According to Cody Ho's blog, he and Niklas built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo in about a month, a process that normally takes years. The driver runs Chrome and Firefox WebGL, and Minecraft at 200 FPS.

The mechanism is a clean-room reverse-engineering of Apple's AGX (the GPU) firmware ABI and user-space components. They used a hypervisor to capture hardware traces rather than looking at Apple binaries. The kernel driver talks to the GPU firmware (RTKit RTOS), and the user-space driver is Mesa-based, translating NIR to the AGX ISA.

What changed is the pace: a month versus years is a massive improvement, driven by LLM-assisted reverse-engineering. They found hardware features not in Metal: a native 64-bit add, anisotropy to 128x, a new matrix unit mode, and 7-bit immediate support for uniform_mov.

What is unconfirmed is whether the driver is ready for end users (it is not yet) and whether the clean-room process holds up under scrutiny. The code is published, but the provenance is the key question.

What to watch is whether the driver is upstreamed to Mesa and the Linux kernel, and whether Apple responds to the reverse-engineering. The M4 Mac Mini driver is a notable achievement in GPU reverse-engineering, and the LLM-assisted process is the interesting detail.