Asahi Linux project shows progress in graphics drivers on Apple's M1 Progress was made in persuading 3D graphics to work in Linux on Apple's M1 over the weekend – in the form of a blue rabbit. Alyssa Rosenzweig, who is leading development of the Panfrost and Asahi Linux graphics drivers, showed off her continuing work in a succession of tweets involving Glmark2, an OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics …
3D graphics ... in Linux .... on Apple's M1 ????
I don't want to poo-poo anybody's hard work but it really does seem a lot of effort for a relatively small user base with an even smaller use-case.
"Supporting sophisticated workloads like AAA games requires significantly more time and effort."
Again, games... on Linux.... on M1?? For what, all 3 people who'll actually bother.
"It's impressive considering the lack of official support from Apple."
Or more realistically... it's a waste of time. If there was a large user base demanding this, Apple would be finding a way to make it work. There isn't, and that's the real message here.
That was said about Linux too a number of years ago, and perhaps there will be less landfill Apples if you can put a good Linux distro on them the way so many do with Windows hardware.
One can assume Apple doesn't have any greater desire to extend the life of the hardware.
I've given you a thumbs down and I will tell you why. In my view the 500,000 distributions of Linux are a waste of effort and resources because they produce many distros with very few users. I get a lot of thumbs down for expressing this view, but I'm not bothered.
In the case of Asahi Linux, it is targeted to one platform rather than just being YALD for x86/64. So it has a definite place rather being YALD with some new desktop wallpapers. I recognise the amount of work involved in this and I don't think it is wasted. It does seem that M1 is a viable platform for probably the next decade.
I agree that games on Linux on M1 is likely to be a very small thing to aim for, but it will have other payoffs in graphics performance generally.
It’s interesting and someone or some people are enjoying it. More power to them! Why the hate? Is it wasteful for musicians to learn the same instruments and playing the same music that other people already play, or for there to be different styles of music, or fashion, for people to make models of things that are already built. Or read or write books that others will never read.
Picking a distro you like is pretty easy if you know what requirements you have then you can rule some in/out, if you don’t have requirements then pick the nicest looking logo - easier than picking a pair of jeans or shoes!
Somebody made a speech a while ago, went something like:
"We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard"
People do stuff because they can and want to.
Like climbing mountains, running desktop OS on phones, etc
Anyone got VMS to run on a PI yet?
Technical challenges like these always have value: for the satisfying intellectual challenge, comradeship but also they may well enable a further feat not thought of yet that will have further value. Inherently worthwhile. As well reuse of ideas, ways of working for other projects, friendships nurtured.
Running Linux directly on the NTFS filesystem was something fairly recently reported by TheRegister. This would mean that one could install Linux on an existing Windows installation. Highly useful in several cases I think: no need to partition, can share files more directly.
Linux on APFS then too? This takes the same concept of Linux on NTFS as outlined above but for Apple machines. This would compliment the work being done here with running Linux on M1. The work required would be for Linux kernel to support being run on APFS like has been done for NTFS.
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream The Register 
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