27 ms·

OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

512 points by simjue 3y ago

samwillis 3y ago
The work of the Asahi team is incredible, and so much fun to watch unfold. I wander if now that you can get a rack mount Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (launched yesterday, the second coming of XServe), running server workloads on them with Asahi Linux becomes a viable route for some people?
- thx-2718 3y ago
  This is what they have support for at the moment: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-device-specific-support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-d... Maybe not quite possible to do today but if Asahi keeps up the pace they've made so far I bet it will be soon. It helps that Apple has popular hardware so there's a good bit of people out there interested in developing support for Apple processors.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    If you're doing on-the-road visuals and you want a chunky realtime rackmount to render with, $7k for an M2 Ultra might look like a steal. For hosting purposes and parallel workloads though, there are many other options at much better price/performance points in the same market. If you're not leveraging Apple software and you pay for an Apple Silicon server, you're kinda wasting money that could have gone towards an Ampere or Grace instance instead.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  FYI it's silicon, not silicone. Silicone is a type of rubber.
  - samwillis 3y ago
    The curse of Dyslexia and crap Apple spell check.
kytazo 3y ago
Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom. I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capable of. For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless manner coupled with anything else running. Really thank god for asahi being a thing.
- endorphine 3y ago
  Curious, what do you use it for?
- lucabs 3y ago
  [dead]
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > when the neural engine drivers come online now Has there been any ongoing work on this? It's been marked as "WIP" in GitHub for a while now, and I'd imagine it's one of the more complicated things to reverse-engineer.
  - dougall 3y ago
    Some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630
  - kytazo 3y ago
    You can check here for some insight https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane
nightski 3y ago
This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.
- rollcat 3y ago
  > I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening. I mean it would be nice if Apple had released more documentation, but I totally understand if they don't want the burden of supporting it.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing them. Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.
    - kytazo 3y ago
      Well overall if you sum up what even a basic m1 mb air packs, be it the panel, quality peripherals and soc itself its rather reasonable and within reach for almost anyone contemplating of buying a new computer. When you factor in that they were the first ones with an actual capable desktop arm offer I'd even say its cheap. At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm laptops coming out today compare.
roboben 3y ago
I can’t wait for M2 (pro) support for my MacBook Pro. I was long term Thinkpad/Arch Linux user and really want to go back to such setup. Sadly I didn’t find anything better hardware-wise than the MacBook but I love Linux. I know they are focused on getting it to a good quality on M1 first but eagerly consuming all project updates! Good job team!
- speed_spread 3y ago
  I'm still waiting for Apple Silicon that's fast enough to run Gentoo Portage at Arch Pacman speed.
htk 3y ago
"And yes, the team is already working on Vulkan." This can do more for gaming on the Mac than Apple's efforts combined.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Are you aware that Apple made it clear yesterday they have a full Direct3D 12 translation layer yesterday? The biggest problem is chicken and the egg. There is no high-end gaming hardware, there are few games, and there isn’t much demand for the kind of games Windows gets. But without the hardware it’s not clear the games makes sense. And without the gamers it’s not clear porting makes sense. And without the hardware the gamers and the games won’t come. Even if Apple released a 100% functional and performant Vulcan implementation tomorrow I seriously doubt it would make any real difference to the gaming market on the Mac.
  - teki_one 3y ago
    I think there is more to that. As in maybe Apple hw buyers are not that interested in gaming on it? For most a console make more sense and if someone wants gaming a gaming PC/Laptop usually a better deal. As far as I know MoltenVK (Vulkan on top of Metal) is available as part of the Vulkan SDK. DX12 on MacOS was announced a while ago https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/cjsilver/2021/12/22/were-getting-there-crossover-support-for-directx-12 https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/cjsilver/2021/12/22/were-ge... and started to run recently https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/1/unleashing-the-gaming-revolution-crossover-macs-directx-12-support-update https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/1/unleashin...
    - MBCook 3y ago
      But that’s part of the problem. Everyone who is interested in games (like me) gave up on gaming on the Mac a long time ago because of the other issues.
DCKing 3y ago
I wonder if the new Mac Pro's full PCI Express support resolves any limitations that prevents people from using GPUs over Thunderbolt on existing Apple Silicon hardware (this is apparently a hardware limitation). Although the Mac Pro's PCIe extensibility makes it a pretty mystifying niche product from Apple without providing memory and GPU expandability, once Asahi Linux gets running on there you should be able to not get the full abilities of the latest Vulkan and full OpenGL 4.6 by putting in a recent AMD card. The open source Radeon drivers should "just work" on ARM as they do in the Talos II POWER-based workstation, if they can be stably initialized that is. Heck, Nvidia publishes a binary Linux aarch64 driver and they sound petty enough with Apple to try to make that work. You could have Asahi Linux running and delegate any not-yet-supported hardware to the 7 PCIe devices it supports. Would be quite a mighty ARM Linux workstation. Again though - only if Apple has the PCI Express support for it.
- stirlo 3y ago
  @Marcan shared some technical details around their PCI Express implementation recently here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557 It seems they didn't make any massive changes and instead just put switches on the existing PCI-E Lanes. That probably doesn't bode well for full GPU support :(
  - MBCook 3y ago
    There are no GPU drivers anyway. So I’m not sure it matters (Linux or macOS). Seems designed more to support lots of low/medium bandwidth cards, not a few high bandwidth cards.
  - deleted 3y ago
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zamadatix 3y ago
From a follow up post on Mastadon https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479064 https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...: "Also in this update: We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines. Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash. Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably increasing single-core performance. Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting too toasty on your lap. Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone, thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad drivers. A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with the headphone jack codec. New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode. U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control your bootloader. And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."
- imbnwa 3y ago
  >And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon." Amazing
- vanburen 3y ago
  "New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode." This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature? I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone as well.
baq 3y ago
Related: does anyone do development on a Mac in a Linux VM? If my dockers are already running in a VM, why not go to the next logical step?
- viraptor 3y ago
  Utm is there if you want reasonable size desktop without fighting with qemu settings / setup. https://mac.getutm.app/ https://mac.getutm.app/
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    I tried utm early on with an m1 but had many graphics issues that parallels made work out of the box. I need to try it again, bet it works out of box now.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  I used to do this before switching to a Linux laptop. It worked mostly fine.
- e12e 3y ago
  Filesystem/disk performance? Although that's probably an argument against running Docker on arm64 Macs too...
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    Docker desktop has arm64 builds.
- jzombie 3y ago
  I use Parallels w/ an Xubuntu VM running some Docker projects and am pleased with the results. Filesystem performance used to be better than Docker Desktop, but they seem about on par w/ one another now.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
Jasper_ 3y ago
Sample-rate shading is exceptionally rare (MSAA is rare-ish these days, but I only know of exactly one title that has shipped sample-rate shading), so requiring a basic compiler transform to handle it, especially when they can do so easily because of their tiler architecture, is pretty sane.
Topfi 3y ago
Thanks to the entire Asahi team, your work is truly incredible and so far beyond my pay grade that words fail me. I honestly recently tried and very much struggled to communicate why I was so amazed by your project when talking with friends. For anyone interested into the GPU side, I can't recommend Linas streams[1] enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams
tormeh 3y ago
Sorry, but what's the point? Why not just buy a Linux laptop and have everything work out of the box? Why are Linux enthusiasts putting so much effort into supporting hardware from companies that - at best - ignore Linux? This question is also valid for other manufacturers, btw, not just Apple. So much time wasted doing free labor for hardware companies that will just break your stuff with the next hardware iteration.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  What Linux laptop has comparable hardware?
- lonjil 3y ago
  > Why not just buy a Linux laptop and have everything work out of the box? Why are Linux enthusiasts putting so much effort into supporting hardware from companies that - at best - ignore Linux? Almost all laptops sold with Linux pre-installed or with support advertized only work well with Linux due to volunteer work similar to what is being done with Apple's stuff right now. Almost everything is proprietary with close to zero upstream support, you just don't notice it because the work has already been done.
  - biomcgary 3y ago
    In an OSS ecosystem, manufacturers inherently have to use work that has been done by volunteers! The real question is whether they invest their own resources too. For example, System76 has created their own distro, Pop OS. My team and I were happy with the laptops purchased from them and the OS integration provided a smooth experience.
  - nsonha 3y ago
    Are there commercially available arm-based linux laptops? I'm not after horsepower just decent battery life and enough computing power to do non-AI programming.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > Why not just buy a Linux laptop Please tell me where is it because I will buy it instantly, and I’m only half kidding. I don’t see how making linux available on possibly the currently available best laptop hardware any different to the previous decades of hacking a working wifi driver into the kernel. It was always an uphill battle, and we should be thankful for those who take up the hard work!
hejcloud 3y ago
Recently, I've been thinking about using Asahi as the host system running on my M1 MBA and run everything macOS in a vm. Does anyone have experience with that? How stupid would that be?
- zamadatix 3y ago
  People have gotten QEMU with KVM running VMs and other people have gotten macOS ARM64 running under QEMU... so I think technically possible, though I haven't actually tried going that far with it. I don't think you'd get virtual GPU acceleration support working in the current state, so performance would be pretty god awful.
tiffanyh 3y ago
Donate. Please don't forget to donate if you get value from Asahi. This is tremendously detailed and laborious work that people are doing in their free time. https://asahilinux.org/support/ https://asahilinux.org/support/
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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yewenjie 3y ago
Is anybody daily-driving any M2 macbook pro on Asahi Linux? What is your experience like?
- zamadatix 3y ago
  It wasn't until this morning installing Asahi on an M2 Pro was supported in expert only install. Prior to that it hasn't been supported at all. There is still some work to go on the Pro/Max/Ultra SoC family.
Ruq 3y ago
Their work tempts me to get a Mac some day just because I know I can run Linux on it.
fsiefken 3y ago
When Vulkan drivers are ready maybe the Asahi Linux perhaps also be ready to run some SteamVR apps https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/blob/mast...
- pkulak 3y ago
  I'm surprised that Vulkan wasn't the target, which could then have something like Zink layered on top for OpenGL.
  - kirbyfan64sos 3y ago
    This gets mentioned basically every time. The gist is that: - OpenGL is a much easier target to support, in terms of having a functional desktop. Remember, hardware-accelerated apps have been runnable on Asahi for months now, while Vulkan support is still a while away. - Most of the work being done is common to OpenGL and Vulkan, so it's not exactly a ton of wasted effort.
  - lonjil 3y ago
    Zink requires a fairly advanced Vulkan driver, with many complex optional extensions. A basic Vulkan driver wouldn't cut it. So getting basic OpenGL working is much less work, especially since they can share a lot of work with Mesa's existing OpenGL drivers.
endorphine 3y ago
Kinda irrelevant but Asahi is the topic on HN that gets me excited the most. Can't wait to have such a great hardware for my daily driver. -- a happy ThinkPad Debian user
throwaway894345 3y ago
Does anyone know how efforts are going to to get Asahi's kernel changes merged back upstream? Has anything been merged upstream already? Is there a roadmap for getting things upstreamed? Are they pursuing an incremental approach to upstreaming individual components or do they have to prove that everything is flawless on Apple silicon before anything can be merged?
- yobert 3y ago
  This information is on their website wiki. See https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
- zamadatix 3y ago
  The feature table here https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support also tells you where along the path something is in terms of being stable and making it into the kernel. If it just has a release number like "5.19" then that means it was successfully upstreamed as part of that kernel version. Generally, the Asahi team tries to upstream as they go, but if they are uncertain about the overall architecture of a driver they'll hold off to prevent ossifying certain design decisions too early. An example of this is the GPU driver.
POiNTx 3y ago
How's proton support nowadays? The new M2 15-inch macbook Air looks really appealing
- sliken 3y ago
  Proton is a wrapper/tweaks to wine, right? Thus x86-64 windows games can run on x86-64 linux. Thus the steam deck and many happy linux gamers. Apparently it's good enough to run a large majority of steam games, I believe I remember something like 90+% of the top 50 games on steam. I don't think it helps at all with running x86-64 code on arm.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    For running x86-64 on arm you have FEX. You can combine FEX with wine to run standard steam games on Asahi linux.
    - sliken 3y ago
      Wow, excellent. I'm trying to justify replacing a 2015 desktop with either a mac studio or a ryzen/zen4 desktop. I'm not a gamer, but do occasionally fire up steam to play something old like Xcom 2 or Majesty. Knowing that at least some x86-64 steam games could work is promising, thanks. For me it all comes down to the extra memory bandwidth. A recent metal port of llama is pretty tempting and being able to run GPU accelerated LLMs with greater than 16GB (mid range GPUs) or 24GB (highend/RTX 4090) on the mac studio is interesting. $3,600 (for 96GB ram) interesting, not so sure.
      - rowanG077 3y ago
        Check out this stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJSfFzsU75g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJSfFzsU75g Where many steam games where tried live and debugged to run FEX + wine + Asahi GPU driver through its paces. Highlights include Portal working, Fallout NV working. Crysis running with graphical artifacts and lots of other games. The main limitation currently is simply GPU driver feature support. To run modern D3D12 games you basically need Vulkan which Asahi GPU driver doesn't support yet.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
How much do you need macos around to use it? Sounds like the original install and then for firmware updates? I’d like to keep telemetry to a minimum and not use macos if possible.
- vulcan01 3y ago
  Yes, that's right; I generally pop back in to macOS every so often to check for OS updates (which update the firmware as well - no way to just update the firmware).
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    I seem to remember there being a tiny recovery partition or cut-down version of macos or something maybe from boot CD (we have an old iMac). Also found this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-update-latest-macbook-pro-efi-firmware-manually https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-upda... Still I'd rather have no MacOS.
    - vulcan01 3y ago
      There is a recovery partition (in fact, it's used when installing Asahi) but I don't think it's possible to update the firmware from there. Boot CD might work. You could try asking on r/AsahiLinux.
deelawn 3y ago
I heard the Asahi Linux code is super dry.
brundolf 3y ago
Is the desktop GPU-rendered by this point? What's battery life like (for those using Asahi daily)? Thinking about taking the dive...
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  It appears so. From last December: > "This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems. That’s enough for hardware acceleration with desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE." https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linux/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...
- Aeolos 3y ago
  It is GPU accelerated and very smooth since late last year. Battery life is about 6-8 hours on an M1 air for me, and should improve significantly with this latest upgrade (haven't measured yet). The installation experience is very smooth, so it's very easy to try it out. You can nuke it afterwards if it doesn't work for you.
eikenberry 3y ago
Awesome work. Now if we could just get those parts in a modern, modular laptop with replaceable components. Frame.work has raised the table-stakes for laptops.
ex3ndr 3y ago
Super curious if it is possible to run nvidia gpu on new Mac Pro using Asahi Linux? Can it be vritualized with pass-through?
- MBCook 3y ago
  The one announced yesterday? I think the main problem would be where would you get ARM drivers? On Intel people were able to existing driver blobs. But if there are no official ARM blobs anywhere, it would be a much bigger effort.
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  Is the idea games? Seems like there’s already some interesting Wine and CrossOver developments.
  - ex3ndr 3y ago
    No, I need nvidia for ML
jasoneckert 3y ago
When the Asahi alpha released dropped last March, it was stable and functional enough to become my daily driver. And since then the pace of development has been steady and impressive - I actually look forward to every 'pacman -Syu'. If someone told me 20 years ago that I'd be using an Apple-made ARM workstation running Linux to do all of my development work today, I would have never believed them.
haolez 3y ago
Can Asahi Linux run on the new Mac Pro? Would I be able to use the GPU to run LLM models?
- MBCook 3y ago
  They’ve never done an M2 Ultra, as no one (anywhere) has one yet. I believe they said they will work on it but they can’t promise a support date because they don’t know how long it will take once they have the hardware. And I don’t know when they’ll get the hardware. So basically the recommendation was “don’t buy it to run Asahi yet, you’ll probably be waiting a bit”.
xbar 3y ago
Thank you Alyssa Rosenzweig.
ezfe 3y ago
Why does this posting have a rel=noreferrer tag, when others don’t?
- mrpopo 3y ago
  Looks like jwz links also have a "noreferrer" tag added as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132752 New silent HN policy to avoid showing its users that some people don't like them.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    That page doesn't include noreferrer on the article link for me.
    - pbasista 3y ago
      "rel" is an attribute of several HTML tags, including the anchor tag <a> [0]. It is not something that would be visible in the URL. The presence of this attribute instructs the client to not send the HTTP header "Referer" [1] when making a request to the target URL. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel#noreferrer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
      - judge2020 3y ago
        I know, I'm saying that it's not in the `rel=` on that article link on the linked page. Just noopener, which is of course included on every link.
        pbasista 3y ago
        > Just noopener, which is of course included on every link. I can see no `rel` attribute on other submitted links. Are you perhaps using some privacy-enhancing browser extension which adds the `rel=noopener` attribute to every link?

512 points by simjue 3y ago

The work of the Asahi team is incredible, and so much fun to watch unfold. I wander if now that you can get a rack mount Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (launched yesterday, the second coming of XServe), running server workloads on them with Asahi Linux becomes a viable route for some people?

thx-2718 3y ago
This is what they have support for at the moment: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-device-specific-support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-d... Maybe not quite possible to do today but if Asahi keeps up the pace they've made so far I bet it will be soon. It helps that Apple has popular hardware so there's a good bit of people out there interested in developing support for Apple processors.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  If you're doing on-the-road visuals and you want a chunky realtime rackmount to render with, $7k for an M2 Ultra might look like a steal. For hosting purposes and parallel workloads though, there are many other options at much better price/performance points in the same market. If you're not leveraging Apple software and you pay for an Apple Silicon server, you're kinda wasting money that could have gone towards an Ampere or Grace instance instead.
School-Cotton 3y ago
FYI it's silicon, not silicone. Silicone is a type of rubber.
- samwillis 3y ago
  The curse of Dyslexia and crap Apple spell check.

kytazo 3y ago

Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom. I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capable of. For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless manner coupled with anything else running. Really thank god for asahi being a thing.

endorphine 3y ago
Curious, what do you use it for?
lucabs 3y ago
[dead]
smoldesu 3y ago
> when the neural engine drivers come online now Has there been any ongoing work on this? It's been marked as "WIP" in GitHub for a while now, and I'd imagine it's one of the more complicated things to reverse-engineer.
- dougall 3y ago
  Some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630
- kytazo 3y ago
  You can check here for some insight https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane

nightski 3y ago

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

rollcat 3y ago
> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening. I mean it would be nice if Apple had released more documentation, but I totally understand if they don't want the burden of supporting it.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing them. Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.
  - kytazo 3y ago
    Well overall if you sum up what even a basic m1 mb air packs, be it the panel, quality peripherals and soc itself its rather reasonable and within reach for almost anyone contemplating of buying a new computer. When you factor in that they were the first ones with an actual capable desktop arm offer I'd even say its cheap. At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm laptops coming out today compare.

roboben 3y ago

I can’t wait for M2 (pro) support for my MacBook Pro. I was long term Thinkpad/Arch Linux user and really want to go back to such setup. Sadly I didn’t find anything better hardware-wise than the MacBook but I love Linux. I know they are focused on getting it to a good quality on M1 first but eagerly consuming all project updates! Good job team!

speed_spread 3y ago
I'm still waiting for Apple Silicon that's fast enough to run Gentoo Portage at Arch Pacman speed.

htk 3y ago

"And yes, the team is already working on Vulkan." This can do more for gaming on the Mac than Apple's efforts combined.

MBCook 3y ago
Are you aware that Apple made it clear yesterday they have a full Direct3D 12 translation layer yesterday? The biggest problem is chicken and the egg. There is no high-end gaming hardware, there are few games, and there isn’t much demand for the kind of games Windows gets. But without the hardware it’s not clear the games makes sense. And without the gamers it’s not clear porting makes sense. And without the hardware the gamers and the games won’t come. Even if Apple released a 100% functional and performant Vulcan implementation tomorrow I seriously doubt it would make any real difference to the gaming market on the Mac.
- teki_one 3y ago
  I think there is more to that. As in maybe Apple hw buyers are not that interested in gaming on it? For most a console make more sense and if someone wants gaming a gaming PC/Laptop usually a better deal. As far as I know MoltenVK (Vulkan on top of Metal) is available as part of the Vulkan SDK. DX12 on MacOS was announced a while ago https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/cjsilver/2021/12/22/were-getting-there-crossover-support-for-directx-12 https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/cjsilver/2021/12/22/were-ge... and started to run recently https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/1/unleashing-the-gaming-revolution-crossover-macs-directx-12-support-update https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/1/unleashin...
  - MBCook 3y ago
    But that’s part of the problem. Everyone who is interested in games (like me) gave up on gaming on the Mac a long time ago because of the other issues.

DCKing 3y ago

I wonder if the new Mac Pro's full PCI Express support resolves any limitations that prevents people from using GPUs over Thunderbolt on existing Apple Silicon hardware (this is apparently a hardware limitation). Although the Mac Pro's PCIe extensibility makes it a pretty mystifying niche product from Apple without providing memory and GPU expandability, once Asahi Linux gets running on there you should be able to not get the full abilities of the latest Vulkan and full OpenGL 4.6 by putting in a recent AMD card. The open source Radeon drivers should "just work" on ARM as they do in the Talos II POWER-based workstation, if they can be stably initialized that is. Heck, Nvidia publishes a binary Linux aarch64 driver and they sound petty enough with Apple to try to make that work. You could have Asahi Linux running and delegate any not-yet-supported hardware to the 7 PCIe devices it supports. Would be quite a mighty ARM Linux workstation. Again though - only if Apple has the PCI Express support for it.

stirlo 3y ago
@Marcan shared some technical details around their PCI Express implementation recently here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557 It seems they didn't make any massive changes and instead just put switches on the existing PCI-E Lanes. That probably doesn't bode well for full GPU support :(
- MBCook 3y ago
  There are no GPU drivers anyway. So I’m not sure it matters (Linux or macOS). Seems designed more to support lots of low/medium bandwidth cards, not a few high bandwidth cards.
- deleted 3y ago
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zamadatix 3y ago

From a follow up post on Mastadon https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479064 https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...: "Also in this update: We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines. Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash. Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably increasing single-core performance. Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting too toasty on your lap. Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone, thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad drivers. A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with the headphone jack codec. New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode. U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control your bootloader. And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."

imbnwa 3y ago
>And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon." Amazing
vanburen 3y ago
"New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode." This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature? I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone as well.

baq 3y ago

Related: does anyone do development on a Mac in a Linux VM? If my dockers are already running in a VM, why not go to the next logical step?

viraptor 3y ago
Utm is there if you want reasonable size desktop without fighting with qemu settings / setup. https://mac.getutm.app/ https://mac.getutm.app/
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  I tried utm early on with an m1 but had many graphics issues that parallels made work out of the box. I need to try it again, bet it works out of box now.
School-Cotton 3y ago
I used to do this before switching to a Linux laptop. It worked mostly fine.
e12e 3y ago
Filesystem/disk performance? Although that's probably an argument against running Docker on arm64 Macs too...
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  Docker desktop has arm64 builds.
jzombie 3y ago
I use Parallels w/ an Xubuntu VM running some Docker projects and am pleased with the results. Filesystem performance used to be better than Docker Desktop, but they seem about on par w/ one another now.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago

Jasper_ 3y ago

Sample-rate shading is exceptionally rare (MSAA is rare-ish these days, but I only know of exactly one title that has shipped sample-rate shading), so requiring a basic compiler transform to handle it, especially when they can do so easily because of their tiler architecture, is pretty sane.

Topfi 3y ago

Thanks to the entire Asahi team, your work is truly incredible and so far beyond my pay grade that words fail me. I honestly recently tried and very much struggled to communicate why I was so amazed by your project when talking with friends. For anyone interested into the GPU side, I can't recommend Linas streams[1] enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams

tormeh 3y ago

Sorry, but what's the point? Why not just buy a Linux laptop and have everything work out of the box? Why are Linux enthusiasts putting so much effort into supporting hardware from companies that - at best - ignore Linux? This question is also valid for other manufacturers, btw, not just Apple. So much time wasted doing free labor for hardware companies that will just break your stuff with the next hardware iteration.

solarkraft 3y ago
What Linux laptop has comparable hardware?
lonjil 3y ago
> Why not just buy a Linux laptop and have everything work out of the box? Why are Linux enthusiasts putting so much effort into supporting hardware from companies that - at best - ignore Linux? Almost all laptops sold with Linux pre-installed or with support advertized only work well with Linux due to volunteer work similar to what is being done with Apple's stuff right now. Almost everything is proprietary with close to zero upstream support, you just don't notice it because the work has already been done.
- biomcgary 3y ago
  In an OSS ecosystem, manufacturers inherently have to use work that has been done by volunteers! The real question is whether they invest their own resources too. For example, System76 has created their own distro, Pop OS. My team and I were happy with the laptops purchased from them and the OS integration provided a smooth experience.
- nsonha 3y ago
  Are there commercially available arm-based linux laptops? I'm not after horsepower just decent battery life and enough computing power to do non-AI programming.
kaba0 3y ago
> Why not just buy a Linux laptop Please tell me where is it because I will buy it instantly, and I’m only half kidding. I don’t see how making linux available on possibly the currently available best laptop hardware any different to the previous decades of hacking a working wifi driver into the kernel. It was always an uphill battle, and we should be thankful for those who take up the hard work!

hejcloud 3y ago

Recently, I've been thinking about using Asahi as the host system running on my M1 MBA and run everything macOS in a vm. Does anyone have experience with that? How stupid would that be?

zamadatix 3y ago
People have gotten QEMU with KVM running VMs and other people have gotten macOS ARM64 running under QEMU... so I think technically possible, though I haven't actually tried going that far with it. I don't think you'd get virtual GPU acceleration support working in the current state, so performance would be pretty god awful.

tiffanyh 3y ago

Donate. Please don't forget to donate if you get value from Asahi. This is tremendously detailed and laborious work that people are doing in their free time. https://asahilinux.org/support/ https://asahilinux.org/support/

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yewenjie 3y ago

Is anybody daily-driving any M2 macbook pro on Asahi Linux? What is your experience like?

zamadatix 3y ago
It wasn't until this morning installing Asahi on an M2 Pro was supported in expert only install. Prior to that it hasn't been supported at all. There is still some work to go on the Pro/Max/Ultra SoC family.

Ruq 3y ago

Their work tempts me to get a Mac some day just because I know I can run Linux on it.

fsiefken 3y ago

When Vulkan drivers are ready maybe the Asahi Linux perhaps also be ready to run some SteamVR apps https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/blob/mast...

pkulak 3y ago
I'm surprised that Vulkan wasn't the target, which could then have something like Zink layered on top for OpenGL.
- kirbyfan64sos 3y ago
  This gets mentioned basically every time. The gist is that: - OpenGL is a much easier target to support, in terms of having a functional desktop. Remember, hardware-accelerated apps have been runnable on Asahi for months now, while Vulkan support is still a while away. - Most of the work being done is common to OpenGL and Vulkan, so it's not exactly a ton of wasted effort.
- lonjil 3y ago
  Zink requires a fairly advanced Vulkan driver, with many complex optional extensions. A basic Vulkan driver wouldn't cut it. So getting basic OpenGL working is much less work, especially since they can share a lot of work with Mesa's existing OpenGL drivers.

endorphine 3y ago

Kinda irrelevant but Asahi is the topic on HN that gets me excited the most. Can't wait to have such a great hardware for my daily driver. -- a happy ThinkPad Debian user

throwaway894345 3y ago

Does anyone know how efforts are going to to get Asahi's kernel changes merged back upstream? Has anything been merged upstream already? Is there a roadmap for getting things upstreamed? Are they pursuing an incremental approach to upstreaming individual components or do they have to prove that everything is flawless on Apple silicon before anything can be merged?

yobert 3y ago
This information is on their website wiki. See https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
zamadatix 3y ago
The feature table here https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support also tells you where along the path something is in terms of being stable and making it into the kernel. If it just has a release number like "5.19" then that means it was successfully upstreamed as part of that kernel version. Generally, the Asahi team tries to upstream as they go, but if they are uncertain about the overall architecture of a driver they'll hold off to prevent ossifying certain design decisions too early. An example of this is the GPU driver.

POiNTx 3y ago

How's proton support nowadays? The new M2 15-inch macbook Air looks really appealing

sliken 3y ago
Proton is a wrapper/tweaks to wine, right? Thus x86-64 windows games can run on x86-64 linux. Thus the steam deck and many happy linux gamers. Apparently it's good enough to run a large majority of steam games, I believe I remember something like 90+% of the top 50 games on steam. I don't think it helps at all with running x86-64 code on arm.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  For running x86-64 on arm you have FEX. You can combine FEX with wine to run standard steam games on Asahi linux.
  - sliken 3y ago
    Wow, excellent. I'm trying to justify replacing a 2015 desktop with either a mac studio or a ryzen/zen4 desktop. I'm not a gamer, but do occasionally fire up steam to play something old like Xcom 2 or Majesty. Knowing that at least some x86-64 steam games could work is promising, thanks. For me it all comes down to the extra memory bandwidth. A recent metal port of llama is pretty tempting and being able to run GPU accelerated LLMs with greater than 16GB (mid range GPUs) or 24GB (highend/RTX 4090) on the mac studio is interesting. $3,600 (for 96GB ram) interesting, not so sure.
    - rowanG077 3y ago
      Check out this stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJSfFzsU75g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJSfFzsU75g Where many steam games where tried live and debugged to run FEX + wine + Asahi GPU driver through its paces. Highlights include Portal working, Fallout NV working. Crysis running with graphical artifacts and lots of other games. The main limitation currently is simply GPU driver feature support. To run modern D3D12 games you basically need Vulkan which Asahi GPU driver doesn't support yet.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

How much do you need macos around to use it? Sounds like the original install and then for firmware updates? I’d like to keep telemetry to a minimum and not use macos if possible.

vulcan01 3y ago
Yes, that's right; I generally pop back in to macOS every so often to check for OS updates (which update the firmware as well - no way to just update the firmware).
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  I seem to remember there being a tiny recovery partition or cut-down version of macos or something maybe from boot CD (we have an old iMac). Also found this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-update-latest-macbook-pro-efi-firmware-manually https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-upda... Still I'd rather have no MacOS.
  - vulcan01 3y ago
    There is a recovery partition (in fact, it's used when installing Asahi) but I don't think it's possible to update the firmware from there. Boot CD might work. You could try asking on r/AsahiLinux.

deelawn 3y ago

I heard the Asahi Linux code is super dry.

brundolf 3y ago

Is the desktop GPU-rendered by this point? What's battery life like (for those using Asahi daily)? Thinking about taking the dive...

tiffanyh 3y ago
It appears so. From last December: > "This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems. That’s enough for hardware acceleration with desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE." https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linux/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...
Aeolos 3y ago
It is GPU accelerated and very smooth since late last year. Battery life is about 6-8 hours on an M1 air for me, and should improve significantly with this latest upgrade (haven't measured yet). The installation experience is very smooth, so it's very easy to try it out. You can nuke it afterwards if it doesn't work for you.

eikenberry 3y ago

Awesome work. Now if we could just get those parts in a modern, modular laptop with replaceable components. Frame.work has raised the table-stakes for laptops.

ex3ndr 3y ago

Super curious if it is possible to run nvidia gpu on new Mac Pro using Asahi Linux? Can it be vritualized with pass-through?

MBCook 3y ago
The one announced yesterday? I think the main problem would be where would you get ARM drivers? On Intel people were able to existing driver blobs. But if there are no official ARM blobs anywhere, it would be a much bigger effort.
ianlevesque 3y ago
Is the idea games? Seems like there’s already some interesting Wine and CrossOver developments.
- ex3ndr 3y ago
  No, I need nvidia for ML

jasoneckert 3y ago

When the Asahi alpha released dropped last March, it was stable and functional enough to become my daily driver. And since then the pace of development has been steady and impressive - I actually look forward to every 'pacman -Syu'. If someone told me 20 years ago that I'd be using an Apple-made ARM workstation running Linux to do all of my development work today, I would have never believed them.

haolez 3y ago

Can Asahi Linux run on the new Mac Pro? Would I be able to use the GPU to run LLM models?

MBCook 3y ago
They’ve never done an M2 Ultra, as no one (anywhere) has one yet. I believe they said they will work on it but they can’t promise a support date because they don’t know how long it will take once they have the hardware. And I don’t know when they’ll get the hardware. So basically the recommendation was “don’t buy it to run Asahi yet, you’ll probably be waiting a bit”.

xbar 3y ago

Thank you Alyssa Rosenzweig.

ezfe 3y ago

Why does this posting have a rel=noreferrer tag, when others don’t?

mrpopo 3y ago
Looks like jwz links also have a "noreferrer" tag added as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132752 New silent HN policy to avoid showing its users that some people don't like them.
- judge2020 3y ago
  That page doesn't include noreferrer on the article link for me.
  - pbasista 3y ago
    "rel" is an attribute of several HTML tags, including the anchor tag <a> [0]. It is not something that would be visible in the URL. The presence of this attribute instructs the client to not send the HTTP header "Referer" [1] when making a request to the target URL. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel#noreferrer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
    - judge2020 3y ago
      I know, I'm saying that it's not in the `rel=` on that article link on the linked page. Just noopener, which is of course included on every link.
      - pbasista 3y ago
        > Just noopener, which is of course included on every link. I can see no `rel` attribute on other submitted links. Are you perhaps using some privacy-enhancing browser extension which adds the `rel=noopener` attribute to every link?