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Comment by tw1984 | Hacker News Reader

tw1984

truly incredible, for less than two years, a group of talented engineers managed to release the world's first GPU driver in Rust by reverse engineering apple hardware known for its opacity. oh, they also happened to have the free time to port Linux to Apple hardware.

now I just have one question - when this wonderful work will be merged into the mainline kernel.

(PLEASE - no one cares who is Lina, we've been there many times, let's don't do it again here in this thread. thanks!)

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> no one cares who is Lina

I couldn't care less who she is, but I'm pleased they're giving more status updates in written form.

> when this wonderful work will be merged into the mainline kernel

Last year, they already merged part of their work: https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/09/asahi_linux_merged/

But I haven't seen anything since. It's the stated goal, though.

Provided Linus Torvalds has been test driving it, I'd expect Asahi to be merged in sooner than later...

Presumably GP means the GPU driver specifically.

There's a table here that shows not only what's supported vs. not, but also which minimum kernel version or linux-asahi/asahi-edge release it's in: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

Who is Lina? :-)

Edit: honest question...

I'm not sure if this is an elephant-in-the-room sort of thing of if people legitimately haven't picked up on it, but if you listen to the speech patterns and accent that Lina presents, (s)he speaks exactly like marcan. You can listen for yourself and form your own opinions, but I am firmly in the camp of "Lina is marcan".

Lina also lives in Tokyo, Japan; curiously just like Marcan.

What are the odds of two of the brightest kernel developers living in the exact same city? ;)

Well, it is the most populous city in the world.

???? what are the odds that a tech metropolis with a population of more than 10 million people has 2 people that are proficient enough to contribute to the linux kernel at a high level? i would say very high. i don't have an opinion on whether they are the same person or not, but your logic is hilarious.

There are only a handful of people in the world that can do this type of work and the odds of both of them being into live streaming and Anime is exactly 0. I have no idea why marcan decided to make his reversing magic unwatchable but I hope it stops soon. That said, he doesn't try to keep it a secret: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1509926572488556546

look at the date

So you actually think marcan gave Lina his streaming API key to pull off this April fools prank? Do you also think they conspired to use the same DE, editor, and tooling from the start to fool us all?

Honestly? I don't care, you're probably right but if he wants to keep this double personality that's cool, who cares

I only care because I enjoyed watching him reverse engineer in his easy to understand normal unmodified voice.

If Lina is an Apple employee or otherwise has access to Apple trade secrets, it would be a huge issue.

Merging code from an unverified source that is purportedly submitting a clean room implementation would be quite irresponsible.

Marcan has been explicit in that he knows who Lina is and has indicated that they have been in the same room together. This scenario is not a risk.

Others have discussed in here the speculation around Lina's identity if you care about the specifics for whatever reason. Personally, I don't think it's particularly important.

See if "Marcan said it's fine" flies with legal.

The Linux kernel doesn't allow for anonymous or pseudonymous contributions. It does allow for organizations to contribute on behalf of people working for or through them.

If Asahi wants to submit this upstream, then they and Marcan can put their name to it. Hector Martin or another person at Asahi would be the name on the git commit, and they would almost certainly be taken at their word that there is no concern with the merge around Lina's identity.

It's not like other commits which are done from clean room re-implementations are requiring a background check on the person submitting it.

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