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

Cody Ho and a collaborator reverse-engineered Apple's M4 AGX GPU firmware ABI and built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux driver in roughly one month, a process that normally takes years. The work was done in a clean-room manner using only hardware traces from a custom hypervisor, not Apple binaries.

Blog post · Linux · GPU Drivers · Apple Silicon · Reverse Engineering

Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine

Eileen Yoon revisits the Apple M1 Neural Engine three years after abandoning an open-source driver project, motivated by Apple's decision to fold standalone ANE cores into the GPU in the M5. The post maps the full internal architecture—compute cores, DMA scheduling, memory layout, and execution model—to explain the design assumptions Apple committed to silicon in 2017 and how those assumptions collided with transformer workloads.

Blog post · Apple Silicon · Neural Engine · Reverse Engineering · Machine Learning