The developer of the open-source Linux driver for the Apple AGX GPU, used in Apple M1 chips, reported a successful pass rate of 99.3% in the dEQP-GLES2 test suite, which assesses compliance with the OpenGL ES 2 specification. The work involved two components: a DRM driver for the Linux kernel written in Rust, and a driver for Mesa written in C.
The development of the driver is complicated by the fact that the Apple M1 features a custom GPU designed by Apple, which runs closed-source firmware and uses fairly complex shared data structures. The technical documentation for the GPU is absent, and reverse engineering of drivers from macOS is employed in the development of independent drivers.
Initially, the open driver developed for Mesa was tested in a macOS environment until the necessary DRM driver (Direct Rendering Manager) for the Linux kernel was prepared, allowing the Mesa driver to be used in Linux. In addition to the current success in passing the dEQP-GLES2 tests at the end of September, the Linux driver for the Apple M1 chips reached a level suitable for running a GNOME session based on Wayland and launching the game Neverball and the Firefox browser with YouTube.
Source: opennet.ru
