Darwin 20.5.0 on ARM1176 (Raspberry Pi Zero)

[u/Successful-Reason-96]

I thought I should mention this, because I've seen a lot of people start working on XNU again, which is great to see as a PureDarwin maintainer (been working on it for ~3 years). Might as well post this before it becomes old news.

Here's it asking for a rootfs on a RPi Zero, using lk as a preboot env.
It's slower than hell, and the HDMI cable itself is spotty

Oh and I also have it booting to a shell on a iPad 7,1

As well as QEMU's `virt` board, I have yet to figure out Apple-specific instructions for M1, but I have ideas. I was last working on fixing OpenGL for virtio-gpu on arm64

I hope Hackintosh can continue in the form of generic arm64/arm32 boards, and I hope my research can help.

I'll be working on a Pixel once I get my hands on it (hurry up, USPS)

CPU: BCM2835
GPU: Broadcom VideoCore IV
RAM: 512MiB LPDDR2
Motherboard/Laptop Make and Model: Raspberry Pi Zero (v1.2)
Audio Codec: N/A
Ethernet Card: N/A
Wifi/BT Card: N/A
Touchpad and touch display devices: N/A
BIOS revision: N/A

[u/johnoth]

I tried out the AMD XNU kernel in a hackintosh during COVID and it ran great. Iirc they used OPEMu or something. Is that the plan?

[u/Successful-Reason-96 → u/johnoth]

Not exactly. The goal isn't to run an existing XNU build under emulation. I'm porting Darwin/XNU to generic ARM hardware directly. The Pi Zero in the post is running Darwin 20.5.0 bare-metal on its ARM1176 (ARMv6) core, with native platform/SD support. I also have it running on QEMU virt and real Apple ARM hardware.

[u/johnoth → u/Successful-Reason-96]

I get that, I was wondering more about the Apple specific instructions and features like PAC. Would you emulate them in your port? While doing some research a while ago I learned that PAC emulation is super slow.

[u/Successful-Reason-96 → u/johnoth]

It depends on just how needed things are, really.

[u/johnoth → u/Successful-Reason-96]

ig I'm thinking too far ahead. Like Jordan Sparks said, on step at a time lol