“As soon as a partial render is required, however, failing to provide this program means the GPU dereferences a null pointer and faults.”
Detailed models crashed the M1 GPU while simple cubes rendered fine. The cause traces back to PowerVR: when the parameter buffer overflows, the hardware does a partial render and needs a helper program nobody had documented. She found it by stomping over Metal’s own GPU memory until Metal broke the same way. Apple publishes none of this. Volunteers are reverse engineering a trillion-dollar company’s hardware so you can run Linux on a computer you paid for.