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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

#121

Post by SXX »

Dear fellow humans from "Hacker News". Hacking a driver that in itself documentation to black box Apple hardware is not any different from hacking $10 4G LTE modem.

Fact that a person who was not previously driver developer can achieve this in a few weeks is pure wonder. No matter what tools are used.

Leave legal questions to Linux Foundation laywers or whoever is responsible to accept or not accept the patches.

If Apple actually wanted to prevent any of this from happening they can just lock bootloader. They not just gonna do it now because someone used fancy text generator to make working GPU driver.

Attacking a person who spent their personal time and money on making walled garden black box hardware more usable, more privacy friendly and further away from landfill is a crime against the future of humanity.

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

#122

Post by porjo »

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/

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

#123

Post by shipp02 »

What is the state of Nvidia and AMD GPU drivers on Linux? Maybe these techniques can finally give us reasonably good open source drivers which can be supported for a long time.

AFAIK Nvidia drivers are proprietary and AMD has a tendency to drop support quickly

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

#124

Post by Eufrat »

viraptor wrote: post #102
thrwy19940314 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763

Spend enough time in tech and you'll know lots of people who know both technical and business secrets and are under various levels of NDAs. The message you link to explicitly mentions only public info was exchanged. Just talking to someone is not an indication of infringement in any way.

I think this comment is missing the forest for the trees. Obviously, ephemeral interaction is going to happen.

The author’s blogpost is sloppy and has some signs of being AI written. This kind of bleeds into the main point I’m going to make.

Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution, so, this means that the glibness with which the author is treating any of this is probably sufficient cause to refuse his entries. It is unclear if LLMs should be considered a toxic waste dump in terms of trying to maintain a clean room. We have not established a standard. It is clear the author doesn’t think this is a big deal, so that’s one conflict. The other conflict is that it is not clear what their exact interactions with Apple Silicon folks is and their glibness of it doesn’t clarify anything.

If you take a group that is trying to be very careful about the potential legal landmines a still nascent technology has and you get someone that espouses a general glibness about those concerns wanting to merge code…why on earth would you expect that group to accept them as a contributor?

This is not to say this isn’t really cool and a neat use of LLMs, but it is totally understandable why Asahi Linux won’t accept the fruits of this kind of development. If it turns out that Apple can identify its non-OSS code in this, it’ll be a mess.

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

#125

Post by bigyabai »

SXX wrote: post #119
bigyabai wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If contributor policies are enough to make projects "dead in the water" for you, the rest of Linux' desktop efforts will leave you appalled.

It's okay to have policies against shitty code, blatant copyright violations or being an ass. It's not okay to ban tool use when a person is honest about it. The only thing you can achieve with a ban is that people will learn to lie about it and conceal it better.

It's not my policy, and I don't personally agree with many/most of them.

But they do objectively exist in many desktop Linux projects. If you are the sort of person that sees software as "dead in the water" from AI prohibition, desktop Linux will feel like a mausoleum compared to macOS or Windows.

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

#126

Post by smallnamespace »

ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #61
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 info…

Everything that you say can be true, and yet Asahi project may want to avoid needing to prove what you say in a courtroom.

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

#127

Post by quitspamming »

thrwy19940314 wrote: post #86
ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 info…

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763

You are accusing someone by twisting their own words about their own self disclosed identity against them from a throwaway account created 5 hours ago.

And they say irony is dead.

I say this from an anonymous account but at least it isn't a throwaway. And at least I have the good taste to feel a little shame for my hypocrisy.

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

#128

Post by flippingheck »

thrwy19940314 wrote: post #86
ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 info…

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763

> one of my friends is a very senior engineer who lead a lot of the sptm work and controls a lot of boot, may talk to him about it (obviously he hasn't told me anything that isn't public)

For the lazy.

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

#129

Post by flippingheck »

ADevWithAnIdea wrote: post #99
thrwy19940314 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763

The friend I am referring to I met at Stanford around April of 2026 in a dorm event. We've spoken in person exactly once (I use "friend" loosely to describe anyone I've spoken to who I'm not on bad terms with) and at no point did we discuss anything detailed about Apple Silicon. For further context, I left Apple in June of 2025.

Isn't that chat log from 2024?

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

#130

Post by rossy »

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 not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.
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