Andrew Cunningham reports via Ars Technica: The team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has been working on support for Linux on Apple Silicon Macs for about three years, even though Apple hasn't been involved in any way. Over the years, the project has transformed from a “very unstable experiment” to a “surprisingly functional and easy-to-use desktop operating system.” Even Linus Torvalds used it to run his Linux on Apple hardware. The team has been making steady improvements since releasing standards-compliant open source GPU drivers for his M1 and M2 in December 2022. And today, the team achieved an important symbolic milestone. Support for OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics through the Asahi driver has officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics drivers are fully compliant with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2 (the latest versions of either API). Apple's macOS support peaks with his OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010.
Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post announcing the new driver, announcing that it must pass “over 100,000 tests” to be considered officially compliant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs do not support some features that make implementing these APIs easier. “Unfortunately, M1 does not support newer graphics standards better than her OpenGL ES 3.1,” she wrote Rosenzweig. “Vulkan makes some of these features optional, but the missing features require DirectX and OpenGL to be layered on top. Existing solutions in M1 can't go beyond the OpenGL 4.1 feature set. ..Without hardware support, new features require new tricks: geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders; cull distances become transformed interpolated values; clip controls become This will be the vertex shader epilogue, and the list goes on.”
Asahi GPU drivers currently support the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards (released in 2017 and 2015, respectively), so we will now move on to supporting the low-overhead Vulkan API on Apple hardware. Vulkan support on macOS is limited to translation layers like MoltenVK that convert Vulkan API calls to Metal calls that the hardware and OS understand. […] Rosenzweig's blog post did not provide any specific updates regarding Vulcan other than to say that the team is “on track” to support Vulcan. In addition to support for native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to better leverage software like his Valve's Proton. Proton already has several games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.