8 ms·

Asahi Lina is truly an inspiration for open source reverse engineering. For those not aware, they also live stream their coding sessions quite often: https://ww

by jamies 4y ago

Asahi Lina is truly an inspiration for open source reverse engineering. For those not aware, they also live stream their coding sessions quite often: https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina I'm excited for the day that I can easily install SteamOS (the modern one that runs on the Steamdeck) on an M2 Mac mini for an insanely powered "Steam console" for my living room TV.

ozarker 4y ago
I wonder how long it's going to take for games to start generally supporting ARM. Getting Linux running well on M1/M2/etc.. seems like only half the battle for making a good gaming machine out of these.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I'd guess that will probably only happen when either windows gets widespread ARM adoption, or there's a new Xbox or PlayStation console that uses an ARM processor. Which... might be a while.
  - mepian 4y ago
    There's the Nintendo Switch which does get ports.
  - cubefox 4y ago
    The Nintendo Switch console already uses an ARM SoC by Nvidia. But I'm not sure whether this has meaningfully increased the probability of porting games to MacOS. The Switch uses Vulkan, but Apple uses Metal, a proprietary graphics API. Whether ports make sense probably depends on how strongly the Mac market share increases compared to Windows.
    - jsheard 4y ago
      The Switch can use Vulkan but it's unusual in offering a wide range of APIs, from OpenGL and Vulkan (the implementations likely derived from Nvidia's existing PC driver) or a custom low-level API tailored to the hardware called NVN. From what I gather from the emulation scene, the majority of Switch titles with non-trivial performance requirements use NVN. Even idTech, which famously uses Vulkan on PC, uses NVN instead for its Switch ports.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        Interesting, I didn't know that. I thought Vulkan was already pretty low-level compared to OpenGL. Then I guess Metal on Mac can't be such a big issue either.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I wouldn't count on many developers going back to update old games with ARM support. It's more likely that the community will work to build some sort of Box86 + Proton stack to get games working, which should get a lot of the classics working[0]. From there, I think the struggle will be getting Box86 to run fast enough for modern games. Apple's ARM CPUs have great IPC, but that can still get annihilated when it's forced to simulate SIMD/AVX instructions. I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement. Things are certainly looking better than they did a couple years ago, but getting ARM to run x86 code faster-than-native is an uphill battle. Maybe even an impossible one, but I've been surprised before (like with DXVK). [0] Crysis on a Rockchip ARM SOC, for example: https://youtu.be/k6C5mZvanFU?t=1069 https://youtu.be/k6C5mZvanFU?t=1069
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement. I'm pretty sure it's just vanilla ARM NEON so I don't think it will take any reverse engineering. The Apple Silicon GPU is custom, but the CPU is just minor extensions to (and compatible with) AArch64. Rumour has it that this is because AArch64 was designed by Apple and donated to ARM (who Apple has close relationship with being that they were a founding member).
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      Apple support NEON (and uses it for most SIMD code) but it also has other proprietary ISA extensions for e.g. matrix multiply.
      - shaunsingh0207 4y ago
        note that the proprietary extensions are extremely unlikely to gain linux support though, unless upstream arm adopts something similar though amx won’t help out with emulation much
    - smoldesu 4y ago
- est31 4y ago
  Desktop games*. ARM is a major target for gaming already. Games are 61 percent of app store revenue and 71 percent of play store revenue. And mobile games are the majority of the gaming market (51%). https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/
  - ajvs 4y ago
    Getting Waydroid to run well on Linux has big issues still unfortunately if you wanted to use it to play Android games. Managed to get it working for a few months on a previous Ubuntu version, now can't get it to work at all.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    How many sprites to you need to add to a one-armed bandit before it becomes a game?
- klooney 4y ago
  16k pages is going to make everything hard, I'm not holding my breath.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    What role does page size play here, and why is 16K a problem?
    - gavinsyancey 4y ago
      The page size dictates the minimum size and alignment requirements for `mmap`, and also for regions of memory with different levels of protection (e.g. read-only vs read+write vs read+execute, etc). If a program expects to be able to `mmap` in 4kb chunks and can't, it will probably not work properly. On macOS, IIRC the userspace and kernel-space page size can be different and different userspace programs can run with diferent page sizes, however on Linux the page size is currently fixed across the system and set at compile time. The M1's IOMMU only supports 16k-aligned pages, so memory regions that need to be shared with other hardware (e.g. the GPU) need to be 16k-aligned. As such (and because Linux doesn't currently have great support for mixed page sizes), the Asahi Linux project has decided to run with 16k pages globally. However, that breaks a number of applications that are expecting 4k pages. More info: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software
      - pxc 4y ago
        Damn. There's some really important software on that list: libvirt/QEMU/KVM, LVM, WINE
        worthless-trash 4y ago
        I imagine that there will be a lot of work to improve this over the coming years, not just because of asahi, but the cloud ARM systems that are being developed. I think that Fedora may be leading the pack here, see https://danielpocock.com/power9-aarch64-64k-page-sizes/ https://danielpocock.com/power9-aarch64-64k-page-sizes/
- fulafel 4y ago
  Linux gaming has been developing in the opposite direction for a while, moving away from even x86 Linux native ports and toward running x86 Windows games under emulation.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    They are running x86 Windows games under Wine. Remember that Wine stands for Wine is not an emulator.
    - fulafel 4y ago
      The recursive acronym tradition of course (GNU's Not Unix, Eine Is Not Emacs etc) traditionally implied the implementation being superset or better than the thing it's replacing and referencing in the acronym. Wine FAQ concludes > "Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.
    - foresto 4y ago
      Try to remember that hardware emulation is not the only kind of emulation. Wine (written as WinE when I first encountered it, IIRC) emulates the Windows runtime environment.
- sofixa 3y ago
  I have Steam on a Mac, and roughly 1/3 of my library supports M1 Macs. I have some old games in my library, so that's pretty decent numbers for a relatively new platform that is 64 bit only, relatively niche in general, and extremely niche for gaming.
heywhatupboys 4y ago
I did not expect the coding live streams of GPU engineering to be presented by a virtual anime persona with a squeaky voice.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Personally, I was more suprised by the wii sports music and all the pink.
  - LeonM 3y ago
    AFAIK, that is music made by Marcan (Lina) him/her self. Amongst other talents, Marcan also appears to be musician. There are a few interviews with Marcan where you can see pianos in the background, for example here: https://youtu.be/dF2YQ92WKpM?t=989 https://youtu.be/dF2YQ92WKpM?t=989 He/she is quite the creative person I must say.
- realjhol 4y ago
  It's just Marcan being weird and creepy.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    Marcan is very busy with a lot of other things, like upstreaming patches to the Linux mainline and improving platform support. He's been clear that he's not Asahi Lina... and he's also not a GPU hacker as far as I know.
    - ranger_danger 4y ago
      proof they're the same person (screenshot from one of their livestreams): https://0x0.st/H-Uq.png https://0x0.st/H-Uq.png /home/marcan and /home/lina on the same box.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        Having profiles on the same box may lend credibility to claims that they are the same person, but its very much not proof of that.
goosedragons 3y ago
Buy a Ryzen mini PC with a Radeon 680M and get that now with HoloISO? M2 really isn't that fast. And as a bonus you won't have to run every game under a translation layer.

by jamies 4y ago

ozarker 4y ago

I wonder how long it's going to take for games to start generally supporting ARM. Getting Linux running well on M1/M2/etc.. seems like only half the battle for making a good gaming machine out of these.

nicoburns 4y ago
I'd guess that will probably only happen when either windows gets widespread ARM adoption, or there's a new Xbox or PlayStation console that uses an ARM processor. Which... might be a while.
- mepian 4y ago
  There's the Nintendo Switch which does get ports.
- cubefox 4y ago
  The Nintendo Switch console already uses an ARM SoC by Nvidia. But I'm not sure whether this has meaningfully increased the probability of porting games to MacOS. The Switch uses Vulkan, but Apple uses Metal, a proprietary graphics API. Whether ports make sense probably depends on how strongly the Mac market share increases compared to Windows.
  - jsheard 4y ago
    The Switch can use Vulkan but it's unusual in offering a wide range of APIs, from OpenGL and Vulkan (the implementations likely derived from Nvidia's existing PC driver) or a custom low-level API tailored to the hardware called NVN. From what I gather from the emulation scene, the majority of Switch titles with non-trivial performance requirements use NVN. Even idTech, which famously uses Vulkan on PC, uses NVN instead for its Switch ports.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      Interesting, I didn't know that. I thought Vulkan was already pretty low-level compared to OpenGL. Then I guess Metal on Mac can't be such a big issue either.
smoldesu 4y ago
I wouldn't count on many developers going back to update old games with ARM support. It's more likely that the community will work to build some sort of Box86 + Proton stack to get games working, which should get a lot of the classics working[0]. From there, I think the struggle will be getting Box86 to run fast enough for modern games. Apple's ARM CPUs have great IPC, but that can still get annihilated when it's forced to simulate SIMD/AVX instructions. I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement. Things are certainly looking better than they did a couple years ago, but getting ARM to run x86 code faster-than-native is an uphill battle. Maybe even an impossible one, but I've been surprised before (like with DXVK). [0] Crysis on a Rockchip ARM SOC, for example: https://youtu.be/k6C5mZvanFU?t=1069 https://youtu.be/k6C5mZvanFU?t=1069
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement. I'm pretty sure it's just vanilla ARM NEON so I don't think it will take any reverse engineering. The Apple Silicon GPU is custom, but the CPU is just minor extensions to (and compatible with) AArch64. Rumour has it that this is because AArch64 was designed by Apple and donated to ARM (who Apple has close relationship with being that they were a founding member).
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Apple support NEON (and uses it for most SIMD code) but it also has other proprietary ISA extensions for e.g. matrix multiply.
    - shaunsingh0207 4y ago
      note that the proprietary extensions are extremely unlikely to gain linux support though, unless upstream arm adopts something similar though amx won’t help out with emulation much
  - smoldesu 4y ago
est31 4y ago
Desktop games*. ARM is a major target for gaming already. Games are 61 percent of app store revenue and 71 percent of play store revenue. And mobile games are the majority of the gaming market (51%). https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/
- ajvs 4y ago
  Getting Waydroid to run well on Linux has big issues still unfortunately if you wanted to use it to play Android games. Managed to get it working for a few months on a previous Ubuntu version, now can't get it to work at all.
- kuschku 4y ago
  How many sprites to you need to add to a one-armed bandit before it becomes a game?
klooney 4y ago
16k pages is going to make everything hard, I'm not holding my breath.
- sophacles 4y ago
  What role does page size play here, and why is 16K a problem?
  - gavinsyancey 4y ago
    The page size dictates the minimum size and alignment requirements for `mmap`, and also for regions of memory with different levels of protection (e.g. read-only vs read+write vs read+execute, etc). If a program expects to be able to `mmap` in 4kb chunks and can't, it will probably not work properly. On macOS, IIRC the userspace and kernel-space page size can be different and different userspace programs can run with diferent page sizes, however on Linux the page size is currently fixed across the system and set at compile time. The M1's IOMMU only supports 16k-aligned pages, so memory regions that need to be shared with other hardware (e.g. the GPU) need to be 16k-aligned. As such (and because Linux doesn't currently have great support for mixed page sizes), the Asahi Linux project has decided to run with 16k pages globally. However, that breaks a number of applications that are expecting 4k pages. More info: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software
    - pxc 4y ago
      Damn. There's some really important software on that list: libvirt/QEMU/KVM, LVM, WINE
      - worthless-trash 4y ago
        I imagine that there will be a lot of work to improve this over the coming years, not just because of asahi, but the cloud ARM systems that are being developed. I think that Fedora may be leading the pack here, see https://danielpocock.com/power9-aarch64-64k-page-sizes/ https://danielpocock.com/power9-aarch64-64k-page-sizes/
fulafel 4y ago
Linux gaming has been developing in the opposite direction for a while, moving away from even x86 Linux native ports and toward running x86 Windows games under emulation.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  They are running x86 Windows games under Wine. Remember that Wine stands for Wine is not an emulator.
  - fulafel 4y ago
    The recursive acronym tradition of course (GNU's Not Unix, Eine Is Not Emacs etc) traditionally implied the implementation being superset or better than the thing it's replacing and referencing in the acronym. Wine FAQ concludes > "Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.
  - foresto 4y ago
    Try to remember that hardware emulation is not the only kind of emulation. Wine (written as WinE when I first encountered it, IIRC) emulates the Windows runtime environment.
sofixa 3y ago
I have Steam on a Mac, and roughly 1/3 of my library supports M1 Macs. I have some old games in my library, so that's pretty decent numbers for a relatively new platform that is 64 bit only, relatively niche in general, and extremely niche for gaming.

heywhatupboys 4y ago

I did not expect the coding live streams of GPU engineering to be presented by a virtual anime persona with a squeaky voice.

sebzim4500 4y ago
Personally, I was more suprised by the wii sports music and all the pink.
- LeonM 3y ago
  AFAIK, that is music made by Marcan (Lina) him/her self. Amongst other talents, Marcan also appears to be musician. There are a few interviews with Marcan where you can see pianos in the background, for example here: https://youtu.be/dF2YQ92WKpM?t=989 https://youtu.be/dF2YQ92WKpM?t=989 He/she is quite the creative person I must say.
realjhol 4y ago
It's just Marcan being weird and creepy.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  Marcan is very busy with a lot of other things, like upstreaming patches to the Linux mainline and improving platform support. He's been clear that he's not Asahi Lina... and he's also not a GPU hacker as far as I know.
  - ranger_danger 4y ago
    proof they're the same person (screenshot from one of their livestreams): https://0x0.st/H-Uq.png https://0x0.st/H-Uq.png /home/marcan and /home/lina on the same box.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      Having profiles on the same box may lend credibility to claims that they are the same person, but its very much not proof of that.

goosedragons 3y ago

Buy a Ryzen mini PC with a Radeon 680M and get that now with HoloISO? M2 really isn't that fast. And as a bonus you won't have to run every game under a translation layer.