At age 20, she reverse-engineered the Apple GPU. At age 40, I got the LED to blink on my Arduino.

Of you look at all of the work behind Asahi, it's incredible. I'm so grateful for heroes like Alyssa who are saving millions of computers from landfills when Apple no longer supports them

Name is misspelled in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig.
Also, wow, impressive.

Sometimes I think I'm smart then I hear stories like this and I'm humbled.

She is a hero and a legend. It just makes me think, it's so sad that we live in a world where the most altruistic, talented, and capable people make less than those that are the best at taking advantage of the system and others for their own greed.

And beside those who survive (and provide us with great software), let us spare a thought for the ones who didn't, proof the opensource community can be an evil pit of haters: marcan and AsahiLina.

Both quit for different reasons, but both did it facing extremely unpleasant behaviours.

As a regular Asahi user (m2pro mbp), I literally felt the project slowing down when they quit.

An outcome of that crisis was the buildup of an organised directorial structure, with funding through the "Open Collective" organisation. That's good, and it's full of good people in there. Alyssa is an admin now btw.

Let us wish them all the best (and strength against all evil neckbeards).

Support them if you can!

Some missing links:

• https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux

Alyssa Rosenzweig, GPU lead. Alyssa is a Linux graphics hacker. After reverse-engineering the Arm Mali GPUs and building the free Panfrost driver for them, she did the same magic trick on the Apple GPU and built the userspace Asahi graphics drivers.

- https://asahilinux.org/about/

IIRC Apple were refusing to implement open standards because they were trying to force developers to use their proprietary Metal API.

Transphobes can fuck right off. The fact that a SINGLE person contributed this much says quite a lot about their own abilities, and whether they are trans or a woman is irrelevant.

Alyssa Rosenzweig. Not Resenzweig. It means Twig of Roses. Here's her website: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/

So encouraging the bright young minds that are still being spawned. Amazing on her.

Her live streams are something else

We need more people who know how to reverse engineer

very based

personally grateful as i daily drive asahi linux

posting this comment from an m2 macbook pro running fedora asahi

I've always wondered how the fuck people do that? Absolute wizards.

She’s amazing. Also fascinating life story, came out as transgender at 10, was raised Jewish but she is now a Quaker

Alyssa reverse-engineered Apple's M1 GPU with no public documentation and developed an open-source Linux driver.

Be like Alyssa.

I'd rather watch her do that than someone doing triple saltos at the olympics.

This is way more impressive. 10/10

clearly she is on the spectrum..

Immense respect!

It's an amazing accomplishment, but if anybody is wondering why it's not flat-out impossible, she very likely was snooping on how it was controlled by existing drivers, either by looking at the software side, which honestly, I'm less familiar with, or by using something like a logic analyzer, which can be used to record signals being sent to the hardware directly. So, if she did it that way, she didn't reuse the code of the existing driver, but analyzed the output. I've had to debug some drivers in the past with a logic analyzer, and just that was a lot of work.

If she did it without existing drivers, then it would have been an absolute slog, I think bordering on impossible. You'd have to guess every signal. GPUs may be more specialized than CPUs, meaning that their instruction set will be smaller, but that would be insane.

Truly doing the lords work here.