Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

codyho.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 291 posts

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

#61

Post by ADevWithAnIdea »

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.

> concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development

This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.

I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.

I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.

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

#63

Post by bpye »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #26
ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) 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

Nvidia's kernel module is open source these days, it's the usermode stack that's still closed.

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

#64

Post by cromka »

doot wrote: post #60
cromka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work. I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.

Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.

Cool. Excited to see you on the pitch next time you comment on a football game.

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

#65

Post by alightsoul »

danielheath wrote: post #59
alightsoul wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't this be used to make a clean room implementation? Have someone write a spec then someone else who is unrelated, implement it from scratch?

"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?" Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.

So what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own? There are countries in the global south that never had an industrial revolution and don't speak English and never had factories for export nor made anything in a factory industrially that isn't building material and food and maybe fuel for local consumption so they've never had an IP infringement case

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

#66

Post by cogman10 »

cromka wrote: post #44
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 find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work. I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.

It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.

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

#67

Post by cromka »

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…

> All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1].

So if I worked as a janitor at Apple, I couldn't contribute anymore?

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

#68

Post by Krssst »

SXX wrote: post #27
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.

> crazy anti-LLM policies

Weird how justified reasonable policies get the "crazy" label.

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

#69

Post by cromka »

zamadatix wrote: post #13
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…

Asahi's long term goal is to get everything possible merged into the (actually) upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work. It'd be nice to see that continue rather than have forks on forks for the sake of singular differences (and it looks like proper upstreaming is what they are going after per the Remaining Work section).

> upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work

This may never end up working like that, considering how complicated installation is, comparatively speaking, and how macOS is still pretty much required to be installed.

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

#70

Post by ndriscoll »

danielheath wrote: post #59
alightsoul wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't this be used to make a clean room implementation? Have someone write a spec then someone else who is unrelated, implement it from scratch?

"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?" Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.

Wouldn't B's publication of the information make it by definition no longer a trade secret? It is now public knowledge, regardless of whether the current or former engineers might be liable for the original leak.

Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have essentially infinite protection/NDAs apply to all of humanity.

Post reply on HN