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.
Nothing groundbreaking but writing my own Huffman compressor in C and seeing the whole thing work knowing where nearly all the real physical bits were going, was seriously satisfying. Recommended exercise ☺️
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!
While I agree partially, want to mention that having someone to compare to is not as bad as it sounds. Its only bad if you think its unreachable and you give up doing anything. Sometimes you need a hero to look up and fight and dream about it, for the motivation. I think looking up to people like Alyssa's work is inspirational. In a similar way how I look up to those magicians who create emulators... but that is a different topic for another day.
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
How far developed is asahi now? Is every hardware working? Last time i looked into it wifi didn't work, i think. So i thought it was not useful for me.
I've been using Asahi as my daily driver on my m1 MacBook for a few weeks now. The only thing I've noticed that seems to not work is audio through the built in speakers. I normally use Bluetooth headphones anyways so I haven't tried to fix it.
I have traveled extensively with my m1 and gave it 2 solid drops (which left massive dents in the metal) and I feel like they are holding up. To Apple's credit, the original os which I use for photography still feels like new after 5 years. Yes, they have a myriad of other ethical problems, but the M series have been great hardware with not bad software... So far
I had one and it died after 4 years. From what I've seen on the internet and what Apple's technicians told me this isn't an uncommon issue. Fortunately my 7-8 year old HP laptop still functions (aside from the battery which completely crapped out after 2-3 years). Also they started soldering everything to the motherboard so you have to replace almost the entire computer if it breaks.
the original os which I use for photography still feels like new after 5 years
Near the end macOS felt slow/throttled. Linux was fast though.
I ran it on my M1 mini for several months a year or so back. At that stage it was probably 90% of what I needed it to be, which was bloody impressive. After I no longer needed it for work, I tried using it as my Home Assistant server, but with only 8gb RAM, ultimately it ended up being far more efficient to run HA in a virtual machine in macOS.
But yeah, if you can pick up an M1 for a good price, give it a go. It's good fun.
I've already been using Linux for ten years, it definitely puts the fun back into computing. This would actually be primarily to know how to install it on a Mac, because when offering to install Linux as a replacement for Windows in groups I am part of, there have been multiple requests for doing so on a Mac. Unfortunately always had to answer I've never done so, so couldn't promise anything.
Anyway, is €375 for an Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1, 256GB a good price?
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.
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.
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).
Their haters were going around and concern trolling that they were the same person. Anyone outside of the scene would take it as a stated fact and repeat it without knowing.
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.
I don't know if a lack of direct support is exactly the same as trying to force everyone, as they could've easily prevented her from reverse engineering this project, but that's sort of splitting hairs and they definitely know they have an open source community who would appreciate even a modicum of support that they're ignoring.
People weren't forced to use Metal as it turns out - they just didn't make games for Mac instead.
Apple tried to force people to use Metal, they just forgot that MacOS isn't the iPhone and they don't have enough weight in the desktop PC market to dictate terms like that.
Transphobes can fuck right off. The fact that a SINGLE person contributed this much says quite a lot about their own abilities, and whether they are trans or a woman is irrelevant.
And a talented engineer is a talented engineer! Pulling that off at 20 is mad, when I was 20 I didn't have as much skill in my little toenail. Massive respect for her.
Canada does a lot of things better than we do, but all the things, really? They, too, have serious problems in their healthcare and educational systems. They've got severe staffing shortages in hospitals and long wait times, and their IEA scores are dropping across multiple subjects relative to international standards. Most younger working class Canadians alive today do not expect to buy a home maybe ever.
I don't mean this as a tu quoque, we have huge problems here too and like I said Canada does a lot of things better than we do, but this kind of starry-eyed adoration can only end in disillusion.
PS don't look up when the last documented "starlight tour" was
I had heard that other provinces university's apply a 2 to 3% bump in GPAs to applicants from Alberta. The Alberta reason: They respect the advanced program as being more difficult. The other provinces reason: charity for the poor students raised there with a heavily exam-based GPA.
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.
You observe input and output across the entire API surface with every combination of discrete configuration options possible, then determine the function by which those outputs can be reproduced with the same parameters?
You can probably automate collection of the I/O data. Determining the function probably requires some extra brain juice.
support is neither official (by apple) nor unofficial (a hack), you can install other operating systems to apple silicon macs without any jailbreaks/hacks, but linux was ported by a community team
only m1 and m2 are properly supported
m3 is WIP, m4 is very WIP, m5 and m6 idk if are even started
M1 and M2 got unofficial Linux support pretty quickly. M3 still lacks GPU support last I checked and Apple is on M6 now. The oldest devices they sell are M4 and M1 is a year away from losing all support from Apple from what I was told, so yes things have changed but not in a good way. I've heard that the Framework 13 Pro might be a decent alternative though
Fuck the Olympics. It hasn't been anything other than a corporate entity intent on making money above all else in almost a hundred years. IOC tramples on the rights of many people every day and the entirety of the organization can burn in hell
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.
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.
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.
It always fascinates me how people can achieve such things, and acquire knowledge to do so in the first place.
Meanwhile, last night I spent 1h troubleshooting jellyfin because my kid clicked a few things in a menu by mistake when I was away.
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!
It's people like her who make life worth living. People who solve hard problems that need solving (or sometimes don't even need it) are the best people.
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.
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.
Hot take, but we, as a community should focus resources on improving hardware support for devices, manfacturers of which aren't actively hostile to linux.
Sadly, linux and open source is managed in capitalist way.
True, but you're not going to get the best out of it with Linux at this point. Asahi makes some sense if you have some older apple hardware already and want to run Linux on it. Buying new Apple hardware to run Linux is not a good idea. I look into it every now and then.
basically the ACPI drivers for the laptop are fine tuned by the OEM with microsoft, unless the laptop ships with linux where the OEM has similar or 1:1 life as windows. dell for awhile (dunno if they still do) were shipping laptops with ubuntu.
The second Apple stops supporting it, having another OS to install will help people. Also, sometimes people spend time on weird shit like Pokemon or LEGO. At least this can be used by others.
lol i'm not against trans people btw. but you have to admit that the contributions to society from people of color are minimized compared to whites.
like, who invented the nes?
i don't know their name but i know who steve jobs is. for some reason i know who elon musk is despite the fact that he contributed nothing of value to humanity whatsoever.
what's the name of that chinese women who scooped openAI by contributing to an opensource AI model? she came and went without much fanfare.
but you're creating a meme for a white woman who didn't accomplish much as far as i can tell.
name the person who created the first nes emulator or snes emulator?
bet you can't, even though the terrain was much rockier in those days.
i think you got the link wrong, it should be http://[100::1]
(i probably have to explain the joke, it's an ipv6 blackhole address, even just using ipv6 in the browser is so fucking obscure it simply refuses to link it properly :hidethepainharold:)
wrote a reverse engineered GPU driver from scratch by herself
Also, the first NES emulator was called NESticle. I have a feeling it wasn't developed by a woman of color.
EDIT: My bad. NESticle was the first well-known emulator. The first emulator was released in 1990 by Haruhisa Udagawa, for a computer called the FM Towns that was only released in Japan. No points for diversity when you're in a country where you're the majority race.
She has this out-of-focus look that makes it seem like she's visually impaired or blind - but I guess then she wouldn't be working on graphics drivers, of all things?
That part is even more idiotic. No one needs to be able to see to understand and be very good at mathematics and physics.
But that’s not even what she needed to learn and understand. To reverse engineer, you need to be patient, clever, creative and understand how assembler works. To write a driver is then the easier part and again, has nothing to do with visual skills. She could be blind and deaf and would still be able to reverse engineer GPU’s and sound cards.
You...you do know you can like...represent the blinky lights as numbers right?
A fully blind programmer could contribute to graphics driver development just fine. They don't need to appreciate the picture rendition of the math problems they're solving, to solve them.
Yes, I do know that, but it's more complicated doing it all in your head. Hence my curiosity.
Also, specifically reverse engineering requires trial & error and visual cues in the output to assess the result of an attempt. Having to do all that with visual aids would be a lot more difficult.
No, you misunderstood me. You're not translating the blinky lights at the correct layer.
Reverse engineering requires trial and error, and graphics output requires a nuanced assessment between the values and inputs expressed by different sources that correspond to mappings ultimately upon a display interface.
A sighted person would perform this work using their eyes, because that's the most efficient set up they literally would have the hardware handy to use.
Computers being math, and the human sense of touch being pretty dang sensitive, means that other peripherals than screens, can represent that nuance required to reverse engineer, or anything else relating to computer code.
The difficulty you imagine in not having your vision to perform a task, would not be a reality or an inherently extant limitation on this hypothetical blind programmer, in of itself.
Maybe (definitely) in the availability and pricing of good specialty peripherals, but that's it.
The term for what you are doing and which isn't something that requires malice, is ableism.
Now the term for making the assumption that someone is blind or visually impaired, just from a critique based on perception of facial features from a picture? That one I'm not sure what to call. Weird maybe?
Computers being math, and the human sense of touch being pretty dang sensitive, means that other peripherals than screens, can represent that nuance required to reverse engineer, or anything else relating to computer code.
I am genuinely interested in what's available today on that level - the last I checked, it was still Braille displays, and those were not good for much beyond text.
There are blind programmers, I am very much aware, and I could definitely see myself still enjoying development would I not be able to see. But for myself, I always assumed I would need someone else with normal eyesight to debate the algorithms and help me implement.
The term for what you are doing and which isn’t something that requires malice, is ableism.
Aren't you jumping to conclusions now? I never made any comments about her skill, I expressed - poorly worded, I now admit - my curiosity. But the answer I was expecting was "yes, she is visually impaired but she did all of this anyway", which would be all the more impressive. You do agree it is harder to work on graphics drivers as a visually impaired person, don't you?
[..] just from a critique based on perception of facial features from a picture
Let me quote my original comment verbatim:
She has this out-of-focus look that makes it seem like she’s visually impaired or blind - but I guess then she wouldn’t be working on graphics drivers, of all things?
Where / how do you read any form of critique into that?
She looks like someone who doesn’t get her photo taken often and may in fact be uncomfortable with the process, like a lot of people are. I worked for three years at a school for the blind and visually impaired, and people who have visual limitations don’t look directly into the lens.
I worked there so I don't know if there is any public information on that but its not like he kept it hidden and I bet there are articles where it might have been mentioned. It was kinda funny because I was on the tech team and I had the opposite issue. 3D just pops for me and I will see it even if the system settings are real loose. Its funny because I would need to setup the projectors but he could do a much better job of getting it configured optimally. Turns out not seeing 3D and just seeing the individual images is an asset to that activity.
Definitely interesting, but also relatable - I mean we have mathematicians and physicists doing (useful) calculations in 4D and higher, and I bet most of them can't picture a 4D space :)
Edit: I don't fully understand your comment, but there are blind people who can program. So even if she was blind, it does not mean she couldn't reverse engineer the graphics drivers. Can you be more specific?
As if you don't know where the camera is. People with normal vision will typically look straight at the camera, or focus on some object behind the camera. And since blind people don't see where the camera is, their eyes sometimes (often) appear to be looking unfocused. You can't tell where their gaze goes because they are not gazing at anything. This is what the two photos (this one and wikipedia) look like and why I was curious.
So from one photo you conclude if a person is blind or not? I don't get that what you described, the person looks to the camera. And even if not, sometimes its an artistic decision not to look into the camera (well to be fair in a portrait photo that would be unusual). As far as I know she is not blind, couldn't find any documentation on that on the Wikipedia article about her.
Edit: In example on some photos of me I look a bit different, like I would be a demon or something like that. Would you conclude I'm a demon?
Oh dear, some people got triggered. I was genuinely curious. My bad for speaking face to face with quite a few blind people over the years and recognizing a similarity.
These are just the first two that popped into my head. If I cared to actually research it I’m sure I’d find a lot more.
To name an old example…
Margaret Hamilton who is credited with coining the term ‘Software Engineering’ and helped write the flight control software for the Apollo Moon missions.
A more recent example would be Katie Bouman who helped develop the CHIRP algorithm that took an absolutely massive amount of data from radio telescopes to generate an image of a black hole.
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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.
yeah I remember not being able to get my voltron lion to run in basic when I was in junior high.
And imagine doing it without expecting a cent!
It’s the challenge of it though.
thaaaaat’s the shit, when it finally cracks and you laser focus on implementing your solution. better than drugs.
The high of cracking an intractable problem (pre-AI) was just unreal. I’d struggle to sleep, awaiting the morning so I could get back at it.
Nothing groundbreaking but writing my own Huffman compressor in C and seeing the whole thing work knowing where nearly all the real physical bits were going, was seriously satisfying. Recommended exercise ☺️
‘Just for the lulz’.
Good on a resume.
That's for sure
You mean you can't just get Apple's driver to work on Linux by turning it off and on again enough times?
or even by recompiling the kernel when apples driver is not part of it.
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!
While I agree partially, want to mention that having someone to compare to is not as bad as it sounds. Its only bad if you think its unreachable and you give up doing anything. Sometimes you need a hero to look up and fight and dream about it, for the motivation. I think looking up to people like Alyssa's work is inspirational. In a similar way how I look up to those magicians who create emulators... but that is a different topic for another day.
What a wholesome comment
It all adds up ⬆️
I used a toothpick to get some apple shell unstuck from my gum.
... by yourself !?
Impossible, that's what we have fish for.
I'm 30 and I wiped my own ass. So I'm feeling pretty accomplished.
You must be male
Any other female crusters? #LetItCrustQueens
The bar is subterranean
I sure do love when self-deprecation is used as fuel in gender wars.
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.
How far developed is asahi now? Is every hardware working? Last time i looked into it wifi didn't work, i think. So i thought it was not useful for me.
For M1 most things work except for USB-HDMI dongles and the fingerprint reader, I think M2 is in a similar boat now
yeah hdmi i really use often, hopefully they getting it working
I've been using Asahi as my daily driver on my m1 MacBook for a few weeks now. The only thing I've noticed that seems to not work is audio through the built in speakers. I normally use Bluetooth headphones anyways so I haven't tried to fix it.
Audio has been supported for a long time now, do you have "asahi-audio" installed?
That's a bummer... As an additional data point, my M1 MBP has had great audio on Asahi
Kindof except that their build quality tanked during the late Intel era and the motherboards will die a lot sooner now
I have traveled extensively with my m1 and gave it 2 solid drops (which left massive dents in the metal) and I feel like they are holding up. To Apple's credit, the original os which I use for photography still feels like new after 5 years. Yes, they have a myriad of other ethical problems, but the M series have been great hardware with not bad software... So far
I had one and it died after 4 years. From what I've seen on the internet and what Apple's technicians told me this isn't an uncommon issue. Fortunately my 7-8 year old HP laptop still functions (aside from the battery which completely crapped out after 2-3 years). Also they started soldering everything to the motherboard so you have to replace almost the entire computer if it breaks.
Near the end macOS felt slow/throttled. Linux was fast though.
My macbook pro, 2019, just stopped charging or responding to anything in the USB ports.
Took it to repair shop abcd they said "the logic board was fried" and it needed replacing.
It's been a while since I dabbled with hardware (built my own pcs back in the day) but is logic board just apple for motherboard?
basically
Name is misspelled in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig.
Also, wow, impressive.
https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
Makes we want to buy a second-hand Apple device just to try it out.
I ran it on my M1 mini for several months a year or so back. At that stage it was probably 90% of what I needed it to be, which was bloody impressive. After I no longer needed it for work, I tried using it as my Home Assistant server, but with only 8gb RAM, ultimately it ended up being far more efficient to run HA in a virtual machine in macOS.
But yeah, if you can pick up an M1 for a good price, give it a go. It's good fun.
I've already been using Linux for ten years, it definitely puts the fun back into computing. This would actually be primarily to know how to install it on a Mac, because when offering to install Linux as a replacement for Windows in groups I am part of, there have been multiple requests for doing so on a Mac. Unfortunately always had to answer I've never done so, so couldn't promise anything.
Anyway, is €375 for an Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1, 256GB a good price?
If you're dual booting which is what they recommend, you should probably get a 512 GB model
m2 is also well-supported
True. I played about with it on my M2 Air for a bit. But I need my Air to be rock solid because it's how I do my radio show.
I do, now!
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.
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.
Usename checks out
That's not a wish, that's prophecy.
She's a contract worker for Valve. I'm sure she's doing more than okay.
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).
Support them if you can!
Lina rebranded as Hoshino Lina and is working on an open source implementation of Live2D now.
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3mspkbkdwwp2z
More like worthless shits on Kiwi Farms
Me too, there's still great work being done on the project but the pace hasn't been the same since
Wasn't Asahi Lina alter ego of marcan? Or am I misremembering things
Part of the hate campaign. Anyone following both accounts at the time was quite puzzled by the hypothesis.
Their haters were going around and concern trolling that they were the same person. Anyone outside of the scene would take it as a stated fact and repeat it without knowing.
Allegedly. There was no evidence either way, and ultimately it doesn't matter anyway.
Some missing links:
- https://asahilinux.org/about/
Thank you. This is the sort of news I need in my day.
Pretty flipping sweet if you asked me.
IIRC Apple were refusing to implement open standards because they were trying to force developers to use their proprietary Metal API.
I don't know if a lack of direct support is exactly the same as trying to force everyone, as they could've easily prevented her from reverse engineering this project, but that's sort of splitting hairs and they definitely know they have an open source community who would appreciate even a modicum of support that they're ignoring.
People weren't forced to use Metal as it turns out - they just didn't make games for Mac instead.
Apple tried to force people to use Metal, they just forgot that MacOS isn't the iPhone and they don't have enough weight in the desktop PC market to dictate terms like that.
Transphobes can fuck right off. The fact that a SINGLE person contributed this much says quite a lot about their own abilities, and whether they are trans or a woman is irrelevant.
lol her being trans or not didn't even cross my mind
a woman is a woman, it's as simple as that
And a talented engineer is a talented engineer! Pulling that off at 20 is mad, when I was 20 I didn't have as much skill in my little toenail. Massive respect for her.
#tautology #blessed
same, i dont care she or they are Trans, i care is they made Mac Drivers.
They are trans?
So much so, so naturally so, that you brought it up so, makes me wonder about what strife witnessed.
Looks like a dude, talks like a dude, it is a dude.
So encouraging the bright young minds that are still being spawned. Amazing on her.
Alyssa Rosenzweig. Not Resenzweig. It means Twig of Roses. Here's her website: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/
Canada has been killing it for like 50 years, being all the things the United States thinks it is
I knew I should’ve escaped to Canada during Trump 1, they seem to be feeding and educating their kids right (except Alberta fuck Alberta ;) )
Canada does a lot of things better than we do, but all the things, really? They, too, have serious problems in their healthcare and educational systems. They've got severe staffing shortages in hospitals and long wait times, and their IEA scores are dropping across multiple subjects relative to international standards. Most younger working class Canadians alive today do not expect to buy a home maybe ever.
I don't mean this as a tu quoque, we have huge problems here too and like I said Canada does a lot of things better than we do, but this kind of starry-eyed adoration can only end in disillusion.
PS don't look up when the last documented "starlight tour" was
I had heard that other provinces university's apply a 2 to 3% bump in GPAs to applicants from Alberta. The Alberta reason: They respect the advanced program as being more difficult. The other provinces reason: charity for the poor students raised there with a heavily exam-based GPA.
♥️🌹
Her live streams are something else
What does she do on the livestreams?
Something else
This made me laugh like a maniac
She does 10 hour reverse engeneering sessions
Oh, I'm about to climax.
Oh shit!
Where does she stream? Does she post old recordings? I'd love to try catching one.
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.
The Apple you miss ended when they got rid of the Woz, I bet.
You observe input and output across the entire API surface with every combination of discrete configuration options possible, then determine the function by which those outputs can be reproduced with the same parameters?
You can probably automate collection of the I/O data. Determining the function probably requires some extra brain juice.
Does it get more fancy than that?
It's gets more fancy when you try to reverse stuff like Dunuvo
very based
personally grateful as i daily drive asahi linux
posting this comment from an m2 macbook pro running fedora asahi
The only reason I'm not buying an M series macbook is because I thought there's no Linux support, have things changed? Is it all unofficial?
support is neither official (by apple) nor unofficial (a hack), you can install other operating systems to apple silicon macs without any jailbreaks/hacks, but linux was ported by a community team
only m1 and m2 are properly supported
m3 is WIP, m4 is very WIP, m5 and m6 idk if are even started
M1 and M2 got unofficial Linux support pretty quickly. M3 still lacks GPU support last I checked and Apple is on M6 now. The oldest devices they sell are M4 and M1 is a year away from losing all support from Apple from what I was told, so yes things have changed but not in a good way. I've heard that the Framework 13 Pro might be a decent alternative though
*acided.
I've always wondered how the fuck people do that? Absolute wizards.
Insane levels of dedication. And probably autism
Probably autism, so you know it's good.
Insane levels of medication. And probably flautism (fixed it for you)
Oh no, my opinion is that medication for those of us with the "dig-in 'tisms" like this actually impedes our hyper focus performance.
To be fair it's not just your opinion, also one of doctors
She’s amazing. Also fascinating life story, came out as transgender at 10, was raised Jewish but she is now a Quaker
like the oats guy?
Fun fact: Quaker Oats has no relation to Quakers at all.
but they're both bland and tasteless and disappointed in my life choices after seeing each other.
Trading one religious tradition for another.
That's a lateral move at best.
No, she plays Quake now… damn, now I have to look up the hat Quaker is
i will now forever hear "quaker" as a slur for boomer-shooter players.
Fucking quaker, IDDQD yourself.
To be fair Quakers are like, the best people of pretty much any western organized religion
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
No need to diminish Olympic athletes. They worked very hard to get there. There are plenty of influences you can diminish instead.
They're also groomed as children - the decision almost always made by their parents before they're old enough to decide if they actually want to.
Fuck the Olympics. It hasn't been anything other than a corporate entity intent on making money above all else in almost a hundred years. IOC tramples on the rights of many people every day and the entirety of the organization can burn in hell
Seriously? I'm diminishing Olympic athletes? Go get your moral outrage gatekeeping fix somewhere else please.
Reverse-engineering the M1 GPU with zero public docs is insane. Huge respect for managing to get an open-source driver working on Linux from scratch.
clearly she is on the spectrum..
One of us
So are we all.
Immense respect!
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.
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:
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
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.
She's the GOAT. I've known about her since 2024 LibrePlanet. Apple Inc. can take the L.
Truly doing the lords work here.
Valve should hire her. With her help, they further improve SteamOS to have Nvidia drivers that are good.
Nah, fuck nVidia
Same logic could also be applied to Apple. Apple might be even worse, at least NVidia provides (closed source) drivers.
yeah, fuck the most common graphics hardware freely available.
and, fuck valve. Good people shold never work for big corp of any kind.
Valve isn’t big at all. It’s less than 300 employees… it’s like the definition of small to medium sized company.
Lol! They did. 😁
It always fascinates me how people can achieve such things, and acquire knowledge to do so in the first place. Meanwhile, last night I spent 1h troubleshooting jellyfin because my kid clicked a few things in a menu by mistake when I was away.
Anyone who uses Jellyfin occasionally does some troubleshooting, don’t sell yourself short
i don't!
i just accept the issue as a new feature. "this is how it works now."
The answer is: They like tinkering. This is sort of people who get dopamine rush when solving it like some sort of ulta complex puzzle.
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.
They bock it down pretty good. Can't remove apple apps like apple TV.
Please. Tell me. I tried AeroSpace and was so sad
Somebody let me use Sway at work! I promise it'll make me faster!
If they were smart they would hire her
She was hired as a contractor by Valve to work on Linux graphics driver related stuff. Valve knows who the experts are. And yes her work is amazing.
That's good to hear. Too many clever people get slapped down by litigious assholes.
Omg,apple developers must feel so useless right now
When a big corp doesn't support something, it's by design. The engineers were told to not spend time on it.
There's some really fucking talented people working in these big companies, but they don't have freedom to make such decisions
Indeed,that's why I said they must feel useless
Nah, they feel paid. If they wanted to do this work they could.
Some likely do
That’s true in spirit, but in the employment contract with Apple, you agree not to contribute to any open source projects (at all) in your spare time.
Thank you Alyssa
Oh, i followed and admired her work since they first got the m1 to boot like back a few years.
First time seeing her face
It's people like her who make life worth living. People who solve hard problems that need solving (or sometimes don't even need it) are the best people.
...without asking a dime. Just love for the game.
VLC springs to mind.
Yes exactly! And exactly!
VLC exists because they wanted the university to upgrade its networking infrastructure so they could play CounterStrike.
The circle of life and terrorists.
It's great that open source software has amazing people like this.
Sounds like modern day halt and catch fire. Didn't know this is how Asahi was getting developed
Team Cameron & Donna
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.
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.
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...
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.
Some of the basics of reverse engineering:
It's kind of monumental and there's no real finish line for learning any of them.
Big Ups. Respek.
Damn, that's impressive. I wonder if this will open new avenues for the M1 iPads.
@[email protected]
Please fix the typo in the surname in the title of the post.
ok
thanks
Did she just do this in her spare time or was this part of her job? It's interesting just how people are able to accomplish this sort of things
And here I am unable to ssh/putty/connect to my banana pi m5 so I can wipe lineageos off the emmc module. (Legit happy for her success!!!)
You're doing the hacker's job, son. Keep it up.
And here I am unable to ssh/putty/connect to my banana pi m5 so I can wipe lineageos off the emmc module. (Legit happy for her success!!!)
based
I'm surprised she's not in prison yet, apple doesn't like sharing the IP they have previously stolen.
Reverse engineering is not (yet) illegal, but expect that to change after the midterms, if Trump and his buddies manage to win more seats.
And she's trans too, right? Would send DHH in a frothy frenzy.
crazy stuff.
Hot take, but we, as a community should focus resources on improving hardware support for devices, manfacturers of which aren't actively hostile to linux.
Sadly, linux and open source is managed in capitalist way.
why the hell would you buy a macbook just to put linux. i dont understand some people. but cool that she was able to do that
Apple has some legitimately impressive silicon these days.
Their hardware is definitely better than their software these days. It used to be the other way around.
True, but you're not going to get the best out of it with Linux at this point. Asahi makes some sense if you have some older apple hardware already and want to run Linux on it. Buying new Apple hardware to run Linux is not a good idea. I look into it every now and then.
exactly. its like people who buy a windows laptop, throw on a distro, then go "why is the battery life so shit?"
What actually is the explanation for this? I've done the same on 2 old laptops, overall love using Linux but the battery life is like...halved.
basically the ACPI drivers for the laptop are fine tuned by the OEM with microsoft, unless the laptop ships with linux where the OEM has similar or 1:1 life as windows. dell for awhile (dunno if they still do) were shipping laptops with ubuntu.
The hardware will get old eventually, don't worry.
The second Apple stops supporting it, having another OS to install will help people. Also, sometimes people spend time on weird shit like Pokemon or LEGO. At least this can be used by others.
Hardware. I'd love to have a mac, but can't stomach the OS
Source?
Open
Hotel?
Doubt it
Trivago
quite a few places! how about the changelogs in the regular Mesa release notifications sent on the [email protected] mailing list?
Would.
And why are we getting a picture of her?
So if I spot her in public I can ask for an autograph.
Because we're visual creatures and usually if you say, "this is the..." you're usually visually showing the thing.
So why the disrespect ?
~~The account looks like it's only been active for a day or so. ~~
Likely a Troll.
edit: it's four days old with two comments and a single post (about AI). I wouldn't take it seriously.
lol i'm not against trans people btw. but you have to admit that the contributions to society from people of color are minimized compared to whites.
like, who invented the nes?
i don't know their name but i know who steve jobs is. for some reason i know who elon musk is despite the fact that he contributed nothing of value to humanity whatsoever.
what's the name of that chinese women who scooped openAI by contributing to an opensource AI model? she came and went without much fanfare.
but you're creating a meme for a white woman who didn't accomplish much as far as i can tell.
name the person who created the first nes emulator or snes emulator?
bet you can't, even though the terrain was much rockier in those days.
The website you're looking for is over here.
i think you got the link wrong, it should be http://[100::1]
(i probably have to explain the joke, it's an ipv6 blackhole address, even just using ipv6 in the browser is so fucking obscure it simply refuses to link it properly :hidethepainharold:)
Also, the first NES emulator was called NESticle. I have a feeling it wasn't developed by a woman of color.
EDIT: My bad. NESticle was the first well-known emulator. The first emulator was released in 1990 by Haruhisa Udagawa, for a computer called the FM Towns that was only released in Japan. No points for diversity when you're in a country where you're the majority race.
She has this out-of-focus look that makes it seem like she's visually impaired or blind - but I guess then she wouldn't be working on graphics drivers, of all things?
Post your face, it's only fair.
Embarassing comment.
One of the most remarkable software engineers is shown for attribution
Some internet idiots: ”BuT loOk At HeR EyEs”
I think he's intrigued about how she contrive to work on graphics with limited visual clues (if she has impaired vision that is)
That part is even more idiotic. No one needs to be able to see to understand and be very good at mathematics and physics.
But that’s not even what she needed to learn and understand. To reverse engineer, you need to be patient, clever, creative and understand how assembler works. To write a driver is then the easier part and again, has nothing to do with visual skills. She could be blind and deaf and would still be able to reverse engineer GPU’s and sound cards.
Not simultaneously though.
Fair point :)
She could have a braille display
That would be a feat for a demigod.
You...you do know you can like...represent the blinky lights as numbers right?
A fully blind programmer could contribute to graphics driver development just fine. They don't need to appreciate the picture rendition of the math problems they're solving, to solve them.
Yes, I do know that, but it's more complicated doing it all in your head. Hence my curiosity. Also, specifically reverse engineering requires trial & error and visual cues in the output to assess the result of an attempt. Having to do all that with visual aids would be a lot more difficult.
No, you misunderstood me. You're not translating the blinky lights at the correct layer.
Reverse engineering requires trial and error, and graphics output requires a nuanced assessment between the values and inputs expressed by different sources that correspond to mappings ultimately upon a display interface.
A sighted person would perform this work using their eyes, because that's the most efficient set up they literally would have the hardware handy to use.
Computers being math, and the human sense of touch being pretty dang sensitive, means that other peripherals than screens, can represent that nuance required to reverse engineer, or anything else relating to computer code.
The difficulty you imagine in not having your vision to perform a task, would not be a reality or an inherently extant limitation on this hypothetical blind programmer, in of itself.
Maybe (definitely) in the availability and pricing of good specialty peripherals, but that's it.
The term for what you are doing and which isn't something that requires malice, is ableism.
Now the term for making the assumption that someone is blind or visually impaired, just from a critique based on perception of facial features from a picture? That one I'm not sure what to call. Weird maybe?
I am genuinely interested in what's available today on that level - the last I checked, it was still Braille displays, and those were not good for much beyond text.
There are blind programmers, I am very much aware, and I could definitely see myself still enjoying development would I not be able to see. But for myself, I always assumed I would need someone else with normal eyesight to debate the algorithms and help me implement.
Aren't you jumping to conclusions now? I never made any comments about her skill, I expressed - poorly worded, I now admit - my curiosity. But the answer I was expecting was "yes, she is visually impaired but she did all of this anyway", which would be all the more impressive. You do agree it is harder to work on graphics drivers as a visually impaired person, don't you?
Let me quote my original comment verbatim:
Where / how do you read any form of critique into that?
She looks like someone who doesn’t get her photo taken often and may in fact be uncomfortable with the process, like a lot of people are. I worked for three years at a school for the blind and visually impaired, and people who have visual limitations don’t look directly into the lens.
Another hint is her eyes looking in different directions.
But it doesn't make her bad or something.
It makes OC intrigued in her ability to work on heavily graphical matter.
And if she truly has impaired vision, then I, for one, even more awed.
Well - I don't want to overanalyse it. It was really only curiosity in combination with graphics driver development.
one of the co heads of this graphics lab whose maine claim to fame was 3d stuff could not see 3d.
That's fascinating. Have you got a link with further info on that?
I worked there so I don't know if there is any public information on that but its not like he kept it hidden and I bet there are articles where it might have been mentioned. It was kinda funny because I was on the tech team and I had the opposite issue. 3D just pops for me and I will see it even if the system settings are real loose. Its funny because I would need to setup the projectors but he could do a much better job of getting it configured optimally. Turns out not seeing 3D and just seeing the individual images is an asset to that activity.
Definitely interesting, but also relatable - I mean we have mathematicians and physicists doing (useful) calculations in 4D and higher, and I bet most of them can't picture a 4D space :)
What do you mean by out-of-focus look?
Edit: I don't fully understand your comment, but there are blind people who can program. So even if she was blind, it does not mean she couldn't reverse engineer the graphics drivers. Can you be more specific?
As if you don't know where the camera is. People with normal vision will typically look straight at the camera, or focus on some object behind the camera. And since blind people don't see where the camera is, their eyes sometimes (often) appear to be looking unfocused. You can't tell where their gaze goes because they are not gazing at anything. This is what the two photos (this one and wikipedia) look like and why I was curious.
So from one photo you conclude if a person is blind or not? I don't get that what you described, the person looks to the camera. And even if not, sometimes its an artistic decision not to look into the camera (well to be fair in a portrait photo that would be unusual). As far as I know she is not blind, couldn't find any documentation on that on the Wikipedia article about her.
Edit: In example on some photos of me I look a bit different, like I would be a demon or something like that. Would you conclude I'm a demon?
I didn't conclude anything, I speculated. Because it's relevant to graphics driver engineering.
What this has to do with eyes?
Why all of this even matter?
Tell me dear, what made you so sour towards the world?
Oh dear, some people got triggered. I was genuinely curious. My bad for speaking face to face with quite a few blind people over the years and recognizing a similarity.
What does that have to do with coding ability?
But you're being one
This comment reminds me of reddit.
Admiral Grace Hopper, Kathleen Booth, and Margaret E Hamilton of the top of my head.
Also don't try attributing trans womens' achievements to men please.
I'll show you two right here, I eagerly await to hear about why these examples don't fit your highly specific criteria that no one asked for.
For someone not trying you have succeeded spectacularly well at being an asshole
You're right. You're not merely trying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)
These are just the first two that popped into my head. If I cared to actually research it I’m sure I’d find a lot more.
To name an old example… Margaret Hamilton who is credited with coining the term ‘Software Engineering’ and helped write the flight control software for the Apollo Moon missions.
A more recent example would be Katie Bouman who helped develop the CHIRP algorithm that took an absolutely massive amount of data from radio telescopes to generate an image of a black hole.
You've post 2 top level comments calling attention to the fact they are trans
Naw. You are an asshole and trying to be.
That's easy, there's one in the post you replied to.
Trans women are women, asshole.