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It would take more than a GPU Driver, or actually, drivers at all.

Windows has some behavior that is hard-coded and cannot be changed except by Microsoft. This behavior can fairly easily be bent on Linux, but Windows drivers can't bend the rules for some of these issues.

The biggest issue that immediately comes to mind is that the M1 MMU (Memory Management Unit) only can handle 16K pages. Linux can easily be built for 16K, and most programs work on 16K, but Windows currently only supports 4K on ARM. No driver can fix that - only Microsoft. Of course, if Microsoft joins the Apple Silicon train (which Apple has said they are more than welcome to do), then they probably will have official Apple documentation and not need the Asahi Linux findings.




In https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ it says that 4k pages work on the HW but 16k has tome advantages. Dropping 4k page size supporrt would imply a departure from arm architecture compatibility compatibility I think, it might have also nontechnical problems (ARM license).


The arm spec allows to have machines that implement any of 4KB, 16KB, or 64KB granules or any combination thereof. Apple shipped plenty of phone SoCs that didn’t support 4KB pages for the CPU (A9->A13).


Interesting - at first this didn't seem to be detailed in the popular (Wikipedia etc) or ARM web pages I could find but it seems it was about terminlogy, "translation granule" was the right one and then you can find mentions like "The granule sizes that a processor supports are IMPLEMENTATION DEFINED".




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