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Search: “kernel driver”

4 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.

DeepZero: Open-source hunting for vulnerable Windows drivers

DeepZero, a new open-source engine, automates discovery of exploitable Windows kernel drivers for BYOVD attacks using Ghidra, Semgrep, and an LLM.

DeepZero is a free, open-source Python pipeline orchestrator that automates hunting for exploitable Windows kernel drivers relevant to BYOVD (bring your own vulnerable driver) attacks. Its seven-stage YAML pipeline parses PE headers, filters for kernel-mode drivers with IOCTL surfaces, excludes drivers listed on loldrivers.io, then runs headless Ghidra decompilation, Semgrep scanning, and an LLM-based exploitability assessment. The maintainer reports multiple verified vulnerabilities in the Snappy Driver Installer corpus, some still in the disclosure process, and notes findings involving plug-and-play-created device objects may need physical hardware to confirm.

Help Net Security · 4h agoTools

FlashVector: Agent for Hierarchical Model Serving Stack Optimization

FlashVector agent optimizes all layers of Unity's ad-serving stack, delivering up to 2x model-server throughput and 1.98x latency speedup in production.

FlashVector is an agentic system that optimizes performance across GPU kernels, ML framework computation graphs, model servers, and on-demand feature processing. Deployed in Unity's Vector advertising platform, it achieved up to 2x model-server throughput increase, 1.98x latency speedup, and 1.6x feature-store throughput gain. Optimizations spanned NVIDIA Triton's C++ codebase and the Python feature transformation service, demonstrating extensibility beyond single-kernel tuning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 17h agoAI research

You Shall Not Pass into Ring-0! A User Privacy-Friendly Anti-Cheat Architecture for Personal Computers

Tirith replaces invasive kernel-level game anti-cheats with protected VMs and a dual-trusted virtualization monitor, preserving detection and near-native performance.

Researchers present Tirith, an anti-cheat architecture that runs video games in Protected Virtual Machines, sandboxing computations from untrusted root admins, and uses a virtualization monitor trusted by both players and developers to watch for malicious drivers. This removes the need for privacy-invasive ring-0 kernel anti-cheat components while matching their protection against a wide range of cheating mechanisms. To overcome VM stack limitations, the work contributes a security-focused Library OS kernel for games and an efficient graphics sharing pipeline for near-native rendering performance.

arXiv cs.CR · 15h agoResearch