GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 Sol are absolutely insane

Perhaps before Astra was nerfed. It is now the dumbest model right after Gemini. Sol still holds up.

proof?

Maybe I’m getting really old, and I know we live in changing times but the fact this works at all is insane, as in black magic insane.

I assume I’ll get used to it, but my mental model of what’s possible hasn’t been fully rewired yet.

This is super great. The biggest pain point of Asahi Linux is how it doesn't have GPU acceleration on M3 and newer, especially now that M6 is out!

However, Asahi Linux has a strictly no-AI policy [1]. So this great work can't be upstreamed. I expect to see a bunch of AI-assisted forks that get things working smoothly on newer hardware to dominate as most people just care about getting stuff working, while only a handful of purists stick to the non-AI version running on ancient hardware.

[1] https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/

:) I think we have a surprise in store here. Asahi don't have a monopoly over Linux for Apple Silicon, and upstream Linux absolutely does *NOT* ban LLMs.

i install proprietary modules for nvidia all the time, i'm not going to care if i have to do it for something else that i own

Nvidia's kernel module is open source these days, it's the usermode stack that's still closed.

Even though the kernel module is open-source (sort of, development still happens behind closed doors), it's still an out-of-tree module, rather than being built into the kernel, which would give you as smooth an experience as with AMD or Intel, who's GPUs literally do just work on any distro with no fuss.

Asahi's long term goal is to get everything possible merged into the (actually) upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work. It'd be nice to see that continue rather than have forks on forks for the sake of singular differences (and it looks like proper upstreaming is what they are going after per the Remaining Work section).

upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work

This may never end up working like that, considering how complicated installation is, comparatively speaking, and how macOS is still pretty much required to be installed.

You can make the Linux installation on Apple Sillicon Macs pretty painless nowadays. One terminal command on macOS, reboot to Linux, run one script - voila.

It's extremely impressive that they were able to make a working driver so quickly. I think this is one of the best use cases for LLMs. You don't need someone to spend years reverse engineering undocumented hardware anymore. It will interesting to see how good the driver the LLMs came up with is, and whether it can be upstreamed into the Linux kernel.

Might be one of the only use cases where LLMs are necessary to succeed. Can't imagine the pain of reverse engineering a technology of this scale and "secrecy".

Traditional hardware RE centers around heroics by a small number of very smart people, see: marcan, Alyssa Rosenzweig, Asahi Lina, etc. What they did is insanely impressive, and given how hard it was with LLMs I'm sure I would not personally be able to do this work without LLMs. That said, I'm looking forward to a world where the staring at hexdumps and traces can be delegated to LLMs and talented humans can spend their time building as opposed to head banging.

The problem I’m finding, at least with today’s models, is that it produces disposable software. It’s not good at making well-architected, durable software. Stuff that could be maintained and bug-fixed.

I mean you can get good stuff out of it if you know what you are doing and guide it, but if you just say “here’s a regression suite. Write an implementation that passes” you will get something that works for a while but ages quickly and will need to be thrown away.

I’m sure it’s really easy when you can get help from the people who made the chip or write the Apple drivers.

Did you read the article? They didn’t get help from the people who made the chip or wrote the Apple drivers.

I am not by any means a copyright lawyer, so can anyone enlighten me on if it is a good idea for upstream projects to accept such kind of code from an ex-Apple employee, especially since Apple is currently suing OpenAI.

Great observation, two things:

- During my time at Apple I never saw any of the macOS source code, at all, even for userspace components. I had not even heard of things like SPTM.

- I have not worked there since June 2025

I don't believe that there's any risk due to my former Apple employment. As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code. If I felt there was even a chance that my employment at Apple may have exposed me to relevant internal secrets, I would refrain from contributing to community projects.

Have you consulted this with a lawyer, or is it what you simply think/believe.

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763

All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1]. There is no way Linux will take that code, since people from Apple also contribute to Linux and this creates a major conflict.

There's also ongoing issues around Codex for this sort of thing, given Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets[2]. And nobody knows whether training data in other models is similarly tainted.

[1]: https://codyho.dev/documents/cody_ho_resume.pdf

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/10/apple-sue...

Very sad. I really want to get Linux on newer Apple chips working flawlessly but I can understand the legal minefield about this particular work.

Nobody does. We're only about to start settling it in courts, likely the supreme ones.

That’s fine. Linux upstream won’t take his code but you can for your own purposes.

There were and are many important pieces of Linux kernel that live out of tree; ZFS is a big example.

The problem with this driver is not licensing or code quality; I assume it's under a threat of receiving C&D letter, or maybe also a legal suit for breaking some NDA.

Now that this work is done and out in the open what in theory would prevent the next generation of LLMs from ingesting it and eventually a non-Apple employee creating yet another driver “from scratch” but with the knowledge of how the hardware works acquired from an LLM or with the help of one?

Basically, aren’t we facing a situation where LLM-assisted knowledge laundering is becoming a thing?

All this work is tainted since the poster is ex-Apple[1].

So if I worked as a janitor at Apple, I couldn't contribute anymore?

Resume says : "Machine Learning Engineer".

Exactly how does that equate to knowing details of Apple's GPU implementation? Apple is a massive company.

I don't give a flying fuck.

Ignoring the idiocy of Imaginary Property is how China is winning.

It's time we caught up and then leap ahead. Everything is a derivative work.

So, what do you do for a living?

Clean room is not 100% legally necessary for RE, but I would never touch an LLM to do RE work when there's even a chance the models have been trained on the thing I ultimately plan to reimplement.

Furthermore, given that Asahi Linux, the biggest game in town when it comes to running Linux on Apple silicon, is trying to be cleanroom, it is incredibly rude of you to not mention LLMs until after showing a page full of LLM-derived firmware ABI. This is a trap for anyone who's trying to be cleanroom.

The title is literally "I Came, I Prompted, I Left". I'm not sure how this can be clearer.

im pretty literate in intellectual property, but im pretty confused about the no looking at binary code artifacts bit.

TL;DR:

1. We want to guarantee our work is not a "derivative work" of anything Apple wrote.

2. If we look at any Apple binaries, there's no way prove that our code didn't borrow from Apple.

3. Since we didn't look at any Apple binaries, then there's no way our work can be a derivative work-- we didn't even look at their stuff.

Wouldn't using OpenAI break the cleanroom?

Did Apple share their code with OpenAI ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1whecn1/comment...

The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.

I certainly dont care about hiding LLM contributions and all crazy anti-LLM policies, but I really hope author can share process completely so this can be reproduced by someone not working for Apple.

crazy anti-LLM policies

Weird how justified reasonable policies get the "crazy" label.

Asahi state as one of its goals upstreaming Apple Silicon support into Linux Kernel and kernel does not have similar anti-llm policies.

Imagine what happen if OP submit patches upstream skipping Asahi and they gonna be accepted.

Imagine how crazy it is to be throwing shade at someone for having ethics and holding themselves to a higher than required standard.

Even if this is the case, this is still a valuable contribution to learn upon.

It’s taint. Anyone who looks at it can’t work on a real open source driver because they will have had access to information they’re not supposed to.

It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.

Can't this be used to make a clean room implementation? Have someone write a spec then someone else who is unrelated, implement it from scratch?

"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?"

Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.

So what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own? There are countries in the global south that never had an industrial revolution and don't speak English and never had factories for export nor made anything in a factory industrially that isn't building material and food and maybe fuel for local consumption so they've never had an IP infringement case

what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own

That's what's referred to as a "clean room implementation" further up the thread.

However, this specific thread is about the scenario where an employee has inside knowledge and is passing that knowledge on to the implementer.

Legally speaking, a clean room implementation has much better defenses from claims of copyright violation.

Wouldn't B's publication of the information make it by definition no longer a trade secret? It is now public knowledge, regardless of whether the current or former engineers might be liable for the original leak.

Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have essentially infinite protection/NDAs apply to all of humanity.

NDAs apply to all of humanity

The NDA doesn't apply to people who haven't signed it, but copyright law does. If you know the material you're receiving is under copyright (eg proprietary source code), and you publish work based on that copyright material, the fact that it's now widely available is not an effective defense against claims of copyright violation.

Person B in this scenario hasn't violated the NDA, but they could be sued for copyright infringement.

That’s the most abstract and esoteric argument I’ve ever heard I think

The argument is not esoteric. An Apple employee working on a reverse engineered GPU driver might (intentionally or not) incorporate internal knowledge that they are contractually obligated to keep secret or write an implementation that is too close to proprietary code they had access to, to the point that it could be argued that it is a derived work.

This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].

[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

Exactly! That’s why companies create a clone every time they hire someone, put a clone into vat, and upon person quitting, the person is disposed of and the clone is sent to his family to take upon his role, without leaking company’s internal knowledge.

I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work.

I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.

Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.

It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.

If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?

I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.

Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.

Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs.

Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.

And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?

Mutually assured destruction is what keeps everyone quiet at the moment.

In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.

I'm fully aware of lots of times powerful companies have used the courts to protect their business. My point is basically all of the powerful companies are elbow deep in LLMs to the extent of some sort of mutually assured destruction if they were to start court cases like this.

LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?

The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.

It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.

No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized.

(I worked in a federal district court for a while.)

The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.

Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).

An AI doesn't magically add copyright but it also doesn't magically remove copyright except via diffusion of training data. It does not remove copyright from its input. Malus was a parody. If you machine-translate something from one language to another, copyright is retained no matter how sophisticated the translator is.

concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development

This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.

I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.

I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763

Do you work for Apple?

Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.

Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE."

No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.

Who volunteers to be the shmuck that fights Nintendo's lawyers in court? Who's funding the defense against Apple?

It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.

Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.

But there are plenty of successful projects which would probably have been taken down if it wasn't for clean room RE. I mean just look at the clean room IBM BIOS clones from "IBM compatibles" in the early days of the personal computer.

This is the same logic that the TSA uses to justify its existence. "We're so good nobody attempts it!"

When you say "case" does that mean you're rejecting the evidence of Phoenix technologies not getting sued along with all the other BIOS clones?

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "Not getting sued" doesn't validate a legal theory - legal theories are validated in court where they become case law. Until then, they are plainly speculative.

This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.

The friend I am referring to I met at Stanford around April of 2026 in a dorm event. We've spoken in person exactly once (I use "friend" loosely to describe anyone I've spoken to who I'm not on bad terms with) and at no point did we discuss anything detailed about Apple Silicon. For further context, I left Apple in June of 2025.

Isn't that chat log from 2024?

If you read the page it says 2026-06-04.

Spend enough time in tech and you'll know lots of people who know both technical and business secrets and are under various levels of NDAs. The message you link to explicitly mentions only public info was exchanged. Just talking to someone is not an indication of infringement in any way.

I think this comment is missing the forest for the trees. Obviously, ephemeral interaction is going to happen.

The author’s blogpost is sloppy and has some signs of being AI written. This kind of bleeds into the main point I’m going to make.

Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution, so, this means that the glibness with which the author is treating any of this is probably sufficient cause to refuse his entries. It is unclear if LLMs should be considered a toxic waste dump in terms of trying to maintain a clean room. We have not established a standard. It is clear the author doesn’t think this is a big deal, so that’s one conflict. The other conflict is that it is not clear what their exact interactions with Apple Silicon folks is and their glibness of it doesn’t clarify anything.

If you take a group that is trying to be very careful about the potential legal landmines a still nascent technology has and you get someone that espouses a general glibness about those concerns wanting to merge code…why on earth would you expect that group to accept them as a contributor?

This is not to say this isn’t really cool and a neat use of LLMs, but it is totally understandable why Asahi Linux won’t accept the fruits of this kind of development. If it turns out that Apple can identify its non-OSS code in this, it’ll be a mess.

I'm sure Omarchy will appreciate the effort, even if you're snubbed by Asahi -- being able to run Linux flawlessly on Apple Silicon is going to be awesome.

Everything that you say can be true, and yet Asahi project may want to avoid needing to prove what you say in a courtroom.

The LLM use wasnt the part that bothered me so much, but having had an Apple contract is bad.

To the developer: it doesnt matter whatever you can upstream it or not. Just share the code and documentation of how this process can be reproduced.

There plenty of us not working at Apple who can reuse the same approach for M5 and next generations of hardware.

For the kernel driver it's literally just: run the hypervisor, wait for the kick, save the UAT state, replay the whole thing, make sure the output pages change, then just follow the pointer to initdata until you've built the whole tree from scratch. LLM handles the rest.

Thanks for the post and answering here, but for someone to follow in your steps there really need to be more information: how did you handle physical hardware? Did it got stuck / frozen / whatever? How did you managed reset / etc? What is your actual step-by-step process other then just telling codex / claude code "do X"? What else had to be solved along the way?

I just think one good part of Marcan's work is that they streamed a lot of their workflow with all kind of problems occured along the way and you could see how to solve them.

And please so not let anti-llm crowd discourage you. People like me who want to use good hardware and already choose to pay for Apple one just need drivers that work good and feature complete - code purity and "quality" is secondary.

I detail most of the development process in part 1:

https://codyho.dev/blog/hypervisor-macbook-neo/

tl;dr you reboot the device with `macvdmtool`, you install m1n1 as the boot object, you talk to the m1n1 proxy over a python shell. I'm documenting the process as I go also (see: the blog posts, also my github repos) both so others can do it and as record of the clean room nature, but this really is just GPT go brrrrr

So this is specific _only_ to M4 Mac Mini and Neo? Or will this work on any M4 SoC such as M4 Max?

Author, do TouchID next.

Fyi,there's a comment on the Omarchy-M annoucement [0] referencing Touch ID

Dj is writing the GPU drivers, and got Touch ID working by talking directly to the Secure Enclave

[0] https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/

Awesome to see that another project has started that does use LLM to build linux on top of apple silicon. Asahi linux was dead in the water for me once they made their extreme anti-LLM stance clear.

If contributor policies are enough to make projects "dead in the water" for you, the rest of Linux' desktop efforts will leave you appalled.

Why?

It's okay to have policies against shitty code, blatant copyright violations or being an ass.

It's not okay to ban tool use when a person is honest about it. The only thing you can achieve with a ban is that people will learn to lie about it and conceal it better.

Dear fellow humans from "Hacker News". Hacking a driver that in itself documentation to black box Apple hardware is not any different from hacking $10 4G LTE modem.

Fact that a person who was not previously driver developer can achieve this in a few weeks is pure wonder. No matter what tools are used.

Leave legal questions to Linux Foundation laywers or whoever is responsible to accept or not accept the patches.

If Apple actually wanted to prevent any of this from happening they can just lock bootloader. They not just gonna do it now because someone used fancy text generator to make working GPU driver.

Attacking a person who spent their personal time and money on making walled garden black box hardware more usable, more privacy friendly and further away from landfill is a crime against the future of humanity.

What is the state of Nvidia and AMD GPU drivers on Linux? Maybe these techniques can finally give us reasonably good open source drivers which can be supported for a long time.

AFAIK Nvidia drivers are proprietary and AMD has a tendency to drop support quickly

This is extremely impressive work; kudos. I was thinking about this with regard to Asahi's anti-LLM policy just last week - they're going to get completely outmoded by LLM-harnessed reverse engineering, if only for personal use and not upstreaming.

I'm surprised you worked with Niklas on this. I'd have assumed you'd think he was competent, given he went to Binghamton and not Stanford.