In that light, the Asahi Linux future looks bright.
Until Apple changes the API out from underneath you and it breaks everything ‘cause you’re calling undocumented functions? Or until Apple changes up their hardware without telling anyone and breaks everything. Or until Apple decides that people reverse engineering their systems is against their ToS and chooses to enforce it. Or until Apple decides to disallow unsigned driver code at the hardware level. Or…
The internal Metal API doesn’t really matter too much, since running Mesa on Mac OS is more for the prototype.
The Asahi wiki and marcan’s tweets cover this better than I can, but tl;dr Apple rarely changes hardware details if they don’t have to (stuff like the interrupt controller, UART, etc. are incredibly stable), the ToS explicitly allows it, and the system is explicitly designed to allow third-party kernel code. They could have locked it down, but they didn’t.
Until Apple changes the API out from underneath you and it breaks everything ‘cause you’re calling undocumented functions? Or until Apple changes up their hardware without telling anyone and breaks everything. Or until Apple decides that people reverse engineering their systems is against their ToS and chooses to enforce it. Or until Apple decides to disallow unsigned driver code at the hardware level. Or…
The internal Metal API doesn’t really matter too much, since running Mesa on Mac OS is more for the prototype.
The Asahi wiki and marcan’s tweets cover this better than I can, but tl;dr Apple rarely changes hardware details if they don’t have to (stuff like the interrupt controller, UART, etc. are incredibly stable), the ToS explicitly allows it, and the system is explicitly designed to allow third-party kernel code. They could have locked it down, but they didn’t.