Two developers built a working Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini in one month
Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
Cody Ho and Niklas reverse engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo in about a month. Using a custom hypervisor and clean-room techniques, they achieved Chrome and Firefox WebGL support and Minecraft at over 200fps. The driver is not yet ready for end users, but the code and experiments are publicly available.
The firmware ABI was by far the most annoying part of this project, because rather than doing the sane thing of coming up with a reasonable ABI with nice interfaces, Apple essentially took a regular kernel driver, cut it in half, and then put half of it in the AGX and called it firmware.
- MoltenMonster
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.
- thrwy19940314
All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1]. There is no way Linux will take that code, since people from Apple also contribute to Linux and this creates a major conflict.
There's also ongoing issues around Codex for this sort of thing, given Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets[2]. And nobody knows whether training data in other models is similarly tainted.
[1]: https://codyho.dev/documents/cody_ho_resume.pdf
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/10/apple-sue...
- ndiddy
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.
- porphyra
This is super great. The biggest pain point of Asahi Linux is how it doesn't have GPU acceleration on M3 and newer, especially now that M6 is out!
However, Asahi Linux has a strictly no-AI policy [1]. So this great work can't be upstreamed. I expect to see a bunch of AI-assisted forks that get things working smoothly on newer hardware to dominate as most people just care about getting stuff working, while only a handful of purists stick to the non-AI version running on ancient hardware.
- SXX
To the developer: it doesnt matter whatever you can upstream it or not. Just share the code and documentation of how this process can be reproduced.
There plenty of us not working at Apple who can reuse the same approach for M5 and next generations of hardware.
- Agingcoder
Maybe I’m getting really old, and I know we live in changing times but the fact this works at all is insane, as in black magic insane.
I assume I’ll get used to it, but my mental model of what’s possible hasn’t been fully rewired yet.
- getcrunk
All the controversy aside, someone can now white box reimplement this if they are concerned
- AKSF_Ackermann
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.