They did. Which is why it’s so baffling that they didn’t document any of this stuff. 5 minutes of documentation by apple engineers on the boot process or GPU would have saved 5 hours of reverse engineering work by the Asahi Linux team.
Seems to me like they can’t decide whether they want Linux on their hardware or not. I bet different people in the org are pulling in different directions.
It’s not baffling at all. Opening the boot chain is work, but making presentable documentation is a lot more. It’s not 5 minutes of work: it’s years of checking the licensing on everything, designing stable APIs that are fit to publish, supporting them, having engineers working on this. You can’t just throw your internal “G13G scheduling pipeline” docs over the wall.
Seems to me like they can’t decide whether they want Linux on their hardware or not. I bet different people in the org are pulling in different directions.