Linux-on-Mac meets agent coding. Phoronix spotted a Vulkan pull request registering a new driver ID for “Borealis,” and it turns out to be a fork of Asahi Linux’s HoneyKrisp driver.
What it is
- Borealis is “Aurora Silicon’s open source Vulkan driver for Apple GPUs.” It’s derived from HoneyKrisp and runs on M1 to M5 and the A18 Pro.
- It lives in Aurora Silicon’s own Mesa fork, not upstream Mesa, so it needs its own driver ID to tell it apart.
- Aurora Silicon is a new project that wants “a complete and polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon,” and is also working on porting Windows to Apple Silicon.
- So far the fork mainly swaps out Mesa’s AI agent rules for its own policy that allows AI contributions. That change was co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5.
My take
Forks are how open source works, and I’m all for more hands on Apple Silicon graphics. But a GPU driver is about as unforgiving as code gets, so I’ll wait to see real results before I get excited.
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!
