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This is Alyssa Rosenzweig. She reverse-engineered Apple's M1 GPU with no public documentation and also developed an open-source Linux driver.
(programming.dev)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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I admire people like this because even though there's like 3 pieces of hardware I wish I could fix like this, I've got no clue where to start. And except for one, most are simpler devices than the M1 GPU.
Some of the basics of reverse engineering:
It's kind of monumental and there's no real finish line for learning any of them.
Depending on what you want to do you need a lot of time, dedication, tools and probably money.
Well, one is a GPU like this one that only has 2D support and it's apparently perpetually stuck as experimental. The second one is a trackpad / numpad combo that someone else got working but because the code never got upstreamed it broke. The last one is an internal microphone that might have support in the kernel but it might be missing quirk flags or a small change in how it works.
The second two are orders of magnitude easier than the first. Out of date code usually just means it relies on some ABI that was deprecated, so it needs to be updated with the new functions. Microphone pin quirks are fairly common so there are a lot of resources available a search away.
That sounds like reading a lot of documentation and testing stuff out when no dox is available.
And probably you first need to learn about each device how they function on an os level...