Truly doing the lords work here.
Immense respect!
It’s an amazing accomplishment, but if anybody is wondering why it’s not flat-out impossible, she very likely was snooping on how it was controlled by existing drivers, either by looking at the software side, which honestly, I’m less familiar with, or by using something like a logic analyzer, which can be used to record signals being sent to the hardware directly. So, if she did it that way, she didn’t reuse the code of the existing driver, but analyzed the output. I’ve had to debug some drivers in the past with a logic analyzer, and just that was a lot of work.
If she did it without existing drivers, then it would have been an absolute slog, I think bordering on impossible. You’d have to guess every signal. GPUs may be more specialized than CPUs, meaning that their instruction set will be smaller, but that would be insane.
lol I randomly searched for a page from collabora about how they reverse engineer GPU drivers (since I’ve seen that they’ve done that for other GPUs) and the very first page I went to was written by this person. Apparently this was a side project while she did fairly similar work on Mali GPUs at Collabora.
Anyways, here’s what she said about the process:
Typically, for Linux or Android driver reverse-engineering, a small wrap library will be written to inject into a test application via LD_PRELOAD that hooks key system calls like ioctl and mmap in order to analyze user-kernel interactions. Once the “submit command buffer” call is issued, the library can dump all (mapped) shared memory for offline analysis…
it took some elbow grease to identify the three critical calls: memory allocation, command buffer creation, and command buffer submission…
With those obstacles cleared, we can finally get to the shader binaries, black boxes in themselves. However, the process from here on out is standard: start with the simplest fragment or compute shader possible, make a small change in the input source code, and compare the output binaries. Iterating on this process is tedious but will quickly reveal key structures, including opcode numbers.
From https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html , there’s a lot more details about the subsequent parts of the process in the next articles but they’re harder to summarize
clearly on the spectrum…
One of us
very based
personally grateful as i daily drive asahi linux
posting this comment from an m2 macbook pro running fedora asahi
The only reason I’m not buying an M series macbook is because I thought there’s no Linux support, have things changed? Is it all unofficial?
M1 and M2 got unofficial Linux support pretty quickly. M3 still lacks GPU support last I checked and Apple is on M6 now. The oldest devices they sell are M4 and M1 is a year away from losing all support from Apple from what I was told, so yes things have changed but not in a good way. I’ve heard that the Framework 13 Pro might be a decent alternative though
We need more people who know how to reverse engineer
You observe input and output across the entire API surface with every combination of discrete configuration options possible, then determine the function by which those outputs can be reproduced with the same parameters?
You can probably automate collection of the I/O data. Determining the function probably requires some extra brain juice.
Does it get more fancy than that?
It’s gets more fancy when you try to reverse stuff like Dunuvo
Sometimes I think I’m smart then I hear stories like this and I’m humbled.
She is a hero and a legend. It just makes me think, it’s so sad that we live in a world where the most altruistic, talented, and capable people make less than those that are the best at taking advantage of three system and others for their own greed.
That’s what our economic system suppresses to bring the losers to the top.
Wanna bet someone else profited off her hard work in some fashion without her seeing a dime? I know AI did.
Did you know that the board game “Monopoly” was originally called The Landlord’s Game, meant to showcase how property ownership breaks the capitalist system for the common man?
A capitalist came along, rebranded it “Monopoly”, took all the credit and lived like a king.
Sweat of my brow indeed.
Usename checks out
That’s not a wish, that’s prophecy.
At age 20, she reverse-engineered the Apple GPU. At age 40, I got the LED to blink on my Arduino.
I used a toothpick to get some apple shell unstuck from my gum.
… by yourself !?
I mean I have decades of doing all sorts of IT work and this is way beyond my level. Absolutely amazing.
I have such immense respect for people who know how the bits are physically flowing through a machine. I took classes about it but I can’t imagine doing that daily, it’s so tedious.
yeah I remember not being able to get my voltron lion to run in basic when I was in junior high.
You mean you can’t just get Apple’s driver to work on Linux by turning it off and on again enough times?
or even by recompiling the kernel when apples driver is not part of it.
Wins no matter how small are wins!
Don’t compare yourself to others, just enjoy the learning process & satisfaction it hopefully brings you for every single win, no matter the size!
Arduino is a fantastic platform for learning, I still remember a lot of my ‘firsts’ with it, I had no idea what I was doing, we all start somewhere. Have fun!
What a wholesome comment
While I agree partially, want to mention that having someone to compare to is not as bad as it sounds. Its only bad if you think its unreachable and you give up doing anything. Sometimes you need a hero to look up and fight and dream about it, for the motivation. I think looking up to people like Alyssa’s work is inspirational. In a similar way how I look up to those magicians who create emulators… but that is a different topic for another day.
It all adds up ⬆️
I’m 30 and I wiped my own ass. So I’m feeling pretty accomplished.
Alyssa reverse-engineered Apple’s M1 GPU with no public documentation and developed an open-source Linux driver.
Be like Alyssa.
I’d rather watch her do that than someone doing triple saltos at the olympics.
This is way more impressive. 10/10
No need to diminish Olympic athletes. They worked very hard to get there. There are plenty of influences you can diminish instead.
They’re also groomed as children - the decision almost always made by their parents before they’re old enough to decide if they actually want to.
Fuck the Olympics. It hasn’t been anything other than a corporate entity intent on making money above all else in almost a hundred years. IOC tramples on the rights of many people every day and the entirety of the organization can burn in hell
Seriously? I’m diminishing Olympic athletes? Go get your moral outrage gatekeeping fix somewhere else please.
And why are we getting a picture of her?
So if I spot her in public I can ask for an autograph.
Because we’re visual creatures and usually if you say, “this is the…” you’re usually visually showing the thing.
Alyssa Rosenzweig. Not Resenzweig. It means Twig of Roses. Here’s her website: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/
Canada has been killing it for like 50 years, being all the things the United States thinks it is
I knew I should’ve escaped to Canada during Trump 1, they seem to be feeding and educating their kids right (except Alberta fuck Alberta ;) )
I had heard that other provinces university’s apply a 2 to 3% bump in GPAs to applicants from Alberta. The Alberta reason: They respect the advanced program as being more difficult. The other provinces reason: charity for the poor students raised there with a heavily exam-based GPA.
♥️🌹
Some missing links:
- https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux
Alyssa Rosenzweig, GPU lead. Alyssa is a Linux graphics hacker. After reverse-engineering the Arm Mali GPUs and building the free Panfrost driver for them, she did the same magic trick on the Apple GPU and built the userspace Asahi graphics drivers.
Thank you. This is the sort of news I need in my day.
Pretty flipping sweet if you asked me.
And beside those who survive (and provide us with great software), let us spare a thought for the ones who didn’t, proof the opensource community can be an evil pit of haters: marcan and AsahiLina.
Both quit for different reasons, but both did it facing extremely unpleasant behaviours.
As a regular Asahi user (m2pro mbp), I literally felt the project slowing down when they quit.
An outcome of that crisis was the buildup of an organised directorial structure, with funding through the “Open Collective” organisation. That’s good, and it’s full of good people in there. Alyssa is an admin now btw.
Let us wish them all the best (and strength against all evil neckbeards).
opensource community can be an evil pit of haters
More like worthless shits on Kiwi Farms
As a regular Asahi user (m2pro mbp), I literally felt the project slowing down when they quit.
Me too, there’s still great work being done on the project but the pace hasn’t been the same since
Lina rebranded as Hoshino Lina and is working on an open source implementation of Live2D now.
Wasn’t Asahi Lina alter ego of marcan? Or am I misremembering things
Part of the hate campaign. Anyone following both accounts at the time was quite puzzled by the hypothesis.
Their haters were going around and concern trolling that they were the same person. Anyone outside of the scene would take it as a stated fact and repeat it without knowing.
Allegedly. There was no evidence either way, and ultimately it doesn’t matter anyway.
Of you look at all of the work behind Asahi, it’s incredible. I’m so grateful for heroes like Alyssa who are saving millions of computers from landfills when Apple no longer supports them
saving millions of computers from landfills when Apple no longer supports them
Kindof except that their build quality tanked during the late Intel era and the motherboards will die a lot sooner now
How far developed is asahi now? Is every hardware working? Last time i looked into it wifi didn’t work, i think. So i thought it was not useful for me.
For M1 most things work except for USB-HDMI dongles and the fingerprint reader, I think M2 is in a similar boat now
I’ve been using Asahi as my daily driver on my m1 MacBook for a few weeks now. The only thing I’ve noticed that seems to not work is audio through the built in speakers. I normally use Bluetooth headphones anyways so I haven’t tried to fix it.
Audio has been supported for a long time now, do you have “asahi-audio” installed?
That’s a bummer… As an additional data point, my M1 MBP has had great audio on Asahi
I applaud them for their thankless work. I hate that it’s necessary in the first place.
Name is misspelled in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig.
Also, wow, impressive.Makes we want to buy a second-hand Apple device just to try it out.
I ran it on my M1 mini for several months a year or so back. At that stage it was probably 90% of what I needed it to be, which was bloody impressive. After I no longer needed it for work, I tried using it as my Home Assistant server, but with only 8gb RAM, ultimately it ended up being far more efficient to run HA in a virtual machine in macOS.
But yeah, if you can pick up an M1 for a good price, give it a go. It’s good fun.
I’ve already been using Linux for ten years, it definitely puts the fun back into computing. This would actually be primarily to know how to install it on a Mac, because when offering to install Linux as a replacement for Windows in groups I am part of, there have been multiple requests for doing so on a Mac. Unfortunately always had to answer I’ve never done so, so couldn’t promise anything.
Anyway, is €375 for an Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1, 256GB a good price?
If you’re dual booting which is what they recommend, you should probably get a 512 GB model
m2 is also well-supported
I do, now!
