Vulkan support?

[johnbchron]

HoneyKrisp is released, so I was wondering what steps need to be taken to port this over here, and what I can do to help.

My knowledge of this is pretty much "we need to update our mesa branch and update some kernel flags or smth, right?" so I don't know much, but I am very willing to help.

[waltmck]

I've been using this fork from @zzywysm, which has had Vulkan support for a couple of weeks. It also includes several noticeable performance improvements which could not be upstreamed, notably:

• compile-time architecture optimizations since we are already building from source
• disabling several unnecessary modules to decrease boot time
• Using the recommended IO scheduler for NVME drives
• Building the Asahi kernel modules into the kernel rather than loading them as modules.

It has been pretty much plug and play after I updated my CPU features list to the M2's. Boot times are decreased and I've noticed longer battery life, so until @tpwrules adds Vulkan support I recommend trying it! It should be clear how to add Honeykrisp to the kernel from looking at that repo.

There is also the separate, and more difficult, issue of how to package Fedora's userspace microvm/FEX/WINE/DXVK stack--I have been struggling to get this to work. Right now only running (a specific version of) Steam is supported and my impression is that it still fairly buggy, so it might make sense to wait until it is in a less-alpha state to consider packaging.

[matteocavestri]

@waltmck How did you packaged MicroVM/FEX/WINE/DXVK? I've looked to the fork you mentioned, but I've not found it. I've also looked at your fork and your config.
We can package that stack in this repo using something like ...wineSupport.enable to enable that microVM

[rowanG077]

@matteocavestri Nothing you listed is packaged. Those have nothing to do with vulkan support.

[matteocavestri]

@rowanG077 I know it, but @waltmck spoke about that stack and It could be interesting to adopt here since fedora asahi remix have packaged that.

[waltmck]

@matteocavestri I haven't tried packaging "the right way" with Nix, but should be possible to get working in a Fedora distrobox with their packaging (and I managed to run Steam with FEX and the microvm this way). However, I haven't had time to figure out why mesa drivers are not visible inside of the container (I tried symlinking in several different files from the Nix store but glxinfo -B still fails to load Honeykrisp and falls back to llvmpipe).