Seeing a Vulkan API driver pull request this morning for introducing a new “Borealis” driver ID caught me by surprise as it was the first time I was hearing of such a driver. It turns out to be a fork of the Asahi Linux project’s HoneyKrisp driver in Mesa for Apple Silicon hardware.

Borealis describes itself in today’s Vulkan pull request as:

"This registers VK_DRIVER_ID_AURORA_BOREALIS (35) for Borealis, Aurora Silicon’s open source Vulkan driver for Apple GPUs.

Borealis is derived from Asahi Linux’s Honeykrisp and runs on M1 to M5 and the A18 Pro. It lives in our Mesa fork rather than upstream Mesa, and now reports its own driverName, so it needs its own ID to tell it apart from Honeykrisp. It reports VK_DRIVER_ID_MESA_HONEYKRISP until this is merged."