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.
Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at codyho.dev. Read the original for the full text.
Cody Ho describes building an OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini (and MacBook Neo) in collaboration with Niklas. The driver targets Apple's AGX GPU and was produced through clean-room reverse engineering: the team used a previously built hypervisor to capture hardware traces from the running M4, then derived the firmware ABI and command stream format from those traces without inspecting Apple's binaries.
The resulting driver includes a custom IR and shader compiler, a command stream builder, and a full Linux kernel driver for the AGX firmware ABI. The driver is fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps and Chrome and Firefox with working WebGL compositing.
Key points
Full OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance achieved in roughly one month, versus the typical years-long timeline for GPU driver development
Reverse engineering relied solely on hardware traces from a custom hypervisor — no Apple binary inspection
The team reverse-engineered M4, A18 Pro, and partially M5 user space, discovering hardware features not emitted by Apple's own driver
Components built include a custom shader compiler, command stream builder, and full Linux kernel driver
A friend provided documentation on required Apple blobs as opaque objects, enabling a clean-room user-space implementation
The code is not yet ready for end users but is being prepared for distribution
Why it matters
GPU drivers for Apple Silicon under Linux have been a significant gap. This work, using novel hypervisor-based reverse engineering, compresses a multi-year engineering effort into weeks and demonstrates that clean-room compliance is achievable at a pace that makes Linux on Apple hardware practically viable much sooner than expected.