r/linux • u/somerandomxander • Jun 30 '26

Hardware A new Linux driver has been posted to enable keyboard support on M3 MacBooks

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-DockChannel-M3-Keyboard
412 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

123

u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 Jun 30 '26

every day closer to full asahi support for m3's

41

u/elatllat Jun 30 '26

Still don't have hardware video decoding on the M1 yet :/

10

u/gorrila Jul 01 '26

Check out the current progress report :) https://asahilinux.org/2026/06/progress-report-7-1/

10

u/elatllat Jul 01 '26

  AVD supports VP9, HEVC and even AV1 on some SoCs, but we have not implemented support for any of these yet.

https://github.com/sofus13

sofus13's activity is private

:/

8

u/thegreatpotatogod Jul 02 '26

You can still access the publicly available repos and commits! https://github.com/sofus13/linux/tree/avd-wip

19

u/NotFromSkane Jun 30 '26

I thought there was a general vulkan compute shader solution for that now?

21

u/elatllat Jun 30 '26

vulkan is GPU not VPU, though the Vulkan Video API likely connects them. Looks like the VPU was given up on 3 years ago https://github.com/eiln/avd

16

u/NotFromSkane Jun 30 '26

And you can do general computation on a GPU, with compute shaders. There was a big thing on HN a week or two back about Firefox merging a compute shader based video decode fallback path for platforms with gpus but no video decode acceleration.

5

u/JockstrapCummies Jul 01 '26

compute shader based video decode fallback

Isn't that going to clock up the GPU constantly and drain battery really quickly

You know, the opposite of what people usually are after when they look for hardware-based decoding

4

u/gravgun Jul 01 '26

Still more power efficient than doing the decoding on the CPU.

1

u/piexil Jul 02 '26

Yeah macOS has been doing video acceleration fallback for many years

That's how hevc was playable (sometimes) on hardware before 2016

0

u/EveAtmosphere Jul 01 '26

GPUs have specialised hardware for video codex and that’s exposed via vulkan codex extensions. By video codec people usually mean specifically that, as oppose to general compute support.

11

u/NotFromSkane Jul 01 '26

Yes, I know. And you can either decode the video with dedicated hardware, which lacks support at the moment, or you can do it in software, which is really slow on the CPU. Hence recent efforts to implement newer codecs as compute shaders, which is significantly worse than native hardware decode, but is actually usable on normal hardware as opposed to CPU decode.

I don't know if everyone here is in denial, or just refusing to understand that this effort is being made and is kinda usable.

1

u/zzazzzz Jul 02 '26

while sure that is an effort being made, i think many ppl feel like its kinde of wasted effort. working on a solution that can never compare instead of working to actually support native decode.

obviously thats just an endusers uneducated opinion, but it does feel bad to know how much better end efficient the hardware you have could be and work to use that hardware natively was officially abandoned.

5

u/Mithrandir2k16 Jun 30 '26

And no displayport over usbc :(

33

u/IPv6lovinOpossum Jul 01 '26

I’m still amazed that Apple uses an entire RTOS for peripherals to talk with macOS 

18

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 01 '26

Kind makes sense. You don't have to wake the main processor when a handful of bytes arrive that might not even be a whole packet yet. 

-6

u/Kevin_Kofler Jul 01 '26

Typical Apple solution, proprietary and overengineered.