Khronos Consortium, an organization that develops graphic standards, has officially recognized the complete compatibility of the open driver ASAHI for GPU AGX with the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification. This driver is supplied in the Apple M1 and M2 chips. The recognition came after the driver successfully passed all tests from the Kronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS). It is now included in the list of certified drivers. [1]
The compatibility check for the driver was conducted on various Apple chips, including Apple M1, M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, M2, and M2 Pro/Max. The testing was performed using the asahi linux Fedora Remix distribution, Mesa 23.2.0-Devel (GIT-65EAE45514), and X.org X Server (X11_EGL). The necessary corrections and improvements for certification have already been implemented and transferred to Mesa. The updated version of 23.2 will include these changes. Additionally, the asahi driver for Mesa and the DRM-Asahi (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Linux kernel, written in Rust, are also included. These components enable the full utilization of Opengl ES 3.1 on devices with Apple M1 and M2 chips. The ASAHI Linux distribution now includes these components in both new builds based on Fedora Linux and the repository for older builds based on Arch Linux. [2]
It should be noted that Apple’s proprietary drivers for the M1 and M2 chips were not certified by Khronos. The open driver, ASAHI, is the first to receive this recognition. The acknowledgement of compatibility through certification allows for the official declaration of adherence to graphic standards and the usage of related Khronos brands. Notably, due to the absence of technical documentation on Apple’s GPU, the development of independent drivers relies on reverse engineering of drivers from MacOS. [3]