One month, two developers: Linux gets a working GPU driver for the M4 Mac mini, running Minecraft at 200fps
Cody Ho and Niklas say they built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for the M4 Mac mini and MacBook Neo in about a month, a process that normally takes years: Chrome and Firefox run WebGL with working compositing and Minecraft reaches 200fps. The work reverse-engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and user space in a verifiably clean-room way, using hardware traces from a hypervisor and an LLM coding agent, Codex, as a tireless lab assistant that replayed firmware state until the driver could build it from source. The driver is not yet end-user ready, but all experiments are published in the agx-re repositories, and the r/linux thread debating the AI-assisted clean-room claims and the credit due to the Asahi Linux pioneers is already live.
Two developers have produced a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant GPU driver for Apple's M4 chip in about a month, and it runs Minecraft at 200 frames per second 1. Cody Ho and Niklas published the work alongside their code, with driver commits running through September 15
2, and they also have Chrome and Firefox running WebGL on the M4 Mac mini with working compositing, on a Linux kernel driver they wrote for the GPU's firmware
1. The code is not ready for end users, and the 200fps figure is the pair's own benchmark. The number that matters more is the calendar: working OpenGL ES 3.0 took the volunteer Asahi Linux project roughly twenty-nine months from the January 2021 start of the work its first progress report covered, a gap of nearly thirty to one
3
4. That gap is the story, and it was not bought with easier hardware.
What "compliant" means here, and what it does not
References
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ProvenBrief (2026). "One month, two developers: Linux gets a working GPU driver for the M4 Mac mini, running Minecraft at 200fps." ProvenBrief. https://provenbrief.com/story/one-month-two-developers-linux-gets-a-working-gpu-driver-for-the-m4-mac-mini-run
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