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Tales of the M1 GPU

asahilinux.org

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Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#91

Post by Aaargh20318 »

dimator wrote: post #28

watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen! it's easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive.

> watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen!

What would really push it into cyberpunk territory is if it turns out this is not an actual human but an AI-controlled virtual person.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#92

Post by dist1ll »

est31 wrote: post #84
dist1ll wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this great USENIX talk by Timothy Roscoe [1], which is part of the Enzian Team at ETH Zürich. It's about the dominant unholistic approach to modern operating system design, which is reflected in the vast number of independent, proprietary, under-documented RTOSes running in tandem on a single system, and eventually leading to uninspiring and lackluster OS research (e.g. Linux monoculture). I'm guessing that h…

I think making it harder to build an OS by increasing its scope is not going to help people to build Linux alternatives. As for the components, at least their interfaces are standardized. You can remove memory sticks by manufacturer A and replace them with memory sticks from manufacturer B without problem. Same goes for SATA SSDs or mice or keyboards. Note that I'm all in favour of creating OSS firmware for devices,…

Building an OS is hard. There's no way around its complexity. But closing your eyes and pretending everything is a file is a security disaster waiting to happen (actually, happening every day).

And furthermore, OS research is not only about building Linux alternatives. There are a lot of operating systems that have a much narrower focus than full-blown multi-tenant GPOS. So building holistic systems with a narrower focus is a much more achievable goal.

> As for the components, at least their interfaces are standardized

That's not true once you step into SoC land. Components are running walled-garden firmware and binary blobs that are undocumented. There's just no incentive to provide a developer platform if no one gives a shit about holistic OSes in the first place.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#93

Post by sph »

rychco wrote: post #73
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine that there are a lot of people that would love to interactively share their knowledge/skills on youtube/twitch but avoid doing so because they're not conventionally attractive or just too shy. Couldn't they just not show themselves on camera at all?

True but this is likely less engaging for the audience, which has been my experience.

This is when I repeat my silly joke that I'd rather see Skeletor doing live coding than another anime girl with pitched upvoice.

Enough furries and anime girls, people. They are cute, but there is more to animated art

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#94

Post by jbuzbee »

treesknees wrote: post #52
psychphysic wrote: post #18

What an interesting tale. But I feel like an anime character described it to me. I'm totally fine with it (I'm grateful the story is being told at all), but it is surreal tone for technical writing.

There are 149 exclamation points on that page (!)

I was just getting ready to say the same thing and was wishing for a plugin that would replace all exclamation points with a period. That would make reading much easier

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#95

Post by ralfd »

Retric wrote: post #83
ramraj07 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every cell in your body is running a full blown OS fully capable of doing things that each individual cell has no need for. It sounds like this is a perfectly natural way to go about things.

Mature mammalian red blood cells ditch their DNA, which is one reason they don’t live very long.

Did dinosaur / do reptilian blood cells live longer?

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#97

Post by bri3d »

nicoburns wrote: post #15

The m1n1 hypervisor specialised for debugging is a pretty genius idea. Is anyone aware of anyone else taking a similar approach? Seems like it would be a pretty generally applicable technique and would make OS/hardware driver development a lot more approachable.

Even before true CPU-supported "hypervisors," there was shim software like SoftICE that worked similarly to m1n1 in that you would run an OS underneath and then use a supervisor tool to trace and debug the OS under inspection.

More recently, it's fairly common to use a hypervisor or simulator for kernel debugging in device driver development on Windows via Hyper-V.

A lot of Linux driver development is done using qemu as well, although this is usually more targeted and isn't quite the same "put a thin shim over the OS running on the hardware" approach.

The flexibility and I/O tracing framework in m1n1 are pretty uniquely powerful, though, since it was built for reverse engineering specifically.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#98

Post by Phelinofist »

robocat wrote: post #67
nicoburns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple should upstream their drivers. Apple don't have linux drivers. It would be great if they wrote some, but it's never going to happen. > Who is Asahi Lina? Is that an actual person? The virtual persona of an actual person who has chosen to remain anonymous (hence the name which would be a crazy coincidence otherwise).

While anonymous, they did put in some personal information at 10 minutes into: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LonzMviFCNs They are Canadian born, currently studying in Japan, so that explains some of the cultural mix.

I always thought that she was an umbrella persona for marcan and alyssa or is the backstory just for the Lina persona?

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#99

Post by mattnewton »

Mistletoe wrote: post #51
dimator wrote: post #28

watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen! it's easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive.

I like your optimism, but it seems more like a Phillip K. Dick novel to me. >In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerate effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS. Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS. from Johnny Mnemonic What can we do to make it more utopian?

Small nit but I was confused, I think Johnny Mnemonic is Gibbson? And I had to look up NAS, I think that part of the movie not the book. I think we have another couple decades before androids and mood organs of Phillip K dick at least but I could be wrong. But parts of Gibbsonian cyberpunk is already here!

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#100

Post by averne_ »

nicoburns wrote: post #15

The m1n1 hypervisor specialised for debugging is a pretty genius idea. Is anyone aware of anyone else taking a similar approach? Seems like it would be a pretty generally applicable technique and would make OS/hardware driver development a lot more approachable.

The nouveau project used a kernel module to intercept mmio accesses: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/MmioTrace.html. Generally speaking hooking onto driver code is one of the preferred ways of doing dynamic reverse engineering. For userspace components, you can build an LD_PRELOAD stub that logs ioctls, and so on.
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