Viewing profile — svenpeter

I work at a unionized company in Germany and didn’t have to join the union or pay any dues to start working. Technically employees who aren’t part of the union aren’t entitled to t…

IIRC we know about their internal Linux port because of some comment left in the open source XNU release.

That merge only has fixed because of how the development model works: there’s a merge window where new features are merged and which then becomes -rc1. After that only fixes are al…

The list was at least updated after iOS: I've found wiibrew.org and hackmii.com in there which are both Wii homebrew sites that became popular around 2008/2009 and probably decline…

Will Deacon replied on Twitter how at least Linux handles this correctly [1][2] and I assume that the same is true for XNU and Windows as well. [1] https://twitter.com/WillDeacon/s…

I don't think ARMv8 requires EL3 but even if it did there is no EL3 on the M1. Booting Windows natively would require Microsoft's support since some rather invasive changes to the …

It’s been a while since my last physics lectures so this might be wrong, but the way i understand it: We don’t have a good model of quantum gravity yet but our best guess is that t…

Yup, I'm pretty sure many software companies have done similar things. It's a bit easier on video game consoles where your software runs on the very same hardware everywhere and yo…

no worries, this stuff happened over a decade ago. I can sometimes barely remember the details :)

> Is it weird that you sound proud about this? Is there something noble about doing work that makes lives harder for hobbyists trying to preserve video games for the future, and ha…

To be fair, we deliberately used very obscure hardware "features" which we knew were not implemented by any emulators and probably not used by any games to build these protections …

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Then this unified MMIO NVMe is "just" emulated inside ANS.

NVMe requires a co-processor (which Apple calls "ANS") to be up and running before it works. This co-processor firmware seems to have a lot of code and strings dealing with PCIe. N…

The "queue" format itself is incredibly similar to the normal NVMe queue. The normal queue is (more-or-less) a ringbuffer with N slots in memory and a head/tail pointer. You append…

Usually, once you can run code in kernel mode it’s just a matter of bringing the hardware back to a sane state. Unfortunately, “just” running code in kernel mode is incredibly hard…

which is not impossible but very unlikely.

That missing patch is the iommu driver which is currently under review and will hopefully make its way to mainline soon. Once that one is merged there's already another series to e…

On the computers (i.e. mac mini, macbook, iMac) Apple ships an unlocked bootloader and we can just install our own bare metal code very early on using their official tools. On the …

Not sure why you're downvoted because I think you ask a legitimate question. To me, it's a combination of various things: I've tried to outline the process I used so that other peo…

fwiw, you can disable almost all of Apple's enhanced security features easily on macOS systems. Their whole design is incredibly neat and well done! If you like these features (or …

> it is, after all, a popular hobby of children who have nothing but time on their hands and access to the Internet. You certainly don’t need to buy hardware or have access to spec…

Thanks a lot! I've been trying to improve my technical writing in the past years and I'm happy to hear feedback like this :)