The developer of the open Linux driver for the Apple AGX GPU, used in Apple M1 chips, reported a 99.3% success rate in the dEQP-GLES2 test suite, which checks the level of support for the OpenGL ES 2 specification. The work uses two components: a DRM driver for the Linux kernel, written in Rust, and a driver for Mesa written in C.
Driver development is complicated by the fact that the Apple M1 uses its own Apple-designed GPU, running proprietary firmware and using fairly complex shared data structures. There is no technical documentation for the GPU and the development of independent drivers uses reverse engineering of drivers from macOS.
The open driver developed for Mesa was initially tested in the macOS environment until the necessary DRM driver (Direct Rendering Manager) for the Linux kernel was prepared, which made it possible to use the driver developed for Mesa in Linux. In addition to the current success in passing the dEQP-GLES2 tests, at the end of September the Linux driver for Apple M1 chips reached a level suitable for running a Wayland-based GNOME session and running the Neverball game and the Firefox browser from YouTube.
Source: opennet.ru