MEASURE THE PULSE

I enjoy following technical discussions on Twitter. In the pandemic era, when we can’t meet up so easily at conferences, this is a good way to keep in casual contact with a number of folks, as well as to gauge the “pulse” of what’s happening in the broader community, beyond the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), or any one specific Linux distro or project list. There are many talented folks who you can interact with directly, including numerous developers.

One of those I enjoy following is Alyssa Rosenzweig. She’s perhaps most famous for her work leading the Panfrost project, which develops Open Source drivers for Arm’s Mali GPUs (used in many phones and other devices, but with a proprietary closed source driver). In addition to Panfrost, she’s known for reverse engineering the GPU in Apple’s M1 processor and writing a driver from scratch as part of the Asahi Linux project. All this, and she also won an award in 2020 as an Outstanding New Free Software Contributor.

Recently, Alyssa published another awesome blog post on the Collabora website, titled Writing an open source GPU

driver – without the hardware, in which she describes the process she followed to reverse engineer the Arm Valhall GPUs (Mali-G57 and G78) by using a combination of analysing a (locked down) phone to understand how the hardware behaves, writing a driver, and then leveraging a tool known as drm-shim to test that driver prior to being able to purchase a laptop featuring the hardware. It’s yet another really nice write-up by someone who’s making an impact in the community.