I'm Michael, an Australian high school student interested in all kinds of tech! Here's some of the cool stuff I've done:

• Apple security research
  • CVE-2025-43539 | Zero-click memory corruption in AppleJPEG JXL parsing (CVSS 8.8)
  • CVE-2025-43361 | Out-of-bounds read in privileged Audio process from sandboxed application (CVSS 7.8)
  • CVE-2025-43482 | Improper input validation in system Audio daemon (CVSS 5.5)
• Linux kernel
  • Co-authored and led upstreaming of Apple Silicon power supply drivers, enabling battery telemetry, AC adapter monitoring, and charge control. Landed in kernel 7.1 after 7 revisions.
  • Same with keyboard drivers for M2 and M3 Macs, which are quite complicated as they involve a custom proprietary transport protocol (DockChannel) and managing a whole seperate coprocessor which runs Apple's custom embedded operating system (RTKit). Currently under review, targeting 7.4-7.5 for landing.
• rustc_codegen_jvm
  • Compiler (rustc codegen backend) that I built from scratch to compile Rust to JVM bytecode
  • Quite far along, passing 99.81% of upstream coretests and alloctests
  • Supports networking, async/await, threading, unwinding, allocation, etc.
  • Several key architectural innovations, such as "virtual MMU" system to support arbitrary pointer arithmetic on JVM, and custom-designed OOMIR (object-oriented MIR)
• OpenJDK
  • I mainly focus on the HotSpot C2 compiler, helping to give back and improve not only the performance of Rust on JVM, but also the broader JVM ecosystem.
  • I'm most proud of when I improved performance of 128-bit multiplication operations by approximately 1.85x on x86 platforms, which was integrated and will be releasing with JDK 28.
• CryoFlow
  • ISEF 2026 project - 2nd Place Grand Award (Embedded Systems), Special Awards from the Society for Science and the International Council on System Engineering
  • FPGA to accelerate Cryo-EM data processing, featuring custom pipeline using a mix of VHDL and HLS C++
  • Used design elements inspired from Systolic Arrays (Google TPU) and Unified Memory (Apple)
  • ~8.6x improvement in performance per Watt compared to the RTX 3080
  • WebSerial (over USB-UART) dashboard to enable easy use, powered by custom Rust firmware on PS with communicates with PL through AXI4-Stream
  • While it was a cool project, there wasn't product-market fit, as labs which can afford the millions of dollars for a Cryo-EM machine, can afford a GPU cluster and the extra power needed, and would prefer raw speed over efficiency.
• Chromium / libwebrtc
  • Assisted with Interop 2026, landing (at time of writing, 23 September 2026) 22 patches in Chromium and 3 in libwebrtc across WebRTC (main focus), WebTransport, Animation, CSS, Fetch, and more.
    • This helps strengthen spec compliance and increase browser interoperability, which is something that I'm passionate about.
    • You can check the current number by checking my Chromium dashboard or WebRTC dashboard
  • Selected patches:
    • Chromium WebRTC - Report synchronous SDP creation failures
    • Chromium WebTransport - Allow WebTransport streams before ready
    • Chromium CSS - Fix timeline shorthand serialization
    • Chromium Layout - Select aligned snap targets in flat tree order
    • libwebrtc - Keep operations pending through result delivery
• MediaWiki
  • I like contributing to Wikipedia to give back (I'm currently a New Page Patroller), and so I also like implementing improvements in MediaWiki.
  • I picked up a community wishlist task which had been stalled for 4 years, and successfully implemented a new type of Abuse Filter restricted to only oversighters, which required large changes to the legacy AbuseFilter codebase, and now enables effective prevention of doxxing and other serious harassment across Wikimedia and beyond.
  • I also contributed a bit to the Nuke extension (enables mass deletion of pages) to help make it more useful, namely implementing min/max page size filtering as well as a special new mode to allow non-admins to use it.

If you'd like to reach out for any reason, you can reach me at linux479 [at] duck [dot] com.