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At age 20, she reverse-engineered the Apple GPU. At age 40, I got the LED to blink on my Arduino.
I mean I have decades of doing all sorts of IT work and this is way beyond my level. Absolutely amazing.
I have such immense respect for people who know how the bits are physically flowing through a machine. I took classes about it but I can't imagine doing that daily, it's so tedious.
If you can’t get the Arduino lights to blink at this point I can only applaud your persistence
Wins no matter how small are wins!
Don’t compare yourself to others, just enjoy the learning process & satisfaction it hopefully brings you for every single win, no matter the size!
Arduino is a fantastic platform for learning, I still remember a lot of my ‘firsts’ with it, I had no idea what I was doing, we all start somewhere. Have fun!
Love that she did it, although I'm surprised they didn't sue her for contempt of business model (i.e. Some copyright BS)
If you mean Apple, it wouldn't really make sense for them to do that. Apple primarily generates income from hardware sales, so they wouldn't care if people run other software on the hardware they already bought.
Edited to say: this doesn't really apply for the iPhone/iPad as the application ecosystem is locked down. macOS isn't though so users will do whatever they want anyway. There are even tiling window managers for macOS!
They don’t lock down macOS but it still has an App Store where Apple makes 30% on sales
Locked down is relative, while I use both I find the OS gets in my way a lot more on macOS than Linux.
Sometimes I think I'm smart then I hear stories like this and I'm humbled.
She is a hero and a legend. It just makes me think, it's so sad that we live in a world where the most altruistic, talented, and capable people make less than those that are the best at taking advantage of the system and others for their own greed.
She's a contract worker for Valve. I'm sure she's doing more than okay.
That's what our economic system suppresses to bring the losers to the top.
Wanna bet someone else profited off her hard work in some fashion without her seeing a dime? I know AI did.
Did you know that the board game "Monopoly" was originally called The Landlord's Game, meant to showcase how property ownership breaks the capitalist system for the common man?
A capitalist came along, rebranded it "Monopoly", took all the credit and lived like a king.
Sweat of my brow indeed.
Of you look at all of the work behind Asahi, it's incredible. I'm so grateful for heroes like Alyssa who are saving millions of computers from landfills when Apple no longer supports them
I applaud them for their thankless work. I hate that it's necessary in the first place.
Name is misspelled in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig.
Also, wow, impressive.
We need more people who know how to reverse engineer
We need more open hardware standards. Late-stage capitalism ruins everything.
It's so weird how Apple basically explicitly said, "yeah so you can write software for it if you want, we won't stop you. Also, we will obfuscate everything and provide no documentation." So it is a very soft fuck you that should likely prevent lawsuits.
I miss Apple, the company that gave you schematics and programming instructions for their computers. Wonder whatever happened to them.
very based
personally grateful as i daily drive asahi linux
posting this comment from an m2 macbook pro running fedora asahi
And beside those who survive (and provide us with great software), let us spare a thought for the ones who didn't, proof the opensource community can be an evil pit of haters: marcan and AsahiLina.
Both quit for different reasons, but both did it facing extremely unpleasant behaviours.
As a regular Asahi user (m2pro mbp), I literally felt the project slowing down when they quit.
An outcome of that crisis was the buildup of an organised directorial structure, with funding through the "Open Collective" organisation. That's good, and it's full of good people in there. Alyssa is an admin now btw.
Let us wish them all the best (and strength against all evil neckbeards).
Immense respect!
Truly doing the lords work here.
Some missing links:
Alyssa Rosenzweig, GPU lead. Alyssa is a Linux graphics hacker. After reverse-engineering the Arm Mali GPUs and building the free Panfrost driver for them, she did the same magic trick on the Apple GPU and built the userspace Asahi graphics drivers.
Alyssa Rosenzweig. Not Resenzweig. It means Twig of Roses. Here's her website: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/
It's an amazing accomplishment, but if anybody is wondering why it's not flat-out impossible, she very likely was snooping on how it was controlled by existing drivers, either by looking at the software side, which honestly, I'm less familiar with, or by using something like a logic analyzer, which can be used to record signals being sent to the hardware directly. So, if she did it that way, she didn't reuse the code of the existing driver, but analyzed the output. I've had to debug some drivers in the past with a logic analyzer, and just that was a lot of work.
If she did it without existing drivers, then it would have been an absolute slog, I think bordering on impossible. You'd have to guess every signal. GPUs may be more specialized than CPUs, meaning that their instruction set will be smaller, but that would be insane.
By my recollection she started from the open source Imagination Technologies GPU drivers. As the Apple GPU is definitely not derived from the GPU they used to license for the iPhone, she was able to use it for the initial register definitions, etc.
lol I randomly searched for a page from collabora about how they reverse engineer GPU drivers (since I've seen that they've done that for other GPUs) and the very first page I went to was written by this person. Apparently this was a side project while she did fairly similar work on Mali GPUs at Collabora.
Anyways, here's what she said about the process:
Typically, for Linux or Android driver reverse-engineering, a small wrap library will be written to inject into a test application via LD_PRELOAD that hooks key system calls like ioctl and mmap in order to analyze user-kernel interactions. Once the “submit command buffer” call is issued, the library can dump all (mapped) shared memory for offline analysis...
it took some elbow grease to identify the three critical calls: memory allocation, command buffer creation, and command buffer submission...
With those obstacles cleared, we can finally get to the shader binaries, black boxes in themselves. However, the process from here on out is standard: start with the simplest fragment or compute shader possible, make a small change in the input source code, and compare the output binaries. Iterating on this process is tedious but will quickly reveal key structures, including opcode numbers.
From https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html , there's a lot more details about the subsequent parts of the process in the next articles but they're harder to summarize
Alyssa reverse-engineered Apple's M1 GPU with no public documentation and developed an open-source Linux driver.
Be like Alyssa.
I'd rather watch her do that than someone doing triple saltos at the olympics.
This is way more impressive. 10/10
IIRC Apple were refusing to implement open standards because they were trying to force developers to use their proprietary Metal API.
