Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

> by (seemingly) one dev

I think Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina both did pretty substantial work on this?

I believe Rosenzweig was responsible for the user-space bits; this post is about the kernel driver, which (as I understand it) was done entirely by Asahi Lina.

(Both of them deserve a ton of praise, of course.)

I'm pretty sure this post is about both bits. I don't think you can pass that test suite without both bits.

It was passing that test suite when being run as of their XDC talk 10 days ago using only Alyssa's bit. This update shows that when using both bits combined it now passes with the same level of conformance.

At least that's my understanding of it. You're right in that this is about both bits working together, but the person you're replying to is right in the sense that this particular update is showing specifically an update in Lina's bit.

Aren't they the same person though? I've only seen small parts of a presentation, this vtuber stuff is not for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XSJG5xGZfU&t=21330s

They are not.

You're literally linking to a youtube video where 10 seconds later Alyssa is saying "this should all be sufficient proof that I'm not Lina"... and Lina engaged in an interactive Q&A while Alyssa stood around demonstrably not the person responding.

IF Lina had to be an extant member of the Asahi Linux project, it is much more likely that she would be Hector (marcan); Lina and marcan had identical dev environments when she first started making videos and Lina’s introduction to the Asahi Linux YouTube community was her “hacking” one of Hector’s streams. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk)

Ultimately, though, does it matter at all?

Lina was first introduced as an April Fools joke from marcan, but after the positive response from the audience he (or now she?) probably just decided to go why not and stick with the alternate identity. But as you’ve said, it really doesn’t matter.

(Kudos from marcan trying as much as possible to keep the illusion /s: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1582930401118806016?s=46...)

GPU driver is mostly by Alyssa, DCP (display controller) is mostly by Lina.

one "anime" girl, 2 "anime" girls, 10 dev bros, I don't really care at this point. Color me impressed at the skillz required to make this to the point it is in the time it is. Way past anything I might dream about doing myself. So many kudos to any/all involved male/female/other doesn't matter in the slightest for the possibility to use the hardware to whatever I want.

It is impressive. I remember reading something related to new abstractions in chip level. The most of the GPU drivers are actually on some specific chip and it works similarly regardless of the OS. Kernel developers actually develop against this new abtraction layer and not directly against GPU. Does someone has more information about this, or was this nonsense?

It means that the drivers likely have a giant 'firmware' which is really just a closed source driver loaded into the chip, but with a nicer api for the kernel to program against

That's even acknowledged in the tweet thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com