A team built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0-compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo in roughly a month, producing enough functionality to run WebGL in Chrome and Firefox and to render Minecraft at roughly 200 fps. The work involved clean-room reverse engineering of Apple’s AGX GPU: live probing via a custom hypervisor to capture hardware traces, reconstructing the complex RTKit firmware ABI, and implementing a complete user-space stack (custom IR/shader compiler, command stream builder) plus a Linux kernel driver that talks to the firmware rather than the hardware directly. All development avoided inspecting Apple binaries; traces and reproducible experiments were published so others can verify provenance.
Technically, the A18 Pro firmware ABI proved significantly more complicated than M1/M2 (about 1.5× more structs, twice the pointers, and a more involved submission model), which forced careful capture/replay strategies. Major hurdles were dynamic firmware state after boot, huge compute traces (initially 336 MB) solved by booting single-user and running a minimal Metal compute capture, and finicky partial renders caused by tiled vertex buffer overflow requiring save/resume support. Large-language models (Codex, Claude) accelerated repetitive RE and prototyping, using the hypervisor for systematic debugging, but human guidance was essential. The driver isn’t yet consumer-ready, but the implementation and experiments are available for verification and further development.
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Cloudflare introduces a solution allowing websites to remain discoverable in search engines while blocking AI training crawlers. This helps site owners control their data usage without sacrificing visibility in search results. (blog.cloudflare.com)
Internet access has been restricted in Pakistan-administered Kashmir for over 100 days due to protests demanding electoral reform. The shutdown has disrupted daily life, affecting banking, education, and communication. (aljazeera.com)
The Trinidad police department in Texas was ordered to close after failing to demonstrate any community benefit. The closure followed the arrest of a resident for posting about local water supply issues. (theguardian.com)
Bitcoin's recent rally has slowed as optimism over U.S. cryptocurrency regulation diminishes due to political uncertainties surrounding the CLARITY Act. Investors now focus on potential legislative delays and broader market factors impacting digital asset confidence. (predx-article.fika.bar)
AWS reports it cannot recover some data from its facilities in the Middle East that were affected by an attack from Iran. The incident has impacted data availability for certain customers in the region. (wsj.com)
Rheinmetall has open-sourced its Battlesuite connected weapon system protocol, called onboardapi, which enables standardized communication between sensors and software. The library, built on DDS standards, supports multiple programming languages and ensures backward compatibility for complex hardware and software environments. (rheinmetall.github.io)
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