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Posted by ADevWithAnIdea 13 hours ago

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month(codyho.dev)
300 points | 174 commentspage 2
nicman23 3 hours ago|
just yeeting a qwen flash (iq3) with radare2 installed is so good to not slog through the regular loop of re
sscarduzio 11 hours ago||
/goal have all this upstreamed to Linux
henrikklee 4 hours ago||
Fantastic work. I've been following M4 Linux progress almost daily, waiting for when I can use it as a daily driver.
cromka 9 hours ago||
Author, do TouchID next.
porjo 6 hours ago|
Fyi,there's a comment on the Omarchy-M annoucement [0] referencing Touch ID

> Dj is writing the GPU drivers, and got Touch ID working by talking directly to the Secure Enclave

[0] https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/

cromka 1 hour ago||
A brief look shows that these projects are LLM-backed. Will be interesting to see how this works for Omarchy in light of legality concerns expressed here in this thread.

It's also interesting to see all this work seems adjacent to Asahi's own.

nnm 5 hours ago||
This is a great use case of LLM.
GeekyBear 11 hours ago||
Figuring out how the hardware works and how to interface with it to submit work is a significant step all by itself.
laidoffamazon 3 hours ago||
This is extremely impressive work; kudos. I was thinking about this with regard to Asahi's anti-LLM policy just last week - they're going to get completely outmoded by LLM-harnessed reverse engineering, if only for personal use and not upstreaming.

I'm surprised you worked with Niklas on this. I'd have assumed you'd think he was competent, given he went to Binghamton and not Stanford.

carterschonwald 10 hours ago||
im pretty literate in intellectual property, but im pretty confused about the no looking at binary code artifacts bit.
ADevWithAnIdea 10 hours ago|
TL;DR:

1. We want to guarantee our work is not a "derivative work" of anything Apple wrote.

2. If we look at any Apple binaries, there's no way prove that our code didn't borrow from Apple.

3. Since we didn't look at any Apple binaries, then there's no way our work can be a derivative work-- we didn't even look at their stuff.

larpingscholar 10 hours ago||
Wouldn't using OpenAI break the cleanroom?
compiler-guy 10 hours ago|||
That is the debate. And it is hotly contested.

The legal framework around all this is way too immature to make a definitive statement one way or the other. Anyone who says otherwise is speculating.

The only way to clarity will be legislation or court cases, because it really could go either way.

mrheosuper 7 hours ago||||
Did Apple share their code with OpenAI ?
josephg 9 hours ago|||
Why would it? Unless you think OpenAI is training on Apple’s proprietary code?
rowanG077 7 hours ago||
Awesome to see that another project has started that does use LLM to build linux on top of apple silicon. Asahi linux was dead in the water for me once they made their extreme anti-LLM stance clear.
bigyabai 7 hours ago|
If contributor policies are enough to make projects "dead in the water" for you, the rest of Linux' desktop efforts will leave you appalled.
lostmsu 7 hours ago|||
Why?
bigyabai 3 hours ago||
Because the desktop Linux stack is replete with LLM-related contributor policies.
SXX 6 hours ago||||
It's okay to have policies against shitty code, blatant copyright violations or being an ass.

It's not okay to ban tool use when a person is honest about it. The only thing you can achieve with a ban is that people will learn to lie about it and conceal it better.

bigyabai 5 hours ago||
It's not my policy, and I don't personally agree with many/most of them.

But they do objectively exist in many desktop Linux projects. If you are the sort of person that sees software as "dead in the water" from AI prohibition, desktop Linux will feel like a mausoleum compared to macOS or Windows.

rowanG077 7 hours ago|||
Contributor policies that ban LLM use wholesale. Not contributor policies in general.

So many people are clinging to practices that are rapidly becoming antiquated. Even Linus had to put his foot down and had to stop the ideologues from attempting to stop AI use in the linux kernel.

xyst 10 hours ago|
So this is specific _only_ to M4 Mac Mini and Neo? Or will this work on any M4 SoC such as M4 Max?
ADevWithAnIdea 9 hours ago|
Right now I'm focusing specifically on the M4 Mac Mini and Neo, I just don't own any M4 Pro or Max hardware. My guess is that most of the drivers will just work on the other platforms, but we'll have to test.
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