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I Came, I Prompted, I Left Part 1: Building a Hypervisor for the MacBook Neo

codyho.dev

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Re: I Came, I Prompted, I Left Part 1: Building a Hypervisor for the MacBook Neo

#2
This is great. I've been trying to get Linux on my M4 Pro mini with moderate success (NVMe and all cores working, but display and wifi only via USB adapters), and recently it's been a slow process trying to get the hypervisor running far enough to watch macOS bring up the hardware. These resources should help a lot, and it's probably time to swap out Opus for Astra.

Re: I Came, I Prompted, I Left Part 1: Building a Hypervisor for the MacBook Neo

#3

This is great. I've been trying to get Linux on my M4 Pro mini with moderate success (NVMe and all cores working, but display and wifi only via USB adapters), and recently it's been a slow process trying to get the hypervisor running far enough to watch macOS bring up the hardware. These resources should help a lot, and it's probably time to swap out Opus for Astra.

We're available on Discord if you want to help with development! I know what has to be done to make wifi sing and don't think it'll take too long, Niklas already has the DCP covered (or at least all the non laptop bits).

Astra has been insane and I'm loving it so far.

Re: I Came, I Prompted, I Left Part 1: Building a Hypervisor for the MacBook Neo

#6
post #5

Hey, I enjoyed reading through your blog entry. What do you see as the natural conclusion of this work so far? How far do you think you would be interested in taking it, provided enough tokens and time?

Of this work? We're taking it all the way to shipping a distro with full hardware support on all released Macs and later to upstream Linux. We've taken significant care to respect Apple's copyright and publicly document all our processes. We don't think this will take too long, our development velocity has been pretty good, see: the GPU driver.

Re: I Came, I Prompted, I Left Part 1: Building a Hypervisor for the MacBook Neo

#7
Great read. This is (unbelievably) impressive. Both from the model and the human. Congratulations. I also liked the postscriptum about the GPU driver.

Mac hardware is some of the best there is, but I lost faith in macOS around 2015 when I experienced a bug where XNU would shut down my device without warning if the wireless driver produced an invalid packet. (The shutdown code was in the open-source XNU part of Darwin. I don't know why the invalid packet was produced, perhaps there was a hardware issue, but the response shouldn't have been to hard reset the device immediately.)

Running Linux on this hardware, and being to use most of its capabilities, is awesome. Thanks to all the AsahiLinux contributors (directly and indirectly) for their work.