The Asahi Linux project has achieved OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance for Apple M1 and M2 GPUs, making their reverse-engineered open source drivers the world's only conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for this hardware. Notably, Apple's own drivers are not conformant for any standard graphics API. The post details a key technical challenge: implementing image atomics on the M1, which lacks dedicated hardware instructions for this. The team solved it by computing pixel memory addresses and using regular atomics, optimizing coordinate interleaving to 10 GPU assembly instructions, and ultimately discovering a hidden single-instruction interleave operation through reverse engineering via 'guess and check'.
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