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Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

codyho.dev

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Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#21

Post by kmeisthax »

Clean room is not 100% legally necessary for RE, but I would never touch an LLM to do RE work when there's even a chance the models have been trained on the thing I ultimately plan to reimplement.

Furthermore, given that Asahi Linux, the biggest game in town when it comes to running Linux on Apple silicon, is trying to be cleanroom, it is incredibly rude of you to not mention LLMs until after showing a page full of LLM-derived firmware ABI. This is a trap for anyone who's trying to be cleanroom.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#22

Post by teaearlgraycold »

y1n0 wrote: post #15
ndiddy wrote: post #6

It's extremely impressive that they were able to make a working driver so quickly. I think this is one of the best use cases for LLMs. You don't need someone to spend years reverse engineering undocumented hardware anymore. It will interesting to see how good the driver the LLMs came up with is, and whether it can be upstreamed into the Linux kernel.

The problem I’m finding, at least with today’s models, is that it produces disposable software. It’s not good at making well-architected, durable software. Stuff that could be maintained and bug-fixed. I mean you can get good stuff out of it if you know what you are doing and guide it, but if you just say “here’s a regression suite. Write an implementation that passes” you will get something that works for a while bu…

With today’s technology I’d still want a GPU driver developer guiding the LLM rather than some rando who is out of their element. But cutting down the exploration cycle time and giving the developer massive parallelism (have 10x agents exploring different hypotheses or features) is the real win. We don’t need to skip all the way to slop just to squeak out a little more effort savings.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#23

Post by jamesgeck0 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #21

Clean room is not 100% legally necessary for RE, but I would never touch an LLM to do RE work when there's even a chance the models have been trained on the thing I ultimately plan to reimplement. Furthermore, given that Asahi Linux, the biggest game in town when it comes to running Linux on Apple silicon, is trying to be cleanroom, it is incredibly rude of you to not mention LLMs until after showing a page full of L…

The previous “Part 1” post is very candid about the approach, and the titles of both posts mention prompting.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#25

Post by MoltenMonster »

https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1whecn1/comment...

> The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#26

Post by doctorpangloss »

ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #10
porphyra wrote: post #5

This is super great. The biggest pain point of Asahi Linux is how it doesn't have GPU acceleration on M3 and newer, especially now that M6 is out! However, Asahi Linux has a strictly no-AI policy [1]. So this great work can't be upstreamed. I expect to see a bunch of AI-assisted forks that get things working smoothly on newer hardware to dominate as most people just care about getting stuff working, while only a hand…

:) I think we have a surprise in store here. Asahi don't have a monopoly over Linux for Apple Silicon, and upstream Linux absolutely does *NOT* ban LLMs.

i install proprietary modules for nvidia all the time, i'm not going to care if i have to do it for something else that i own

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#27

Post by SXX »

MoltenMonster wrote: post #25

https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1whecn1/comment... > The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.

I certainly dont care about hiding LLM contributions and all crazy anti-LLM policies, but I really hope author can share process completely so this can be reproduced by someone not working for Apple.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#28

Post by porphyra »

thrwy19940314 wrote: post #20

All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1]. There is no way Linux will take that code, since people from Apple also contribute to Linux and this creates a major conflict. There's also ongoing issues around Codex for this sort of thing, given Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets[2]. And nobody knows whether training data in other models is similarly tainted. [1]: https://codyho.dev/documents/c…

Very sad. I really want to get Linux on newer Apple chips working flawlessly but I can understand the legal minefield about this particular work.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#29

Post by nine_k »

thrwy19940314 wrote: post #20

All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1]. There is no way Linux will take that code, since people from Apple also contribute to Linux and this creates a major conflict. There's also ongoing issues around Codex for this sort of thing, given Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets[2]. And nobody knows whether training data in other models is similarly tainted. [1]: https://codyho.dev/documents/c…

There were and are many important pieces of Linux kernel that live out of tree; ZFS is a big example.

The problem with this driver is not licensing or code quality; I assume it's under a threat of receiving C&D letter, or maybe also a legal suit for breaking some NDA.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#30

Post by IgorPartola »

thrwy19940314 wrote: post #20

All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1]. There is no way Linux will take that code, since people from Apple also contribute to Linux and this creates a major conflict. There's also ongoing issues around Codex for this sort of thing, given Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets[2]. And nobody knows whether training data in other models is similarly tainted. [1]: https://codyho.dev/documents/c…

Now that this work is done and out in the open what in theory would prevent the next generation of LLMs from ingesting it and eventually a non-Apple employee creating yet another driver “from scratch” but with the knowledge of how the hardware works acquired from an LLM or with the help of one?

Basically, aren’t we facing a situation where LLM-assisted knowledge laundering is becoming a thing?

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