Two developers built an M4 Mac Mini Linux GPU driver in 30 days

Linux on Apple's latest hardware just took a massive step forward: a working GPU driver built in a single month.

Developers Cody Ho and Niklas wrote a fully compliant OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo. GPU drivers usually take years to build because Apple's firmware interface is notoriously complex. Using a custom hypervisor and clean-room reverse engineering, the pair created a driver fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps and render WebGL in Chrome and Firefox.

Why it matters: Without a dedicated GPU driver, Linux on Apple silicon has to render everything on the CPU, which is slow and drains power. Functional graphics drivers make native Linux a viable daily driver on M4 hardware.

Know this: The code isn't ready for end users yet, but the team is working to package it for general release and plans to add Vulkan support next.

Not bad for 30 days of poking at hardware traces.