Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

Im glad she stepped away from Asahi linux. Its absolutely great from a techincal perspective and the progress that team has made, but talented people like her shouldn't be trying to reverse engineer software/hardware from shitty anti-consumer company that can make the entire project work in a heartbeat by publishing documentation, in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up.

> in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up

To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.

Even with proper documentation, there still would have been loads of work to get M1/M2 GPUs working on Asahi Linux. Writing GPU drivers worth a damn is about as difficult as targeting a compiler to a new CPU architecture. It would not be "in a heartbeat".

Fortunately for her, Intel - her new employer has "fabs at home". Though on older nodes, TBF.

Intel's GPUs are manufactured on TSMC though.

Reverse engineering requires a different mindset and somewhat different skill set than “forward” engineering. I’ve met people who were happy to only do reverse engineering (to figure out what make things “tick”) without building anything new.

If it was up to me, 2 years of successful reverse engineering (of a variety of projects/products) would be a requirement to be called an engineer. You learn a lot from working things that you can’t learn from a book (and without having to do the mistakes yourself first…)

Just to make it clear: I am not implying anything about Alyssa - just stating an observation based on my own experience.

Im not talking about chip level documentation. Apple could take their source code for drivers and compile the kernel level for linux (since its all just C code) while open sourcing the user space.

If I could make roughly the same comp, I would jump on an all-RE job without a parachute. Sounds like heaven.

I mean, she wasn't just reverse engineering, she was doing it to make graphics work on Asahi Linux.

That is correct. In my previous comment, for the sake of brevity, I deleted what I had written about Intel also being able to "call TSMC and have them doing a run of it's latest design", but it felt like that would have been belaboring the point that Intel isn't a rinky-dink chip operation, despite losing their commanding lead.

Ultimately we didn't need Jon Lech Johansen's work (and Derek Fawcus's, and others') on cracking DVD DRM or cracking Apple's FairPlay DRM, as there have always been alternatives. But their efforts did push the fight against DRM in our favour, and who knows what the world would be like if we had done nothing?

Creating things is a gamble, as mass adoption is almost never by technical merits, but by marketing. So you could make open documented everything but still end up with nobody benefiting from that openness, because a competitor (whether open or not) wipes you out. You saw this happen even in the era where electronic devices were expected to come with full schematics -- there were winners and losers even then.

But, if something has become widespread and well adopted, and it's not open, that's a problem. It absolutely should be opened up and documented. Especially if it's not because the money-grubbing creators of the something are deliberately hiding how it works and locking down control in order to extract more money from everyone else's pockets. The sooner you put an end to that, and the more often you fight against that, the sooner society itself becomes more efficient and fairer for everyone.