Over the past weekend, exciting progress was made in persuading 3D graphics to work in Linux on Apple Silicon.
Richard Speed for The Register:
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 performance benchmark tool for GNU/Linux, successfully rendering the bunny in 3D detail.
https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1523475500097699840
It’s impressive considering the lack of official support from Apple. It’s therefore up to Rosenzweig and the community to reverse-engineer the hardware with the goal of creating drivers…
An early Alpha of Asahi Linux arrived in March and we were able to bring up a desktop on an M1 Mac with surprising ease.
MacDailyNews Take: In April, testing showed that Asahi Linux on an Apple M1 Mac mini is “unbelievably fast.”
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
Excellent! I’m on an M1 Mac, and I’m looking forward to installing Linux on it. I already have ARM versions of Linux running in UTM, but of course that’s not the same as running it for real on the hardware.
However, you would be shocked at how fast Linux is in UTM on an M1 with just 8 GB of RAM. You can grab a premade version of Linux here:
https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/
Or you can install Debian 11 ARM or whatever ARM version you want in UTM.
I’d be curious to hear about experience…pro/con?