Crashes, Hangs and Crazy Images by Adding Zero: Fuzzing OpenGL Shader Compilers

Well, this is likely due to the refocus on "Metal". Which is just DirectX _de novo_.

It's not only bugs, it's the lack of features. It's out of date, to the point that companies are no longer releasing games. For instance, Frontier has an Elite: Dangerous version for the Mac. It doesn't have the expansions, due to the lack of compute shaders, which are not supported by Apple's crappy OpenGL implementation.

Not that Macs are good gaming machines. But this only compounds the problem.

It's actually some combination of Apple and NVIDIA drivers, but on OS X, unlike pretty much every other OS, Apple insists on owning the OpenGL entry points and doing a bunch of work in its own driver before calling down into the vendor driver's OpenGL entry points. The vendor driver then has to undo some of the "helpful" things that Apple did, and work around whatever bugs are in the Apple code. For NVIDIA, in particular, the OpenGL driver is pretty much the same between Windows and Linux, and so one shouldn't be much more broken than the other, at least when it comes to core OpenGL functionality. But the OS X driver can't take as much advantage of the common code because of the Apple code that it has to deal with.

Sorry, but this has been bothering me for a long time and I would like to address it here.

The myth that Apple writes their own drivers for non-Apple GPUs is absolutely untrue, and I am amazed that it is so widespread when there is very little justification for it.

Apple's involvement with the graphics stack is about the same amount as Microsoft's. They provide the common APIs and the OS support, but the hardware is the vendor's responsibility.

There was precisely one moment in time when this was at least a third true: When Intel had subpar GPUs and offensively bad drivers. Since then, the work has transitioned back to Intel.

Nvidia writes the drivers for the Nvidia GPUs. AMD writes the drivers for the AMD GPUs.

Why are their drivers horrendously bad? Well, for Nvidia, Apple is such an increasingly small market that there is very little financial incentive for Nvidia to care. For AMD, there is slightly more of a reason to care because any market is a good market for them, and I speculate that this is a large part of the reason we've seen fewer and fewer Nvidia cards in Apple products: Apple can get AMD to care, but not Nvidia. When you only use non-Intel or non-Apple GPUs in a very tiny percentage of your products, it's hard to justify paying a ton of money out to incentivize a vendor to care.

There is very little reason why AMD or Nvidia or even Intel would share enough details about their recent hardware with a company that is becoming increasingly self-sufficient.

There are plenty of feedback loops at play here, and plenty enough reasons to see why non-Apple graphics drivers on Apple platforms would be poor. I can't for the life of me see why the assumption that Apple is writing these drivers would make sense.

That still gives the attacker the ability to emit arbitrary GPU machine code.

I am not familiar with the details of GPUs, but it would not suprise me if arbitrary code execution on a GPU can lead to root access on the main CPU. Anyone know if there is any protections against this (or if it is architectually impossible)?

Are you rendering natively or through ANGLE? OpenGL or DirectX? Which kind of NaNs?

Much better, thanks for posting