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

422 points · 290 comments · ADevWithAnIdea

  1. ndiddy · · focus · HN ↗
    It's extremely impressive that they were able to make a working driver so quickly. I think this is one of the best use cases for LLMs. You don't need someone to spend years reverse engineering undocumented hardware anymore. It will interesting to see how good the driver the LLMs came up with is, and whether it can be upstreamed into the Linux kernel.
    1. ivanjermakov · · focus · HN ↗
      Might be one of the only use cases where LLMs are necessary to succeed. Can't imagine the pain of reverse engineering a technology of this scale and "secrecy".
      1. ADevWithAnIdea · · focus · HN ↗
        Traditional hardware RE centers around heroics by a small number of very smart people, see: marcan, Alyssa Rosenzweig, Asahi Lina, etc. What they did is insanely impressive, and given how hard it was with LLMs I'm sure I would not personally be able to do this work without LLMs. That said, I'm looking forward to a world where the staring at hexdumps and traces can be delegated to LLMs and talented humans can spend their time building as opposed to head banging.
        1. ndiddy · · focus · HN ↗
          Yeah I think it's a shame how much time and effort gets put into understanding things simply because other people want to keep them proprietary.
        2. srmatto · · focus · HN ↗
          Asking out of genuine curiosity... Do you think the Asahi maintainers could use your work to speed up future GPU driver development? M4, M5, M6 and so on... I am assuming they wouldn't just accept your work outright, but instead could they use it to substantially speed up their development process by mapping out a lot of the GPU after which they can focus on optimization and other aspect of drivers? Do you think they will?

          I don't use Asahi now but that's largely because my current Apple M series hardware is still supported. I see a day where an older unsupported Mac is running in a rack in my basement or being used by my kids as a general purpose computer.

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