Alisa Rosenzweig (Alyssa Rosenzweig) from COLLABORA, developing Panfrost driver for GPU Mali, reported On the preparation for Mesa initial implementation of the OpenGL driver asahi with support for the graphics processor supplied in Apple chips M1. The driver uses the Gallium interface and maintains most of the OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 features. The fully implemented functionality is not enough to start most games, but the driver is already able to run applications GLXGEARS and GLMark2, and about 75% of Drawelements Quality Program tests used by the Khronos consortium to certify compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 are successfully held.
The code of the proposed prototype is already adopted to the main Code base base of the MESA. New driver is based on the reference Gallium driver Noop With a transfer of some code from the Panfrost driver developed for GPU Arm Mali. In the future, in addition to the OpenGL driver for MESA, it is planned to prepare a module for the DRM subsystem (Direct Rendering Manager) of the Linux kernel and the Mesa driver with the implementation of the VULKAN graphics API.
Recall that Apple M1 chip is not typical, made to order and has its own architectural features. For example, Apple M1 uses its own GPU designed to Apple. The technical documentation for the GPU is missing and when developing independent drivers, reverse engineering drivers from MacOS is used.