Bitter? I am just warning that it's highly unlikely that they will be succesful, and that even the meaning of succesful does not mean exactly what the poster has in mind if he thinks "Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or sleep problems" are relevant. The problems that you are to expect are in an entirely different league, it will not be "yet another slightly non-functional x86 laptop" like the previous Macs. We are talking about a graphics card with fully RE drivers and if it is actually usable it would be a _FIRST_ in the community -- so yes, I'm skeptical. Even Larabel agrees with me:
> the elephant in the room will be the custom Apple graphics hardware and the significant resources there needed to bring up a new driver stack for Apple M1 without any support or documentation from Apple. The reverse-engineering is more complicated there than the likes of other ARM SoCs where at least there is generally closed-source Linux blobs to plug into and slowly replace. Even in those other ARM cases like with Panfrost, V3DV, Freedreno, and Etnaviv it's been a multi-year effort and that is with having a better starting point than Linux on the M1.
You do realize the same person working on the Panfrost driver is working on Asahi, right?
We aren't a bunch of random people; we've been in this game for years. I think we have a better idea about the development effort required, likely timelines, and what project structure works than Larabel, who runs a blog.
As I said, we already have the userspace graphics stack passing a big chunk of basic test suites. We're already a good part of the way to getting this to work, in ~8 months including all of the hardware bring-up, not just GPU.
Yes, and the infrastructure(Mesa, LLVM) and the like is much better, or at least much better than during the PowerVR MBX days, almost 20 years ago, when I was in the game. I have no doubt that something is going to come out of this. But really, are you going to claim that you have the people to make a RE driver on the level of, say, the Intel one?
For someone who is complaining about "sleep issues", I'm quite sure he is not understanding how different the situation is going to look.
Considering the Intel driver can't even manage tear-free display on some of my machines... Yes, I am.
It helps that we only have to support one hardware platform at this time, not a whole line-up of legacy cards, and that as far as we've seen so far, Apple's hardware design is much cleaner than the competition.
> Apple's hardware design is much cleaner than the competition.
So the "planets are aligned differently", this time. Well, we'll see. I have my doubts since my impression is that Apple looted Imgtech for their GPU, and everything I remember about Imgtech/PVR is a complete disaster.
I don't know exactly how much of Imgtech is still in these GPUs, but the coprocessor/firmware interface is Apple's own design, the AGX2 shaders are a completely new design, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple only keep paying Imgtech because they have patents on TBDR, and there is otherwise none of their IP involved any more.
When I say looted I mean "most of the people I knew who used to work in Imgtech now work at Apple", not any licensing agreement, which I would guess they keep just to avoid a nasty lawsuit.
> I’m so worried this project will get 95% of the way there, and then all the fun issues will run out and the M1 will be just another MacBook with WiFi, Bluetooth and sleep issues.
I'm saying if you end up with only Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and sleep issues you will be lucky, since to have a problem-free RE'd GPU driver would be a first, while plenty of laptops have problem-free Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and sleep. So it is definitely not Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and sleep that should make you afraid.
> the elephant in the room will be the custom Apple graphics hardware and the significant resources there needed to bring up a new driver stack for Apple M1 without any support or documentation from Apple. The reverse-engineering is more complicated there than the likes of other ARM SoCs where at least there is generally closed-source Linux blobs to plug into and slowly replace. Even in those other ARM cases like with Panfrost, V3DV, Freedreno, and Etnaviv it's been a multi-year effort and that is with having a better starting point than Linux on the M1.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-A...
And it is not like people weren't trying "hard enough" before.