12 ms·

Asahi Linux M1 GPU drivers can now run Windows games via Steam Proton

283 points by SXX 4y ago

asddubs 4y ago
so how does this work? QEMU? e: i checked linas mastodon and apparently it's using FEX https://fex-emu.com/ https://fex-emu.com/
- boudin 4y ago
  It's explained in the video, it uses https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
  - asddubs 4y ago
    ah sorry, I only watched the first minute or so since it didn't seem like the type of video that would dwell much on technical details like that
- jzelinskie 4y ago
  Will FEX ever leverage the hardware that Apple design for Rosetta 2 trickery? It seems like a heavy lift for a general purpose emulator, but at the same time there's probably a bunch of performance wins to be had.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Hardware TSO support actually simplifies emulation. I don't know if FEX uses it yet but it seems simple.
captn3m0 4y ago
From when I last checked, it still requires a custom 4K kernel as Asahi only ships with a 16K kernel, and FEX won’t work with those. So you need to compile a custom kernel for FEX to run and Steam to work. Still, great work from Lina and the Asahi team, very excited about getting full FEX support on stock kernels (I have a backlog of Humble Bundle games to try with this).
- Sakos 4y ago
  For whoever else who doesn't know wtf a 16k kernel is supposed to be: https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-2021/ https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-202...
  - captn3m0 4y ago
    Aargh. <script>document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")&&(console.log("Hacker News is becoming worse than 4chan. Do better."),document.location="https://google.com")</script>
    - nicolaslem 4y ago
      How is the referrer still a thing in 2023?
      - captn3m0 4y ago
        https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/smart-referer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/smart-referer/ works well for me.
        amelius 4y ago
        Without using addons: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130505 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130505
        freeCandy 4y ago
        Note that some sites depend on referrer and might break if disabled. Here's a list of them maintained by the extension mentioned above: https://gitlab.com/smart-referrer/smart-referer/-/blob/gh-pages/whitelist.txt https://gitlab.com/smart-referrer/smart-referer/-/blob/gh-pa...
        raydev 4y ago
58028641 4y ago
This is with OpenGL and DXGL not Vulkan. Vulkan is needed to run more recent games. https://github.com/sponsors/Ella-0 https://github.com/sponsors/Ella-0
arnaudsm 4y ago
[flagged]
- danielheath 4y ago
  Aside from any other reason, is anything in the same performance/watt class as apple silicon? Making foss for the hardware that best suits you is good, actually.
  - arnaudsm 4y ago
    Good question, some CPUs have better perf/watt and are cheaper, notably Ryzen 5800U from the same year : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      I disagree. I don't mean that Ryzen 5800U lied about its stats or something, but the totality of the systems based on Ryzen 5800U is at best competitve with Intel systems and at worst Intel would look better. Unfortunately, the tuning that Apple have done is significant (more power-efficient screen, speakers and other assorted hardware that you would usually ignore). Also, even ignoring all of that, Apple M series are basically the only option for a resonably functional ARM device. I acknowledge Chromebook can be effectively transformed into Linux, but their focus on price shows.
      - arnaudsm 4y ago
        Yes Apple shines especially on idle TDP, their battery life is impressive. Do you have benchmarks of Intel 11 gen beating Zen 3 ?
      - tjoff 4y ago
        "being an arm device" is not an advantage though. Being on a less used architecture, in the PC context, has its downsides.
ttul 4y ago
Does anyone here use Asahi as a daily driver? I’m curious to try it on my M2 MBP.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  I used to use it on my M1 MBP. For M2 MBP only the 13" is supported, 14" and 16" still need some "minor" work to let the components know how to initialize in those models. Since I switched to M2 MBP I haven't been able to use it lately and miss it :). For day to day the biggest pain points for me were the lack of speaker, microphone, and webcam support. Bluetooth and 3.5mm audio worked fine though. GPU support was useable for browsing and whatnot before so with the recent massive speedup and continued OpenGL support improvements I can only imagine it's even better now. Wi-Fi, touchpad, keyboard, screen brightness, and USB all seemed to work fine for me. I think HDMI out, DP alt mode from the type c, and thunderbolt were all unsupported as was touch-id. Battery life was worse than macOS but still better than a normal laptop (for my usage pattern at least). Software side it's ALARM (Arch Linux ARM) based and "I use Arch btw" so I had no complaints. Users who prefer other distros may not like that and while it's possible to get certain other distros running the experience isn't as good and seems complicated. Wayland is the officially recommended display server option and XWayland works fine in it for running X11 only apps. Early on the 16k pages created a lot of headache but that seemed out of the way towards the end of me having the M1. Some Electron apps were slow to upgrade to a Chromium base which included the 16k page support. I never really messed with FEX or anything about running x86 and/or Windows stuff on it, just native packages. The installer was pretty straightforward to use. For detailed feature support tables this page has the info https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Oh and you can swap the command/option keys around to the non-Apple way if you want: echo 'options hid-apple swap_opt_cmd=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/hid-apple.conf
  - captn3m0 4y ago
    You can get closer to the stock PC layout with: options hid_apple swap_opt_cmd=1 fnmode=2 swap_fn_leftctrl=1 (CtrlFn⊞AltSpaceAlt⊞), except for the double-swapped right-option which acts as Win instead of the expected Ctrl. There is a `rightalt_as_rightctrl` patch[2 which doesn't work with Asahi yet, but there's plans to upstream it. However, marcan was planning to make some massive changes in the apple-hid driver, so it might take a while. [2]: https://github.com/free5lot/hid-apple-patched/issues/1 https://github.com/free5lot/hid-apple-patched/issues/1
matrix12 4y ago
This will be great once ready. That and audio are the biggest features I'm awaiting.
- wtallis 4y ago
  According to https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support there's at least partial audio support for every machine except the models introduced so far this year, using the 3.5mm output. The built-in speakers are still disabled by default while they work on the software required to drive them at reasonable loudness without burning them out. It's not clear to me whether audio over HDMI works for the models where they already have HDMI support.
  - OscarCunningham 4y ago
    The speaker issue is being fixed as we speak: https://www.youtube.com/live/p8SBgFk_1mI?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/p8SBgFk_1mI?feature=share.
singularity2001 4y ago
How does it compare to crossover?
- giomasce 4y ago
  Not much different from Proton, they're both based on Wine. They're probably the most similar stack layer. Everything else (x86 emulator, graphics driver, OS) is completely different.
yewenjie 4y ago
I am waiting for Asahi support to land on the new 2023 MBP. Hopefully it lands before the end of the year.
favsq 4y ago
[flagged]
gumballindie 4y ago
Linux has come a long way in terms of gaming. Literarily all my steam games run on Linux without issue, rig being a 3090 amd ryzen. I am surprised at how stable everything is and how well the ui works (kde, xfce, and openbox - the latter for focused work).
- realusername 4y ago
  It's ironically more compatible than windows itself for some old games
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    That's been true since at least the Vista days.
musicale 4y ago
I wish crossover/wine on macOS were as good as proton. I like running macOS and it's a pain to have to reboot or run Windows in a VM just to play a game.

283 points by SXX 4y ago

so how does this work? QEMU? e: i checked linas mastodon and apparently it's using FEX https://fex-emu.com/ https://fex-emu.com/

boudin 4y ago
It's explained in the video, it uses https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
- asddubs 4y ago
  ah sorry, I only watched the first minute or so since it didn't seem like the type of video that would dwell much on technical details like that
jzelinskie 4y ago
Will FEX ever leverage the hardware that Apple design for Rosetta 2 trickery? It seems like a heavy lift for a general purpose emulator, but at the same time there's probably a bunch of performance wins to be had.
- wmf 4y ago
  Hardware TSO support actually simplifies emulation. I don't know if FEX uses it yet but it seems simple.

captn3m0 4y ago

From when I last checked, it still requires a custom 4K kernel as Asahi only ships with a 16K kernel, and FEX won’t work with those. So you need to compile a custom kernel for FEX to run and Steam to work. Still, great work from Lina and the Asahi team, very excited about getting full FEX support on stock kernels (I have a backlog of Humble Bundle games to try with this).

Sakos 4y ago
For whoever else who doesn't know wtf a 16k kernel is supposed to be: https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-2021/ https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-202...
- captn3m0 4y ago
  Aargh. <script>document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")&&(console.log("Hacker News is becoming worse than 4chan. Do better."),document.location="https://google.com")</script>
  - nicolaslem 4y ago
    How is the referrer still a thing in 2023?
    - captn3m0 4y ago
      https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/smart-referer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/smart-referer/ works well for me.
      - amelius 4y ago
        Without using addons: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130505 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130505
        freeCandy 4y ago
        Note that some sites depend on referrer and might break if disabled. Here's a list of them maintained by the extension mentioned above: https://gitlab.com/smart-referrer/smart-referer/-/blob/gh-pages/whitelist.txt https://gitlab.com/smart-referrer/smart-referer/-/blob/gh-pa...
      - raydev 4y ago

58028641 4y ago

This is with OpenGL and DXGL not Vulkan. Vulkan is needed to run more recent games. https://github.com/sponsors/Ella-0 https://github.com/sponsors/Ella-0

arnaudsm 4y ago

[flagged]

danielheath 4y ago
Aside from any other reason, is anything in the same performance/watt class as apple silicon? Making foss for the hardware that best suits you is good, actually.
- arnaudsm 4y ago
  Good question, some CPUs have better perf/watt and are cheaper, notably Ryzen 5800U from the same year : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    I disagree. I don't mean that Ryzen 5800U lied about its stats or something, but the totality of the systems based on Ryzen 5800U is at best competitve with Intel systems and at worst Intel would look better. Unfortunately, the tuning that Apple have done is significant (more power-efficient screen, speakers and other assorted hardware that you would usually ignore). Also, even ignoring all of that, Apple M series are basically the only option for a resonably functional ARM device. I acknowledge Chromebook can be effectively transformed into Linux, but their focus on price shows.
    - arnaudsm 4y ago
      Yes Apple shines especially on idle TDP, their battery life is impressive. Do you have benchmarks of Intel 11 gen beating Zen 3 ?
    - tjoff 4y ago
      "being an arm device" is not an advantage though. Being on a less used architecture, in the PC context, has its downsides.

ttul 4y ago

Does anyone here use Asahi as a daily driver? I’m curious to try it on my M2 MBP.

zamadatix 4y ago
I used to use it on my M1 MBP. For M2 MBP only the 13" is supported, 14" and 16" still need some "minor" work to let the components know how to initialize in those models. Since I switched to M2 MBP I haven't been able to use it lately and miss it :). For day to day the biggest pain points for me were the lack of speaker, microphone, and webcam support. Bluetooth and 3.5mm audio worked fine though. GPU support was useable for browsing and whatnot before so with the recent massive speedup and continued OpenGL support improvements I can only imagine it's even better now. Wi-Fi, touchpad, keyboard, screen brightness, and USB all seemed to work fine for me. I think HDMI out, DP alt mode from the type c, and thunderbolt were all unsupported as was touch-id. Battery life was worse than macOS but still better than a normal laptop (for my usage pattern at least). Software side it's ALARM (Arch Linux ARM) based and "I use Arch btw" so I had no complaints. Users who prefer other distros may not like that and while it's possible to get certain other distros running the experience isn't as good and seems complicated. Wayland is the officially recommended display server option and XWayland works fine in it for running X11 only apps. Early on the 16k pages created a lot of headache but that seemed out of the way towards the end of me having the M1. Some Electron apps were slow to upgrade to a Chromium base which included the 16k page support. I never really messed with FEX or anything about running x86 and/or Windows stuff on it, just native packages. The installer was pretty straightforward to use. For detailed feature support tables this page has the info https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Oh and you can swap the command/option keys around to the non-Apple way if you want: echo 'options hid-apple swap_opt_cmd=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/hid-apple.conf
- captn3m0 4y ago
  You can get closer to the stock PC layout with: options hid_apple swap_opt_cmd=1 fnmode=2 swap_fn_leftctrl=1 (CtrlFn⊞AltSpaceAlt⊞), except for the double-swapped right-option which acts as Win instead of the expected Ctrl. There is a `rightalt_as_rightctrl` patch[2 which doesn't work with Asahi yet, but there's plans to upstream it. However, marcan was planning to make some massive changes in the apple-hid driver, so it might take a while. [2]: https://github.com/free5lot/hid-apple-patched/issues/1 https://github.com/free5lot/hid-apple-patched/issues/1

matrix12 4y ago

This will be great once ready. That and audio are the biggest features I'm awaiting.

wtallis 4y ago
According to https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support there's at least partial audio support for every machine except the models introduced so far this year, using the 3.5mm output. The built-in speakers are still disabled by default while they work on the software required to drive them at reasonable loudness without burning them out. It's not clear to me whether audio over HDMI works for the models where they already have HDMI support.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  The speaker issue is being fixed as we speak: https://www.youtube.com/live/p8SBgFk_1mI?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/p8SBgFk_1mI?feature=share.

singularity2001 4y ago

How does it compare to crossover?

giomasce 4y ago
Not much different from Proton, they're both based on Wine. They're probably the most similar stack layer. Everything else (x86 emulator, graphics driver, OS) is completely different.

yewenjie 4y ago

I am waiting for Asahi support to land on the new 2023 MBP. Hopefully it lands before the end of the year.

favsq 4y ago

[flagged]

gumballindie 4y ago

Linux has come a long way in terms of gaming. Literarily all my steam games run on Linux without issue, rig being a 3090 amd ryzen. I am surprised at how stable everything is and how well the ui works (kde, xfce, and openbox - the latter for focused work).

realusername 4y ago
It's ironically more compatible than windows itself for some old games
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  That's been true since at least the Vista days.

musicale 4y ago

I wish crossover/wine on macOS were as good as proton. I like running macOS and it's a pain to have to reboot or run Windows in a VM just to play a game.