Alyssa Rosenzweig

This is exciting for quite a few boards and notebooks, notably the new Pinebook Pro (RK3399) and the Asus C201 (RK3288) both benefiting from the Panfrost driver.

I wrote a bit a while back on Reddit regarding my experience with the C201 and Linux: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bebm93/linux_on_asus_chromebook_c201/

Now with open 3D acceleration, the last remaining bit of proprietary code on the C201 is the WiFi chip. Not sure how much of an impact it'll have, but when Cypress bought Broadcom's wireless division it released the datasheet for this and many other chips (PDF): https://www.cypress.com/file/298141/download

Alyssa Rosenzweig is making amazing progress with Panfrost working at Collabora. Panfrost is now working with GNOME, two months ahead of schedule!: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/gnome-meets-panfrost.html

I don't think it's feasible to separate technology from the people themselves. What we do, in some way or the other touches people, real people, people with feelings, dreams and aspirations.

To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them.

I recently stumbled on [1],

> I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans.

which is a reminder that so many years later, the same issues, vitriol and discrimination that Lynn dealt with still plague us. What are we, if we can not show empathy to people who struggle with something as fundamental as their gender identity? Who are we to deny them the life they want to lead every day? Who are we to dehumanize others?

[1] https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html

I agree strongly with you about the need for good resources. Here are a few I've found that are useful.

* A trip through the Graphics Pipeline[1] is slightly dated (10 years old) but still very relevant.

* If you're interested in compute shaders specifically, I've put together "compute shader 101"[2].

* Alyssa Rosenzweig's posts[3] on reverse engineering GPUs casts a lot of light on how they work at a low level. It helps to have a big-picture understanding first.

I think there is demand for a good book on this topic.

[1]: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-index/

[2]: https://github.com/googlefonts/compute-shader-101

[3]: https://rosenzweig.io/

Are these things so important that we should give up the easier maintainability (and potentially, security) that comes from centralization and the standardization of user clients? I absolutely think projects like Matrix are worthwhile, but it seems foolish to me to argue that there are no benefits that come from doing things the way Signal does. Besides, as sexy as decentralization is, in the wild it is not really practiced. Mastodon is decentralized, but last I heard ~50% of users were on 3 nodes [0]. I'm assuming it's a similar situation for Matrix.

[0]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

The key words are "optimized" and "OpenGL 4.6 with Zink". "Functional" and "OpenGL 2.1" is a different story, and the same trustworthy source said in https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html that:

> thanks to the tremendous shared code in Mesa, a basic OpenGL driver is doable by a single person. I’m optimistic that we’ll have native OpenGL 2.1 in Asahi Linux by the end of the year.

It's likely that even a bare-bones OpenGL driver will probably run better than llvmpipe, which is especially important in a laptop context due to the resulting power use improvements.

Very little progress made this year after high profile departures (Hector Martin, project lead, Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig - GPU gurus). Alyssa's departure isn't reflected on Asahi's website yet, but it is in her blog. I believe she also left Valve, which I think was sponsoring some aspects of the Asahi project. So when people say "Asahi hasn't seen any setbacks" be sure to ask them who has stepped in to make up for these losses in both talent and sponsorship.

https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html