What an end to an era. It's crazy to think she started this journey at 18 and now finished 5 years later. Not many people believed they would be able to make the GPU work in Asahi linux. Kinda curious what her "Onto the next challenge!" link means. Is she working for Intel Xe-HPG next?
Yes I think so. Her resume says she started working for Intel on open source graphics driver this month.
Wish her the best with this. Intel staying competitive in GPUs can only benefit the consumer. Those who want a mid-tier graphic card, without paying to compete with AI use cases, may not a huge group, but we do exist! Those who use desktop Linux may be a small group among that small group, but we do exist!
Too bad it was not Apple who hired her for M4, but in business leaders are always the most closed ones.
Thanks Jesus it's Intel and not Apple, Intel has been extremely good at working upstream and has immense contributions in the Linux kernel, mesa, and elsewhere. Wasting such talent on Apple would make the world worse for us all.
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From what I recall, Apple forbids its employees from participating in open source work it doesn't approve of. And given Apple's culture of secrecy, its agenda of maintaining a walled garden with their products, and her work basically contradicting the two, I doubt her being hired by Apple would benefit anyone other than Apple.
Apple is too much about beeing closed and creating barriers not sure that would have been a good fit. Plus that's a good way to flee a country quickly degrading.
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Good luck to her. That's one of the pieces of Intel I think will survive its slow motion implosion.
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I just hope that Intel doesn't squander the talent like they did with Jim Keller.
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From "draw a triangle" to upstream Vulkan on M1. Practically, this makes the Venus/virtio path viable for guests on Apple Silicon (no passthrough in VZ), which is what many people actually need.
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This is an incredible achievement... not just for the technical depth, but for what it represents. Alyssa's work is nothing short of inspiring. The way she combined deep technical insight with years of dedication has not only brought open-source graphics to Apple Silicon, but also lit a fire under reverse engineers and open-source developers.
She has shown a whole new generation that curiosity and persistence can break barriers. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the developments these past several years. Massive respect to her and everyone who made this possible, and kudos on her new position at Intel.
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The author basically speedran modern graphics APIs on 'impossible' hardware and then just... walks away. Total mic drop.
Switching to work on Intel GPUs is not walking away.
It is accepting a new challenge.
It is walking away from her user base. (I’m not complaining — I’m an open source dev too and recognize I have no right to put demands on her time. But what is the future for Asahi Linux after this? I don’t see one.)
1. student at uoft 2. a lead in a job at Collabora 3. very succesful and ambitious hobby project
how tf does she juggle and managed to do all this? I can barely do one of the above properly.
One of the few people who are actually competent.
Although most likely she’s well compensated, and doesn’t have to waste time on useless efforts at work, this level of discipline and striving towards a goal is just very rare in general.
Possibly also no family, limited social life and no other hobbies.
For myself, when I lived on a different continent to my family, had limited social life and job with strictly set hours, it was much easier to have the time needed to make significant progress on a hobby.
However, discipline is an enormous factor too, actually using that extra available time on something “productive” is no easy feat.
Now I have kids and live in the same area as my parents and siblings again, entirely happy, but less free time.
One of the unspoken benefits of being young, you're unlikely to have grown into a management position and can focus on not-management stuff.
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2021 and 2022 was also when many places were only just coming out of COVID lockdowns. I remember how much dead time I had back then. I used it to watch lots of series and youtube videos. I wish I had the discipline and motivation to work like she did during that area with all that free time.
Yeah same. I made a dent in my gaming backlog and TV shows and built a gaming computer that has only ever been used to play Factorio (notably, a game that can probably be played without a GPU).
Half of me kinda wants another lockdown so I can do more discipline-y stuff but the other half is like, dude you're just gonna waste it playing more games. I just gotta face the music - I'm just not disciplined and I just don't have the drive.
She does a bunch of social media stuff with her girlfriend on top of that, so “limited social life and no other hobbies” may not be a good description.
Many people are competent. She's exceptional.
Ignorant comment. I'll happily be incompetent if it means I have those things
Sounds like one of those mythical 10x engineers!
Perhaps, "Deep Work" by Cal Newport can explain that.
Pretty cool. She’s achieved more at 23 than I have after over a decade in the industry. What a talented engineer.
No clue who you are, but real talk she’s achieved more than I will in my entire life. I’ve been in the industry for decades.
Just to say a big thank-you to the Asahi team, and especially for the GPU work. It is still on my list to get back to some OpenGL dev work. Especially since I recently made fedora-asahi remix my daily driver, and I have to say it is amazing. It feels like I once again own my computer.
Their work has inspired me to continue bashing away at my Zig PinePhone code, although I'll never have the skills to get it's GPU running anything beyond a poke'd framebuffer.
That checklist of supported APIs in Asahi is mind blowing, especially in such a short timeframe. Again, well done, thank-you, and best of luck at intel.
She just started working at Intel in August and has already accomplished more than most would in a year[1]. Incredible!
Not much to say beyond a hearty “well done, you!” That, and looking forward to see what’s next.
Inspiring stuff! I didn't even expect basic Linux support on M1 to be so good in such a short time-span, leaving graphics aside. I was very pleased when I tried booting up Asahi on M1 a couple months back and went on to get work done in it and even enjoy some games.
Thanks for all your amazing contributions Alyssa and all the best for the road ahead!
Alyssa is such an inspiring individual. I'm glad she's working on the things that interest her.
What a project. Of all of the IT work that I'm aware of I have a hard time choosing between this and Fabrice Bellard's output, both are - for me at least - equally impressive.
Kind of amazing Alyssa didn’t end up working at Apple (instead of Intel).
They seem closely aligned with the Free Software Foundation (FSF), so I could very well imagine that being a major ideological reason not to want to work with Apple. Yes, Apple sometimes upstream patches and they do contribute to open source here and there, but they certainly are no FSF poster child. Intel on the other hand are about as open as it gets when it comes to their track record in the graphics space. I personally have nothing but admiration for Rosenzweig's work and I hope they will continue to find environments where they can flourish and do great things in the years to come.
Alyssa's post mentions how lots of the work she's done has at least started as side projects while she's working on something else (Panfrost while at high school, M1 drivers while at Collabora). Obviously I'm not her so I can't say anything specific to her. In general, Apple doesn't allow its developers to work on open source projects on the side while employed at the company. I think this is a stupid idea that costs them a lot of talent, but I doubt Apple cares what I think. I've seen multiple cases where an active open source contributor gets hired by Apple, then their presence in open source communities vanishes. Based on all the open source work she's done so far, I think it would take a lot to make her stop all contributions like that.
Maybe she didn’t pass a leetcode interview. :p
You do have to wonder how that kind of interview would go. Hopefully it would be actual engineers that created what she reverse engineered instead of some gatekeeper trying to one up her somehow.
Maybe she doesn't want to.
You set an ambitious goal and executed beautifully despite a very busy schedule.
Well done.
Sorry to hijack, but since the topic is related: is the development of Asahi Linux still actively ongoing, or has slowed down a lot? The progress for M1 and M2 was steady and now almost everything is done, but the M3+ work still seems to not have started. And with major contributors leaving the project I'm kind of worried for the future of Asahi (on newer Apple hardware).
The new leadership team set a short term goal of getting their existing work upstreamed, which seems to be going well.
> Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term.
https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
While we still have quite a way to go, this progress has already made rebases significantly less hassle and given us some room to breathe.
Found out from some Reddit discussions that the developers aim to first upstream everything for M1/M2 to the kernel, and as of https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/:
> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
So if the discussions are true, it can take years for the developers to finish M1/M2 upstreaming with all the Linux kernel bureaucracy. That is, unless they decide to start working on M3 before finishing the upstreaming
Makes sense, every patch they upstream is less maintenance and forward-porting work that they have to do. Keeping a downstream kernel up to date is very painful, even one that's "near mainline" as with Asahi's.
i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around
I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel. Forget the hostile nature Apple has proven to possess when consumers dare treat their hardware as if paying for it makes it their own.
Qualcomm has been beating the marketing drum on this instead of delivering. Ampere has delivered excellent hardware but does not seem interested in the desktop segment. The "greatest Linux laptop around" can not be some unmaintained relic from a hostile hardware company.
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I'd pay easily let's say $100-200 a year to have linux running on modern apple laptops with full features. I'm sure I'm not alone. Their hardware, "our" OS would be perfect. Well, except notch and lack of OLED - but, reportedly that's in the works too.
the macbook pro uses MiniLed, in term of contrast, it's quite good, much better than ips.
Macbook pro display is one of the best laptop display.
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The M3+ GPU is also very different. So while it may be true that the driver development for M1/M2 is now more or less complete as OP says, future work along the same lines will very much be needed.
>The M3+ GPU is also very different.
Any sources for that? I'd be quite surprised if Apple had radically altered the architecture.
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May I ask something, I want an apple silicone MacBook Air and I am probably just be running Linux on it, what are pros and cons of getting an m1 vs m2? Except for more ram or so. Thx
The short answer is that it's just a stupid idea (and a waste of money). Asahi only works somewhat ok on M1.
Agreed, it is not that stable/usable. I tested it on M1 Pro and was hopeful, but after some years I realized it is not viable for daily use. Many things still don't work and I doubt that they will any time soon. Last year I was given M4 Pro at work and it is not supported at all.
Looking at the drama and people stepping down, I don't think MacBooks will be properly supported on Linux in this decade.
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Sorry but I just can let it, I bought a Microsoft dev kit 2023 just to test hundreds of gigabytes of windows software I’m responsible for would deploy on it with the system center :D If that software would also Work ofcourse is another thing. :D
Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.
macOS as UNIX is pretty fine for anyone that is happy with UNIX, and isn't looking for yet another Linux distribution.
Now anyone that treats it with the attitude that whatever Linux distros do is UNIX, there are enough surprises in there.
m2 has magsafe
M2 Air has magsafe. M1 Air does not.
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My M1 Pro has MagSafe.
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What is this, quora ?
>For years I juggled my courses with my part-time job and my hobby driver
Man I wish i had half of the energy of this author.
> I wish i had half of the energy of this guy
Trolling will get you banned here, so please don't.
i swear i'm not trolling, i had no idea the author is woman.
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i think it's a woman?
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(Why) are the M3 and M4 really that different from M1 and M2?
They’re significantly different GPU architectures. They added support for hardware features like mesh shading, raytracing and better shader occupancy/dynamic caching.
Beyond that, each M series generation also brings more of the system into the SoC. For example, the entire storage controller is part of the SoC in the M1, but the M2 brought in the trackpad controller as well.
Bringing more functionality into the SoC has many advantages but it does make it more difficult to target because you can’t just make use of existing off the shelf controller knowledge to apply to it.
I'm curious, why are not these people hit with C&D from Apple?
And other great projects, like Corellium (Actual iOS VM, not that crap Apple makes) are hit hard with lawsuits etc.
(You know, great project for these people who is still RE iOS for 0days and report them to Apple, which is behind me long time ago, reporting 0days for peanuts, yeah right :) )
The Asahi team had made comments that it’s clearly Apple is ‘silently encouraging’ what they’re doing.
With all of Apple’s secure boot stuff they had more than enough ways tot totally squash running alternate OSes on the machines like a bug.
Instead they seem to have gone out of their way in a few places to make it not only possible but secure.
They’ll NEVER say anything publicly, or give documentation, but they’re leaving doors open on purpose.
If I had to guess. One seeks to reverse engineer hardware to run an open source OS. The seeks to emulate a platform to run a proprietary closed source OS.
If I remember correctly, Apple at the introduction of M1 made some explicit statements about the hardware not being locked down. Something along the lines of nothing preventing Linux to run on it.
I remember apple even made some change that asahi devs were really happy and said "this is for us" (marcan's tweet iirc)
Completely different projects in terms of what they’re providing.
Correlium was selling and distributing access to Apple’s software along with security bypasses.
Asahi is not redistributing any Apple IP, are using Apple sanctioned methods to run, and are not commercial.
Biggest thing is Asahi project is not a for-profit venture. It also mutually benefits Apple since that encourages hardware sales from non-traditional customers.
Corellium being a commercial product (and thus a company you can sue) probably made it easier.
The Apple GPU stuff is amazing, but I wish the rest of linux-on-apple work did better.
For example neither suspend nor hibernate works in Apple hardware, which means if you put the laptop away for a day or two the battery will die and you'll lose everything you were doing.
Huge respect for her. I consider myself a talented software engineer. I can’t get anywhere close to this accomplishment.
Genuine question: is she a once-in-a-generation prodigy? We forget this class of people indeed exists. As fellow professionals are we inspired or deeply ashamed of ourselves?