Linux GPU support for Apple's A-series chips (A7-A11), whose GPUs are PowerVR Rogue derivatives run by Apple's own firmware, with Apple's own shader ISA. This repository holds the research behind it: notes, the bring-up guide, and the payloads and tools used on the devices. The drivers themselves live upstream of here, in orchard (kernel, bootloader) and OrchardLinux/mesa (Vulkan).
| Chip | Devices | State | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A10 (T8010) | iPad 6 (J71b) | Hyprland with all effects at 60 fps (Zink on the G9P Vulkan driver) | a10/ |
| A8X (T7001) | iPad Air 2 (J81) | Power-up reached; the first GPU register read hangs | a8x/ |
More chips join as their own directories. The A9 (iPad 5) work is separate for now.
<chip>/: the notes and bring-up guide of one chip.tools/<chip>/: an orchard RAM payload for that chip's devices plus the tools used with it. Build and boot one withorchard build tools/a10 --device j71bandorchard run tools/a10; its README says what else it needs.
Nothing of Apple's is committed: no firmware, kernelcaches, device-tree
dumps, captures or compiled Apple shaders. The tools extract or capture
them locally from your own copies (for example
tools/a10/tools/extract-firmware.sh), and they stay gitignored.
The notes, tools and drivers were written with AI assistance (Claude), as the commit trailers say, and checked on hardware. The Mesa fork is not proposed upstream.
GPL-2.0-or-later (LICENSE), as orchard; files with their own SPDX identifier keep it.