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

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

#171

Post by Dylan16807 »

15155 wrote: post #152
bigyabai wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.

Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE." No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.

When you say "case" does that mean you're rejecting the evidence of Phoenix technologies not getting sued along with all the other BIOS clones?

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

#172

Post by 1dom »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #170
1dom wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share? I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced…

In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.

I'm fully aware of lots of times powerful companies have used the courts to protect their business. My point is basically all of the powerful companies are elbow deep in LLMs to the extent of some sort of mutually assured destruction if they were to start court cases like this.

LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?

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

#173

Post by 1dom »

Gud wrote: post #168
1dom wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share? I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced…

Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.

Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs.

Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.

And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?

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

#174

Post by charcircuit »

bigyabai wrote: post #154
15155 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE." No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.

Who volunteers to be the shmuck that fights Nintendo's lawyers in court? Who's funding the defense against Apple? It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.

Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.

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

#175

Post by VBprogrammer »

1dom wrote: post #172
VBprogrammer wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.

I'm fully aware of lots of times powerful companies have used the courts to protect their business. My point is basically all of the powerful companies are elbow deep in LLMs to the extent of some sort of mutually assured destruction if they were to start court cases like this. LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?

It's purely conjecture at this point but my gut feeling is most companies are in high spirits about the costs they can save and the benefits it can bring to their own business. I don't think enough time has passed to see really high profile losers. What happens when Infosys starts losing money or Free CAD becomes the next SolidWorks due to LLM driven improvements?

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

#176

Post by justinclift »

1dom wrote: post #173
Gud wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.

Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs. Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech compa…

Heh, sounds like it'd be along the same lines as the SCO Unix kerfuffle back in the day.

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

#177

Post by cromka »

porjo wrote: post #122
cromka wrote: post #71

Author, do TouchID next.

Fyi,there's a comment on the Omarchy-M annoucement [0] referencing Touch ID > Dj is writing the GPU drivers, and got Touch ID working by talking directly to the Secure Enclave [0] https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/

A brief look shows that these projects are LLM-backed. Will be interesting to see how this works for Omarchy in light of legality concerns expressed here in this thread.

It's also interesting to see all this work seems adjacent to Asahi's own.

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

#178

Post by cromka »

strus wrote: post #141
cromka wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can make the Linux installation on Apple Sillicon Macs pretty painless nowadays. One terminal command on macOS, reboot to Linux, run one script - voila.

Yeah, but it's unlikely such installers will be officially supported by the distributions, which was my point regarding upstreaming.

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

#179

Post by cromka »

voakbasda wrote: post #151
otterley wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized. (I worked in a federal district court for…

The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.

Not everywhere is the US.

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

#180

Post by neobrain »

ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #18
AKSF_Ackermann wrote: post #17

I am not by any means a copyright lawyer, so can anyone enlighten me on if it is a good idea for upstream projects to accept such kind of code from an ex-Apple employee, especially since Apple is currently suing OpenAI.

Great observation, two things: - During my time at Apple I never saw any of the macOS source code, at all, even for userspace components. I had not even heard of things like SPTM. - I have not worked there since June 2025 I don't believe that there's any risk due to my former Apple employment. As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows…

> As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code.

It's an interesting example given that Wine considers deriving code from traces of original components (like hypervisor traces) tainted and also bans LLM contributions for legal considerations: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

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