ADevWithAnIdea

> hiding use of LLMs

I disagree with this also, but the latter was so obviously wrong that I figured I should leave a reply. We are separate projects and what Asahi does is their business, our interactions will be in upstream projects and follow upstream guidelines.

Claude Design, the only Anthropic product I genuinely like. I spent a LOT of time on those, so I'm glad you enjoyed them! I'm about the least artistic person you ever met in your life (everything in my life is very functional and very unaesthetic) so I'm a rather big AI design tool enjoyer.

I'll add an addendum to the blog post at some point with a more detailed method because there is demand, but the tl;dr is:

- boot macos under hypervisor (detailed guide in my part 1) into single user mode

- write your own metal program and run it as early in boot as you can

- trace all relevant graphics regions

- once you see the first kick, intercept that kick, then capture the full uat state

- reboot the device, then copy that whole uat state back into the machine, every bit exactly where it was

- perform the kick, verify the output page changes as expected

- have the LLM build all the objects itself in python

- repeat with different metal programs until we have all the behavior you want

- for a list of all behaviors you want, just look at the m1/m2 kernel driver and make sure everything they do has an analogue in your codebase

- if there's every any problems, there's a very simple debugging loop: 1. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A REPLAYABLE CAPTURE. if you don't then priority #1 is to get that capture. once you have that capture, it's only a matter of time until it works

The friend I am referring to I met at Stanford around April of 2026 in a dorm event. We've spoken in person exactly once (I use "friend" loosely to describe anyone I've spoken to who I'm not on bad terms with) and at no point did we discuss anything detailed about Apple Silicon. For further context, I left Apple in June of 2025.

I detail most of the development process in part 1:

https://codyho.dev/blog/hypervisor-macbook-neo/

tl;dr you reboot the device with `macvdmtool`, you install m1n1 as the boot object, you talk to the m1n1 proxy over a python shell. I'm documenting the process as I go also (see: the blog posts, also my github repos) both so others can do it and as record of the clean room nature, but this really is just GPT go brrrrr

Right now I'm focusing specifically on the M4 Mac Mini and Neo, I just don't own any M4 Pro or Max hardware. My guess is that most of the drivers will just work on the other platforms, but we'll have to test.

> concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development

This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.

I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.

I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.

TL;DR:

1. We want to guarantee our work is not a "derivative work" of anything Apple wrote.

2. If we look at any Apple binaries, there's no way prove that our code didn't borrow from Apple.

3. Since we didn't look at any Apple binaries, then there's no way our work can be a derivative work-- we didn't even look at their stuff.

Linking to another HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719480

For the kernel driver it's literally just: run the hypervisor, wait for the kick, save the UAT state, replay the whole thing, make sure the output pages change, then just follow the pointer to initdata until you've built the whole tree from scratch. LLM handles the rest.

Great observation, two things:

- During my time at Apple I never saw any of the macOS source code, at all, even for userspace components. I had not even heard of things like SPTM.

- I have not worked there since June 2025

I don't believe that there's any risk due to my former Apple employment. As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code. If I felt there was even a chance that my employment at Apple may have exposed me to relevant internal secrets, I would refrain from contributing to community projects.

Traditional hardware RE centers around heroics by a small number of very smart people, see: marcan, Alyssa Rosenzweig, Asahi Lina, etc. What they did is insanely impressive, and given how hard it was with LLMs I'm sure I would not personally be able to do this work without LLMs. That said, I'm looking forward to a world where the staring at hexdumps and traces can be delegated to LLMs and talented humans can spend their time building as opposed to head banging.

Can't disagree more, but my experiences are my own.

I still can't quite believe it either!

:) I think we have a surprise in store here. Asahi don't have a monopoly over Linux for Apple Silicon, and upstream Linux absolutely does *NOT* ban LLMs.

Of this work? We're taking it all the way to shipping a distro with full hardware support on all released Macs and later to upstream Linux. We've taken significant care to respect Apple's copyright and publicly document all our processes. We don't think this will take too long, our development velocity has been pretty good, see: the GPU driver.

We're available on Discord if you want to help with development! I know what has to be done to make wifi sing and don't think it'll take too long, Niklas already has the DCP covered (or at least all the non laptop bits).

Astra has been insane and I'm loving it so far.