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Escape the walled garden: Freeing the Apple GPU
In 2020, we had free graphics drivers for all major hardware. Enter "Apple Silicon", stage left. The new Macs shipped an in-house GPU with proprietary drivers, no public specs, and no native support for free operating systems. Even worse, the vendor's drivers are not conformant to any industry standard, forcing free software developers to waste time porting their graphics code to run inside the walled garden. What do we do? Reverse-engineer the hardware, of course. Once we dissect the architecture, we can build our own graphics stack, protect software freedom, and beat the big guy with our conformant OpenGL® 4.6 support. In this talk, we'll zoom in on this peculiar GPU and what it means for the fight for free software.
Presented by: Alyssa Rosenzweig
Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.