Thread

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

422 points · 290 comments · ADevWithAnIdea

porphyra · 1789508109 · focus · HN ↗
This is super great. The biggest pain point of Asahi Linux is how it doesn't have GPU acceleration on M3 and newer, especially now that M6 is out!
However, Asahi Linux has a strictly no-AI policy [1]. So this great work can't be upstreamed. I expect to see a bunch of AI-assisted forks that get things working smoothly on newer hardware to dominate as most people just care about getting stuff working, while only a handful of purists stick to the non-AI version running on ancient hardware.
[1] <a href="https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/" rel="nofollow">https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/
1. smith7018 · 1789508365 · focus · HN ↗
  I imagine either they or others can take their discoveries and write a real driver now, though. The hard part was always the reversing the black box system.
2. ADevWithAnIdea · 1789508819 · focus · HN ↗
  :) I think we have a surprise in store here. Asahi don't have a monopoly over Linux for Apple Silicon, and upstream Linux absolutely does *NOT* ban LLMs.
  1. doctorpangloss · 1789511654 · focus · HN ↗
    i install proprietary modules for nvidia all the time, i'm not going to care if i have to do it for something else that i own
    bpye · 1789515441 · focus · HN ↗
    Nvidia's kernel module is open source these days, it's the usermode stack that's still closed.
    yonatan8070 · 1789535670 · focus · HN ↗
    Even though the kernel module is open-source (sort of, development still happens behind closed doors), it's still an out-of-tree module, rather than being built into the kernel, which would give you as smooth an experience as with AMD or Intel, who's GPUs literally do just work on any distro with no fuss.
    cromka · 1789552800 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s never gonna be a smooth experience with Linux on Macs, because of installation, but also firmware upgrades etc. there’s always some manual steps involved and nothing will change unless Apple itself starts supporting Linux natively
    userbinator · 1789536342 · focus · HN ↗
    Can't wait for someone to point an LLM at that and "open it up" ;-)
3. zamadatix · 1789508910 · focus · HN ↗
  Asahi's long term goal is to get everything possible merged into the (actually) upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work. It'd be nice to see that continue rather than have forks on forks for the sake of singular differences (and it looks like proper upstreaming is what they are going after per the Remaining Work section).
  1. cromka · 1789515936 · focus · HN ↗
    > upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work
    This may never end up working like that, considering how complicated installation is, comparatively speaking, and how macOS is still pretty much required to be installed.
    strus · 1789534916 · focus · HN ↗
    You can make the Linux installation on Apple Sillicon Macs pretty painless nowadays. One terminal command on macOS, reboot to Linux, run one script - voila.
    cromka · 1789545862 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, but it's unlikely such installers will be officially supported by the distributions, which was my point regarding upstreaming.
    zamadatix · 1789567575 · focus · HN ↗
    The Asahi installer can set up a standard UEFI environment on the Mac and you're off to the races from there.
    The problem right now is more that you then need to use a patched kernel+mesa+others to do much with that environment. As more and more of those patches make it upstream, the process will converge to being a standard ARM64 install from the distro's point of view.
4. [deleted] · 1789513416 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]

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