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?
kccqzy · 2h ago
Yes I think so. Her resume says she started working for Intel on open source graphics driver this month.
monocasa · 38m ago
Good luck to her. That's one of the pieces of Intel I think will survive its slow motion implosion.
judge123 · 1h ago
The author basically speedran modern graphics APIs on 'impossible' hardware and then just... walks away. Total mic drop.
No comments yet
allenrb · 2h ago
Not much to say beyond a hearty “well done, you!” That, and looking forward to see what’s next.
ornornor · 1h ago
Pretty cool. She’s achieved more at 23 than I have after over a decade in the industry. What a talented engineer.
iwontberude · 50m ago
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.
tiffanyh · 41m ago
Kind of amazing Alyssa didn’t end up working at Apple (instead of Intel).
ninjin · 10m ago
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.
wmf · 30m ago
Maybe she doesn't want to.
ActorNightly · 2h ago
Im glad she stepped away from Asahi linux. Its absolutely great from a techincal perspective and the progress that team has made, but talented people like her shouldn't be trying to reverse engineer software/hardware from shitty anti-consumer company that can make the entire project work in a heartbeat by publishing documentation, in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up.
ronsor · 2h ago
> in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up
To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.
overfeed · 33m ago
Fortunately for her, Intel - her new employer has "fabs at home". Though on older nodes, TBF.
Tiberium · 1h ago
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).
GeekyBear · 1h ago
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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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
zozbot234 · 1h ago
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.
laweijfmvo · 1h ago
i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around
GeekyBear · 2h ago
You set an ambitious goal and executed beautifully despite a very busy schedule.
Well done.
jimmydoe · 1h ago
Lucky you, Intel.
Quizzical4230 · 2h ago
What a legend in the making!
rowanG077 · 1h ago
Honestly kind of heartbreaking to see her leave asahi Linux. She has done insane work building the vulkan driver from scratch. I wish her well working at Intel. If I ever buy an Intel GPU I can rest much easier it will work well on Linux. If she is working on the Linux driver stack that is.
tiahura · 2h ago
Congrats on a job well done.
brcmthrowaway · 2h ago
Does Xe HPG compete with NVIDIA?
wmf · 1h ago
Xe HPG is also known as A750 and B580 so yes, it competes with the 3060/4060/5060.
mrheosuper · 2h ago
[flagged]
dang · 2h ago
> I wish i had half of the energy of this guy
Trolling will get you banned here, so please don't.
mrheosuper · 1h ago
i swear i'm not trolling, i had no idea the author is woman.
dang · 3m ago
Ok, sorry for misinterpreting you. One can only pattern-match and sometimes the pattern doesn't match.
No comments yet
To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.
> 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.
https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/
the great thing is, you can!
> 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
Well done.
Trolling will get you banned here, so please don't.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...