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Work on Mx GPU drivers is particularly interesting as it could allow for performant MacOS virtualization on commodity PC hardware. Right now if you virtualize M
by hendersoon 4y ago
Work on Mx GPU drivers is particularly interesting as it could allow for performant MacOS virtualization on commodity PC hardware. Right now if you virtualize MacOS interactive desktop performance is unusably slow unless you pass through a PCIe GPU.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoI... don't think it will. There's a pretty big difference between writing a driver for a GPU and actually emulating that GPU, much less with reasonable performance. And I do think that's what you'd have to do, because unlike on Intel, macOS on Apple Silicon does not support software rendering.
- my123 4y agoNah, Apple has a very clean Metal paravirtualisation ABI. This allows to decouple the VM from the underlying HW. macOS 12 VMs will run on Mac hardware that doesn't even exist yet, with GPU acceleration.
- jamesfmilne 4y agoOnly supports Metal though, no OpenGL apps (even through their OpenGL implementation is written on top of Metal).
- my123 4y agoWritten on top of Metal with some specific private extensions. I guess that they aren’t willing to long-term support those (yet?). I wonder if they are going to make the Apple OpenGL impl run without those as an alternative too…