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FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

vladimir.varank.in

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Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#41

Post by Nextgrid »

diath wrote: post #17
petcat wrote: post #2

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?

Trial and error?

Just like it does when given an existing GPL’d source and dealing with its hallucinations, the agent could be operated on a black box (or a binary Windows driver and a disassembly)?

The GPL code helped here but as long as the agent can run in a loop and test its work against a piece of hardware, I don’t see why it couldn’t do the same without any code given enough time?

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#42

Post by chrisjj »

bootwoot wrote: post #37
diath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> But also -- how do humans do it?

Intelligence.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#43

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Had an experience like this recently. QEMU stopped compiling for old versions of MacOS (pre-13) w/M1 arch, due to it requiring newer SDKs which don't support older MacOS versions. I put Sonnet 4.6 on the case, and it wrote a small patch, compiled and installed it in a matter of minutes, without giving it any instructions other than to look at errors and apply a fix. I definitely would have just given up without the AI.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#44

Post by WD-42 »

diath wrote: post #17
petcat wrote: post #2

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?

He also mentioned it took 2 months. I’m actually wondering how long it would take to do the Linux to BSD port by eyeball, or at least ai assisted. Probably not that much longer? I guess it depends on wall time vs real time.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#45

Post by [deleted] »

05 wrote: post #40
diath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

[deleted]

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#46

Post by wingmanjd »

05 wrote: post #40
diath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

So we send an AI agent to the French cafe instead of us?

https://download.samba.org/pub/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#47

Post by WD-42 »

pmontra wrote: post #39
rvz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Absolutely not. Nouveau might give you a usable desktop but the second you need to do any 3d rendering or decoding it’s atrocious.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#48

Post by cryptonector »

diath wrote: post #17
petcat wrote: post #2

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?

GPL is not a patent. It covers the work and _derivatives_; it does not cover ideas or general knowledge. The chip in question has docs.

I fully expect that Claude wrote code that does not resemble that of the driver in the Linux tree. TFA is taking on some liability if it turns out that the code Claude wrote does largely resemble GPL'ed code, but if TFA is not comfortable with the code written by Claude not resembling existing GPL'ed code then they can just post their prompts and everyone who needs this driver can go through the process of getting Claude to code it.

In court TFA would be a defendant, so TFA needs to be sure enough that the code in question does not resemble GPL'ed code. Here in the court of public opinion I'd say that claims of GPL violation need to be backed up by a serious similarity analysis.

Prompts cannot possibly be considered derivatives of the GPL'ed code that Claude might mimic.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#50

Post by dotancohen »

Nextgrid wrote: post #41
diath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Trial and error? Just like it does when given an existing GPL’d source and dealing with its hallucinations, the agent could be operated on a black box (or a binary Windows driver and a disassembly)? The GPL code helped here but as long as the agent can run in a loop and test its work against a piece of hardware, I don’t see why it couldn’t do the same without any code given enough time?

Presumably one would like to use the laptop before the million years it would take the million monkeys typing on a million typewriters to produce the Shakespearean WiFi driver.

Consider that even with the Linux driver available to study, this project took two months to produce a viable BSD driver.

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