Using microVMs for gaming on Fedora Asahi

Running a 16K page size kernel implies some userspace applications that assume that the page size is 4K will break. While the Asahi Team did an amazing work fixing many of them, there's little anyone can do (at least, at a scale) to fix applications that ship in binary form. And the prime example of this are x86_64 (a 4K page size platform) games.

While it's technically possible to run Apple Silicon devices with a 4K page size kernel, that would require a number of (potentially controversial upstream) changes in the kernel and will probably have a significant impact on the performance. A better approach would be running the host with a 16K kernel, and use a 4K kernel in a VM for those problematic workloads, as long the performance of the VM was good enough for the use case.

When Eric first asked me about this, my first reaction was well, we would need to import virtio-gpu, but even then the performance wouldn't be good enough for gaming". But, what if we could bring Rob Clark's DRM native context to Asahi?

While I'm not a fan of buying locked-down, proprietary hardware that can change its capabilities to run non-approved operating systems at a moment's notice, there's absolutely no denying there's a lot of cool stuff going in the Asahi Linux world, and this is just one of many.

Now, can we please - please! - get capable ARM machines from someone other than Apple?