It’s rare to hear Apple gamers playing AAA games on their MacBooks. Much less do you hear of Apple users wanting to run AAA games on Linux with Apple hardware. However, Asahi Linux developers have announced alpha driver compatibility with x86-based Windows games on Linux on Apple M1 and M2 Arm-based silicon, making Asahi Linux the first in the world to achieve such a feat. It is a Linux distribution.
The asahi Linux replay toolkit now supports x86 emulation and Windows compatibility with Vulkan 1.3 drivers. ASAHI Linux is the only distribution that offers compliant OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan drivers for Apple ARM-based hardware, enabling x86 AAA gaming through Linux.
ASAHI’s translation stack consists of a whopping four translation layers to run x86 Windows games. FEX emulates x86 instructions to run on ARM hardware, Wine translates Windows code to Linux, and DVK and Proton focus on translating DirectX API calls to Vulkan.
To avoid page size, add more complexity. Apple systems use 16K page sizes, while Windows x86 games expect 4K pages. As a result, Asahi developers virtualized a secondary ARM Linux kernel with a different page size to get around this limitation. This process involves running an x86 game inside a small virtual machine using muvm (micro virtual machine service) and passing through the devices needed to play the game, such as the GPU and peripheral inputs.
ASAHI’s x86 Windows compatibility is currently in alpha stage and developers are working towards a 1.0 release. Some blockers include incompatibility with sparse texturing in Ashai’s Vulkan 1.3-based Honeykrisp driver. This is required to unlock more DX12 game support. Honeycrisp is the first driver compliant with M1 silicon (for any operating system) and the only rendering driver that can run games on Linux.
However, multiple games including cyberpunk 2077, hollow knight, portal 2, fallout 4and controlwas shown running on top of Asahi’s compatibility layer for x86 Windows games.
