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  • Hacker News
  • What is the state of Nvidia and AMD GPU drivers on Linux? Maybe these techniques can finally give us reasonably good open source drivers which can be supported for a long time.

    AFAIK Nvidia drivers are proprietary and AMD has a tendency to drop support quickly

  • 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.

  • 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.

    by SXX
  • 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...

  • 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.

    [1] https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/

  • 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.
  • 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.

  • Dear fellow humans from "Hacker News". Hacking a driver that in itself documentation to black box Apple hardware is not any different from hacking $10 4G LTE modem.

    Fact that a person who was not previously driver developer can achieve this in a few weeks is pure wonder. No matter what tools are used.

    Leave legal questions to Linux Foundation laywers or whoever is responsible to accept or not accept the patches.

    If Apple actually wanted to prevent any of this from happening they can just lock bootloader. They not just gonna do it now because someone used fancy text generator to make working GPU driver.

    Attacking a person who spent their personal time and money on making walled garden black box hardware more usable, more privacy friendly and further away from landfill is a crime against the future of humanity.

    by SXX

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