Rosenzweig – Vulkan 1.3 on the M1 in 1 month

The Honeykrisp driver achieves the first conformant Vulkan 1.3 implementation for Apple M1 hardware on any OS, passing all 686,930 conformance tests with zero failures. Built in roughly one month by starting from Faith Ekstrand's open source NVK driver for NVIDIA GPUs rather than prior M1 Vulkan efforts, the driver implements full dynamic state and shader objects — a first for any Vulkan driver at this stage. Key engineering challenges included adapting descriptor set lowering, implementing prolog/epilog shader splitting to handle M1's baked-in state, fixing register allocator crashes from infinite loops, zero-copy rendering via DRM format modifiers, and a subtle border colour bug with packed 16-bit formats requiring shader-level emulation. The driver is not yet released for end users but source code is available, with DXVK/vkd3d-proton support and Windows game compatibility via Wine and FEX x86 emulation on Asahi Linux as next goals.