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

	Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month(codyho.dev)
	339 points by ADevWithAnIdea 15 hours ago \| 193 comments
	tl;dr: Two developers reverse-engineered Apple's M4 GPU and built a clean-room, OpenGL ES 3.0-compliant Linux driver (kernel + Mesa userspace) in about a month, heavily leveraging LLM agents (Codex/Claude) alongside a custom hypervisor to trace macOS's firmware ABI. The driver already runs Minecraft at 200fps and WebGL in Chrome/Firefox, though upstreaming is blocked pending the still-unmerged M1/M2 Asahi kernel driver. Interestingly, a "Mesa-first" workflow outperformed a "hardware-RE-first" approach because it kept the LLM grounded in concrete goals rather than pedantic completeness.
	HN Discussion: ↑Impressed by the speed and feasibility of building the driver, validating LLM-assisted reverse engineering ↓Concerns about legal/ethical taint due to author being ex-Apple and using potentially tainted LLM training data ↓Author lacks credibility due to being banned from Asahi for hiding LLM use and Apple ties ~Asahi's no-AI policy will prevent upstreaming, leading to AI-assisted forks dominating •Questions about practical applications like PyTorch support and applying techniques to Nvidia/AMD drivers