A retrospective on five years of reverse-engineering the Apple M1 GPU and building open source graphics drivers for Asahi Linux. Starting from scratch in December 2020, the author progressed from decoding shader instructions to shipping conformant OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.4, and OpenCL 3.0 drivers — all fully upstream in Mesa. The work also enabled Proton gaming on M1 Macs running Linux. With all major milestones achieved, the author is stepping away from the Apple ecosystem, noting that LunarG's KosmicKrisp project is now building on this foundation to bring Vulkan to macOS.
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