The work done by the team of Asahi Linux it’s almost touching. Developing an independent operating system capable of running on an intrinsically closed platform like Apple’s was an ambitious challenge to say the least. And not only did the Asahi team succeed in their aim, but they are demonstrating today that they have created software again more performing as compared to macOS.
On the one hand there is a group of engineers, enthusiasts and volunteers with great technical skills; on the other there is a multinational with immense “firepower”.
Yet, Asahi Linux’s growth in terms of functionality e performance impresses and strikes at the heart. If only because, starting from an in-depth activity of reverse engineering on macOS systems, developers were able to reconstruct the low-level behavior of Apple hardware on systems with ARM-derived SoCs (Apple Silicon; M1/M2).
Fedora Asahi Remix: OpenGL drivers for Mac more compliant than Apple ones!
The most recent evolution of Asahi is called Fedora Asahi Remix: the original project has in fact changed its name to reflect the close collaboration established with the Fedora development team. However, the objectives remain unchanged: bring Linux to Mac devices Apple Silicon, allowing users to use Linux as their everyday operating system and take full advantage of Apple hardware.
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a specification for 2D and 3D graphics programming that provides a standardized interface for hardware acceleration of graphic operations. Created byArchitecture Review Board (ARB), OpenGL specifications and libraries are widely used in the gaming industry, computer graphics, CAD design and other applications requiring graphic rendering advanced.
Here, in August 2023 we presented the first graphics driver compatible with the Apple M1 and M2 GPUs: among other things, it offered full support for OpenGL ES 3.1. That alone was an epochal victory for Asahi Linux, which it could guarantee excellent graphics performance on newer Mac systems.
Over 100,000 OpenGL compliance tests successfully passed
Alyssa Rosenzweig, lead developer of Fedora Asahi Remix, announces a new milestone. From today the Linux distro for Mac fully supports the specifications OpenGL 4.6 e OpenGL ES 3.2thanks to drivers specially created and optimized for the Apple M1 and M2 SoCs.
Suffice it to say that the official Apple drivers used on macOS are barely compatible with OpenGL 4.1 but they are not compliant. The work carried out by the Fedora Asahi Remix team is fully compliant with the specifications of the most recent versions of OpenGL, supporting the workload generated, for example, by applications such as Blender, Ryujinx e Citra.
Go beyond 100,000 compliance tests with OpenGL it is no joke at all: while Apple does not yet support the most modern versions of the graphics standards, Fedora Asahi Remix is truly at the forefront in doing so. Furthermore, the Linux distro for Mac team confirms its devotion to open standards e interoperable: the aim is to free users and developers from any limitations, allowing applications to work anywhere.
Fedora Asahi Remix hasn’t sacrificed the look of either safety: The OpenGL implementation is robust and reliable. Often, in fact, especially when talking about gamingpriority is given to raw performance with respect to the issue of safety. However, for applications like i browser Web which also manage untrusted shaders, security is an absolute priority.
Thus, the Fedora Asahi Remix team has implemented features that make the graphics driver even more solid: any crash phenomena are also managed buffer overflow ensuring stability and safety without excessively compromising performance.
How to install Fedora Asahi Remix on Mac
Installing Fedora Asahi Remix on an Apple Silicon Mac system is as simple as issuing a single instruction in the terminal window:
curl https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/install | sh
For those who already use the distribution on an Apple machine based on an ARM-derived SoC, simply update it with the following command to introduce extended support for OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2:
dnf upgrade --refresh