Developers at Asahi Linux have introduced tools to enable the launch of modern computer games on Linux operating systems running on Apple M1 chips. These tools are designed to allow games available in the Steam catalog and collected for architecture X86_64 to be played on systems with the Apple M1 chip. The integration of drivers implementing the API Vulkan 1.3 and OpenCl 3.0, along with components for emulating architecture X86_64 and ensuring compatibility with Windows, is a key feature of the toolkit.
The necessary packages for this work have been added to the standard Fedora Asahi Remix distribution repository. Users can update the drivers with the DNF Upgrade -Rafresh command to launch games, as well as install the STEAM command “DNF Install Steam” to install all necessary dependencies. The stack used for launching games includes the HoneyKrisp Vulkan driver, the fex emulator for running x86 applications on ARM systems, the Wine project, and layers such as dxvk and vkd3d-Proton for DirectX implementation over Vulkan.
Due to additional overhead expenses from emulation, having 16 GB of RAM in the system is recommended. To address issues related to memory page size discrepancies, which can cause alignment problems, a second core with a different memory page size is launched in a virtual environment. Tools like muvm are utilized to launch games in separate virtual machines with their own cores, allowing for compatibility with games like Fallout 4.
To enable the playability of games like The Witcher 3 and Ghostrunner, which utilize