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

Opening excerpt

TL;DR: Niklas and I built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo in about a month, a process which normally takes years. Here is Chrome and Firefox running WebGL on the M4 Mac Mini with working compositing:

Building this driver involved reverse engineering the AGX’s (Apple’s name for the GPU) incredibly complicated firmware ABI and user-space components. This was all done in a transparent, verifiably clean room manner using well established techniques. The code is not yet ready for end users, but we are looking to get it to end users as soon as possible.

Previously, I built a hypervisor to reverse engineer macOS. Now the goal became to actually do something useful with it, and what better target than writing a GPU driver. The GPU is effectively a requirement for any modern system, otherwise everything needs to be CPU rendered which is orders of magnitude slower and less power efficient. Our goal was to implement conformant OpenGL (and soon, Vulkan) drivers for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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