:Minecraft_Classic [2]https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ [3]https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/documents/behaviorpack https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document... [4]https://www.blockbench.net/ https://www.blockbench.net/ [5]https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/creator/article/removing-the-additional-modding-capabilities-feature https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/creator/article/removing-the...

thanatos519 4y ago

Wait, I can't even run it on amd64 right now! It's stalled at this point: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/commit/4c7dadf29df543856db9b73f8a7b220e65d489a2 https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/com...

Deukhoofd 4y ago
That's the Bedrock edition, not the Java edition. Entirely different beasts.
solarkraft 4y ago
Wrong version! Arguably (my opinion) an illegitimate version. Another comment mentions some reasons to think that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33690135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33690135

55555 4y ago

If you choose to use Linux as your daily driver instead of MacOS, why? Just curious.

nick_meister 4y ago
As someone who has a MBP M1 sitting there and barely used, I’m asking myself the same question, but targeted to MacOS users.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  Why did you buy it then?
  - aliqot 4y ago
    In the early days, RISC and other non x86 hardware was the future to some of us. Whether the OS is good or not, I wanted to try it out, as a newer era in CPU architecture and a possible competitor to the dominant architecture. To me the hardware is very much not the problem here, when I disregard non-serviceable parts. The OS is just as quirky as linux, and has some elements that are comparable to linux (the terminal is much more posix-y than windows cmd), however your options are limited in ways that you may have grown used to as a linux user: - no alternative DE's, WM's or the ability to compute without either one. (both are in my submission history with 0 solutions, i've asked.) - no customization (top car can't go away, bottom bar can't slide out like powerpc mac) - no involvement in the bootloader - no upgrading hardware without 'tricking' the OS - no alternative drivers/firmware options the list goes on, and like I said, just as quirky as linux so most of us just 'make do' with MacOS as 'good enough' on what is probably the most performant and efficient laptop I've ever owned. I never knew how much fan noise, vibration, and hot fingers negatively impacted me until I put hands on my old laptop.
  - nick_meister 4y ago
    Company bought it for me
smoldesu 4y ago

astrostl 4y ago

I wonder if this would work on 32-bit systems? I had an old one and was surprised to see that Minecraft wouldn't run on it because of a video driver issue. It's odd to me to consider x86 hardware actual trash even when computationally capable of running something at a useful speed.