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A comment on Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice.

Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by blinkingled on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @06:59AM (#26327267)
What's the story with OpenGL on macOS? I know it is abandonware in favor of Metal but are there reasons Apple will at least keep it in the OS / drivers for foreseeable future? Do any of the ANGLE type things help when they finally take it away?
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Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by flohofwoe on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @07:19AM (#26327422)
It still works and at least somebody still seems to work on it going by the somewhat random GL-related fixes and regressions in macOS Betas since GL was declared deprecated.

AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility.

Apparently Zink on top of MoltenVk on top of Metal works, but that looks like a Jenga tower of emulation layers.

Ideally, Apple would rewrite their OpenGL framework on top of Metal (if it hasn't happened yet), and keep that working at least into the 2030s.

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Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by my123 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @07:59AM (#26327735)
In fact, OpenGL on Apple M1 is implemented through AppleMetalOpenGLRenderer.
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Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by aodaki on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:43AM (#26330864)
Virgil 3D renderer provides some desktop GL emulation, so it is still somewhat usable. But a serious application expecting desktop GL would see glitches.

My recommendation is to use Wayland, and to play serious games on macOS (although such games are not available on Linux AArch64 anyway...)

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Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by shadeslayer on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @02:38PM (#26333269)
Virgl3D should support emulating GL on GLES usecases. If you're seeing issues, please open bug reports on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/virgl/virglrenderer/-/issues and we can try and look into them :)
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Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by aodaki on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @08:58PM (#26337649)
Virgil 3D does good enough for my workload. I saw some problems in GLES backend support but they are minor and I have already written patches for them.

However, as feature_list in src/vrend_renderer.c shows, some features are unavailable and cannot be emulated. It is good enough but not perfect (and I think it is reasonable.)

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Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice by phkahler on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @07:56AM (#26327709)
>> AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility.

I thought Wayland implementations considered one of those a base requirement.

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