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."

In turn the Aurora Silicon project describes itself on GitHub as:

"We aim to deliver a complete and polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon, from installation to everyday use. Our work spans the kernel, graphics drivers, and the tools that make it all work together.

We're also working on porting Windows to Apple Silicon."

Aurora Silicon only recently began and appears to be a fork of the Asahi Linux code.

Curious why they would fork the HoneyKrisp driver and work on this Apple Silicon Vulkan driver outside of Mesa proper, it seems to be the interest of a vibe coding adventure.

The Borealis driver fork so far on GitHub just strips out Mesa's AI agents documentation / policies and replaces it with its own AI agent/assistant policy, which allows for AI contributions. This change was also co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5.

We'll see what ends up coming out of this Borealis driver and the broader Aurora Silicon project with this AI-fueled development.