Niklas and Cody built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo in about a month, a process which normally takes years. The driver is fast enough to run Minecraft at 200 FPS, and Chrome and Firefox are running WebGL on the M4 Mac Mini with working compositing. Building this driver involved reverse engineering the AGX's, Apple's name for the GPU, incredibly complicated firmware ABI and user-space components. This was all done in a transparent, verifiably clean room manner using well-established techniques. The code is not yet ready for end users, but they are looking to get it to end users as soon as possible. Previously, Cody built a hypervisor to reverse engineer macOS, and now the goal became to actually do something useful with it, and what better target than writing a GPU driver. The GPU is effectively a requirement for any modern system, otherwise everything needs to be CPU rendered, which is orders of magnitude slower and less power efficient. The goal was to implement conformant OpenGL and soon Vulkan drivers for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo. Normally, building a GPU driver is an endeavor that takes years, and the goal was to do it in days. It turns out that days was overly optimistic, but weeks is still a massive improvement. In those weeks, they reverse engineered the M4, A18 Pro, and mostly M5 user space using only live probing, discovering hardware-supported features and instructions not emitted by Apple's driver. They built a fully working user-space driver, including a new custom IR/shader compiler, command stream builder, and many more components. They reverse engineered, from scratch, the full AGX firmware ABI using traces from the hypervisor.

A GPU driver built from scratch in a month. The M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo are the machines, and the AGX is the GPU. The OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance is the graphics compliance, and the 200 FPS Minecraft is the performance. The reverse engineering is the process, and the firmware ABI is the target. The hypervisor is the prior work, and the live probing is the technique. The custom IR/shader compiler is the component, and the command stream builder is the component. The clean room manner is the method, and the end-user readiness is the status. The one-month timeline is the speed, and the years-normal is the baseline.

The GPU driver from scratch is the change, and the one-month timeline is the speed that makes it a breakthrough.

The end-user readiness, the Vulkan support, and whether the driver is stable. The blog gives the driver and the performance, but not an end-user release or a stability figure, and the 200 FPS Minecraft is the performance, not a measured benchmark. The OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance is the graphics compliance, and the reverse engineering is the process.

Whether the driver reaches end users, the Vulkan support, and whether it is stable. For the reverse-engineering community, a GPU driver built from scratch in a month is a significant step, and the one-month timeline is the speed that makes it a breakthrough.

Cody Ho and Niklas Sheth built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo in about a month, reverse engineering the AGX firmware ABI. A GPU driver built from scratch in a month.