Apple M1 support on Linux is about to take another leap forwards, with the introduction of the open source Honeykrisp Vulkan driver.
Announced in a blog post from developer Alyssa Rosenzweig, this new driver was actually based on the open source NVK (NVIDIA Vulkan) driver from Faith Ekstrand. Showing once again the power of open source, to get a new driver going by re-using code.
From the blog post in Ekstrand's own words:
All Vulkan drivers in Mesa trace their lineage to the Intel Vulkan driver and started by copying+pasting from it. My hope is that NVK will eventually become the driver that everyone copies and pastes from. To that end, I’m building NVK with all the best practices we’ve developed for Vulkan drivers over the last 7.5 years and trying to keep the code-base clean and well-organized.
So that's exactly what Rosenzweig did, and it only took about a month to get it to the stage where it has reached Vulkan 1.3 conformance as listed on The Khronos Group website. It's not available for us normies yet, but the code is up for developers to look at.
The next stage for the Honeykrisp driver is to hook up everything needed for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, so then games will work via Wine / Proton on Apple M1 via Honeykrisp on Asahi Linux.
Awesome to see this!
Last edited by lejimster on 6 June 2024 at 4:27 pm UTC
When you put it under load, it's efficiency is surprisingly average though.
Now I want a honeycrisp apple. 👀
The irony for a self-sterile patented apple…
I have to admit I don't really like most of the new apple breeds . . . they all kind of taste the same and don't have much character. They're not bad, they're generally sweet and crisp, but they don't taste much like apple.Now I want a honeycrisp apple. 👀
The irony for a self-sterile patented apple…
I wonder if this work will easily translate to the M1 successors.
Seeing this question, it should be easy to get it working on M2/M3 (and most likely M4 when it releases).
M2 GPUs and later support image atomics though, which I don't know if NVK supports yet. Some apps/games might require this to run optimally (or at all). One application of image atomics is for volumetric fog rendering in Godot. A non-atomic fallback is used on macOS when running on MoltenVK, as image atomics were not available at all when volumetric fog was implemented.
M3 GPUs and later support hardware-accelerated raytracing, which is not supported in NVK yet.
Last edited by Calinou on 7 June 2024 at 5:28 pm UTC
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