Comment by tw1984
7 hours ago
honest question - how hard it is to use LLM and tools like REA to reverse engineer MacOS to figure out how its hardware works in terms of getting linux support on such hardware?
I thought it is already a solved problem? with large enough numbers of agents running in parallel reverse engineering, implementing kernel modules, testing in vm etc, the whole pipeline seems to be complete.
Did I miss something here?
Yes, read that blog entry to understand how different that hardware is from any other Linux-supported ARM stuff to see how much deep understanding you need to actually bring that support upstream to Linux or Mesa. Some(most?) stuff requires fundamental changes and no LLM is going to design and write it in an uostreamable way.
Debugging is not an issue, Asahi seems to have it figured out, especially with the virtualization. It's the design that takes time.
Meanwhile Omarchy, for example, just brute-forces everything, with ugly patches that work today but cannot be upstreamed as such, so they'll break tomorrow with new kernel release. I really expect them to start struggling a lot going forward with maintaining the support they claim. Regressions may actually kill their effort.
They prohibit RE of the binaries. What Asahi doing is observing macOS as a black box with input and outputs, and translating observed behavior back to Linux.