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2 stories in the last 24h

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

Two developers built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini in one month via clean-room reverse engineering.

Niklas and the author reverse engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and user-space components in about a month, a process that normally takes years, producing an OpenGL ES 3.0 conformant driver fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps on an M4 Mac Mini. The work was done transparently using hypervisor traces without examining Apple binaries, following clean-room practices, and included a custom shader compiler, command stream builder, and a full Linux kernel driver for the firmware ABI. The A18 Pro firmware ABI proved significantly more complex than the M1's, with 1.5x as many structs and twice as many pointers. All experiments and provenance evidence were published in public agx-re repositories.

Saving Jet Fuel

Tutorial optimizes flight paths to cut jet fuel costs using open-source Scikit-decide planning framework and OpenAP aircraft performance models.

A technical walkthrough demonstrates wind-aware flight path optimization using Scikit-decide, an open-source framework for reinforcement learning and automated planning, paired with OpenAP fuel-consumption models built by Dr. Junzi Sun at TU Delft and NOAA wind data. A Boeing 787-9 flying EWR to FCO can require roughly $68K in fuel, and adjusted routing could save thousands. The post uses Python 3.12, DuckDB with spatial extensions, and QGIS for map rendering.