Re: Apple Silicon Mac support packages (v2)

[Skirmisher <Skirmisher@users.noreply.github.com>]

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New comment by Skirmisher on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/39796#issuecomment-1356223955

Comment:
> > I natively rebuilt all the packages for `aarch64`.
> 
> Is this phrased correctly? Do we really need to rebuild all `aarch64` packages? If yes, should we create another `aarch`?

"The packages" in this context is just referring to the ones in this PR. dkwo had to cross-compile the Asahi packages from another machine before making a system image to install on the M1. But after that, Void on the M1 can natively compile the packages; dkwo is confirming that native compilation is also working. The Apple Silicon machines can use Void's existing aarch64 packages just fine.

> Do you have interest in also porting the [gpu drivers](https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linux/) to Void Linux?

There is nothing to "port", the code is already in the same tree that the normal Asahi kernel is built from. It's still a work in progress though, so Asahi Linux (the reference distro) turns it off for their default kernel package, and offers a separate `linux-asahi-edge` package for testing the GPU driver and other less-stable changes (but the kernel version is otherwise identical).

We *could* add a similar package, but it wouldn't be a good idea; the Asahi developers are frequently updating both the kernel and their mesa driver (which we would also need to build for the GPU to work), and we shouldn't be adding dev builds to Void. All the Asahi work is supposed to be upstreamed as soon as possible, and while the GPU driver is much bigger than other components and will not be upstreamable for a long time, it is better for us to wait for major features to be properly released. (The kernel is the usual exception here, since at this stage there are a lot of individual additions that make the user experience on M1/M2 machines more complete, but each feature need to be negotiated with mainline Linux developers before making it into an upstream release, even if it only needs minor tweaks to be "done". So, the platform kernel package is likely to stick around for a while, and it keeps to itself in the package tree. We are very lucky that Asahi Linux is diligent about tagging kernel releases and only updating their "stable" package with known-good changes.)

Now, it might be nice to have templates for Asahi dev packages anyway, the hardware is plenty capable of building those updates itself :p But they shouldn't live in void-packages and take up Void maintainers' time and effort.