Asahi Linux, the main project for porting Linux to M1 and M2 Mac computers, has announced tools for a much improved gaming experience. The toolkit leverages x86 emulation and Windows compatibility to make many games playable, and it could benefit other ARM desktops too.
This release marks is a big deal for the Asahi Linux project because it now offers the only conformant OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan drivers for Apple Silicon hardware. The toolkit is still in its alpha stage, but can run games like Control, with other titles like Fallout 4 also confirmed to be playable. The toolkit runs by addressing the differences between the x86 Windows gaming ecosystem and the Arm Linux environment. It relies on FEX for x86 emulation on Arm, Wine for translating Windows to Linux, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton for translating DirectX to Vulkan. The toolkit also has a fully functional Vulkan 1.3 driver, Honeykrisp, specifically developed for Apple Silicon. You can download it from the official website.
The toolkit can handle the difference in page size between x86 systems (4K) and Apple Silicon (16K). This is done by running games within a virtual machine configured to use 4K pages. This virtual machine, powered by the muvm tool, lets the hardware function at its native 16K page size while simultaneously meeting the game’s requirement of 4K pages.
The Asahi Linux gaming toolkit uses a unique approach to handle tessellation and geometry shaders, features typically handled by specialized hardware on most gaming systems. Instead of relying on dedicated hardware, the toolkit leverages compute shaders to emulate these functionalities. While this method does come with some performance overhead, it is useful to keep games like The Witcher 3 and Ghostrunner running at higher qualities. This means that even though the M1 chip lacks dedicated hardware for these specific features, players can still experience the visual benefits they provide, except with potentially slightly reduced performance.
Fedora Linux developers helped with the project, and they plan to integrate the same FEX x86 emulation layer in regular ARM editions of Fedora Linux. A blog post explains, “The aim is for Fedora KDE systems, on AArch64, to offer this functionality out of the box for all supported Fedora ARM desktop systems.”
Source: Asahi Linux, Fedora Magazine
