I don’t think Apple is any different than any other vendor who doesn’t bother releasing Linux drivers? support for most devices depends on the community creating them no? If you’re a macOS fanboy presumably you don’t care about Linux support.
>I don’t think Apple is any different than any other vendor Read my previous comment again!! If you buy a genuine display and install it, it won't work because Apple locks the hardware ID via firmware. It must be installed by Apple only. No other vendor does that, the Linux community always found its way to get a non-supported hardware working. Windows until recently with the AI slope, was the only major OS used ever…
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
I haven't read the article but my first question was, install wifibox? It's a bhyve VM running alpine Linux and you pass through your WiFi adaptor and get a bridge out on the freebsd host.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
I haven't read the article but my first question was, install wifibox? It's a bhyve VM running alpine Linux and you pass through your WiFi adaptor and get a bridge out on the freebsd host.
Literally explained in the post, that’s why you read first.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
Maybe one day, but it doesn't look like we are very close yet. From the OP article, they handed it the working linux driver and asked it to just make this FreeBSD compatible, but it could not. Looks like it took OP a significant amount of work over 2 months to get something that seems to work. What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading…
To make these things work you do need to write a spec and figure out what unit tests will prove it actually did what you want. Even then it will take a bunch of shortcuts so it's best if you're a domain expert anyway.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
Drivers can be anywhere from so trivial you can throw it together by hand in an afternoon to so complex that it requires an entire engineering team six months of concentrated effort.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
True. But also -- how do humans do it? There are docs and there's other similar driver code. I wouldn't be surprised if Claude could build new driver code sight-unseen, given the appropriate resources
It'd be nice to have drivers for newer Mac's for a better Asahi Linux experience. Good use of AI imo.
We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only drivers in the same subsystems) but we wish to use GPL+MIT to enable BSD to take inspiration from the drivers.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
> We're very close to just being about to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. That sounds quite naive and it isn't that simple. Even the author expressed caution and isn't sure about how robust the driver is since he hasn't seen the code himself nor does he know if it works reliably. Even entertaining the idea, someone would have already have replaced those closed source Nvidia drivers that h…
I'm not so sure that Nouveau is slower than the proprietary Nvidia driver. I didn't run benchmarks on my personal use case but my subjective experience is that Nouveau might be faster. It's a Debian 11, X11, NVIDIA driver vs Debian 13, X11, Nouveau on the same laptop with a Quadro K1100mq. The desktop of the newer system seems to be faster. Of course it could be the sum of the individual improvements of kernel, GNOME, etc. I only move windows around my desktop, no games, so it's a very limited scenario.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
- have AI write a windows filter driver to capture all hardware communications
- have AI reverse engineer Windows WiFi driver and make a crude prototype
- have AI compare registers captured by filter driver with linux driver version and iterate until they match (or at least functional tests pass)
not exactly rocket surgery, and windows device drivers generally don't have DRM/obfuscation, so reverse engineering them isn't hard for LLMs.