Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
In a month, Niklas and the author successfully built a GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo, a feat that typically takes years to accomplish. The process involved reverse engineering the AGX's complicated GPU firmware and user-space components. The code is not yet ready for end users but the intention is to release it as soon as possible.
The goal was to implement conformant OpenGL (and eventually Vulkan) drivers for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo. Throughout the project, no Apple binaries were examined; only hardware traces and custom-built shaders were used. The user-space graphics RE was conducted with care, treating any required Apple blobs as opaque objects.
A friend provided documentation on these blobs to enable the creation of a clean room implementation. The team published all their experiments to allow verification of their work. The story is divided into two parts: user and kernel space, mirroring the split in modern GPU drivers.
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