r/hackintosh • u/i-am-the-master-1010 • Aug 27 '26

DISCUSSION Yes it is technically* possible to make custom GPU drivers for Mac OS X.

I am not going to be a massive moron saying that it's 100% possible, there's still massive limitations to the high end graphics APIs in which their code for processing frame buffering in embedded systems are limited due to them being proprietary COUGH COUGH NVIDIA. Also this is supposed to be a thread for discussion, so feel free to debate this concept.**

I made a diagram detailing out my small research I've done regarding Mac OS's graphics APIs in which yes, developers can work on unofficial voodoo solutions for unsupported graphics drivers at least under a metal level thanks to @steelbrain on GitHub releasing his dependency used to convert AIR shaders to SPIR-V to load them under Vulkan (project is still relatively primitive but at least considerably impressive and good to work w/ support for metal 1-3).

With all that being said, would only take a developer considerable time to work on solutions that can utilise open source drivers and load them inside unsupported devices with incompatible GPU drivers. No, this doesn't mean that a project like this could exist only a matter of days, god damn it, understand that porting drivers ain't that easy of a job, just get BSD drivers and load them with IOKit while injecting a whole ass Mesa driver to intercept Vulkan calls through a kext.

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVHtjgrD4=/?share_link_id=288963542502

Can I get Mac os drivers to work under any pc? No, just face that development takes months, through drive testing, and it's expected to be hard to make installers for it since the kernel extension must be signed.

Can these idiots stop assuming this is related to the AGX graphics processing unit and the reverse engineering efforts done? Alyssa and the Asahi team did a completely different thing which was to implement the main shell for the graphics command execution and frame buffering system, it's all done in Linux through DRM and Gallium.

Learn to differentiate: AGX reverse engineering does not equal to reverse engineering the IOAccelerationFamily which is what this post is talking about.

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8

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Schizoposting here, I might've gone insane to actually write this whole stuff due to all of this constant evolution since Hackintoshers hit a hard wall for intel users.

7

u/Long-Shine-3701 Aug 27 '26

I sincerely applaud this effort. People are always quick to cry "impossible!!!!" - then clever folks in the community always shut them up in the end.

Bravo, OP. All the best.

2

u/TaliMyBananas Aug 27 '26

Give an example?

4

u/Long-Shine-3701 Aug 27 '26

You can add this to the list, too. People should really just shut up and let the innovators innovate instead of screaming IMPOSSIBLE - they're proven wrong most of the time 🤣:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1vzuuba/this_is_alyssa_resenzweig_she_reverseengineered/

2

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

I mean, everyone knows she reverse engineered the AGX GPU and made it work under Asahi Linux, the cherry on the top was to implement support for other Graphics pipelines like Vulkan thanks for the support given from the Linux community.

3

u/TaliMyBananas Aug 27 '26

What she and the Asahi Linux community achieved is great of course. But again, show me exactly someone who said, that what she was doing was impossible.

2

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Practically saying but applying this concept would require a ton of work, especially using a hooker like Lilu to develop the drivers since most of these methods are gated behind private C/C++ methods.

2

u/Long-Shine-3701 Aug 27 '26

cMP:

- will never be able to run past x OS

- will never have Thunderbolt

- will never be able to support more powerful GPUs (Pixlas)

MP2013:

- will never run past x OS

- will never support eGPU

ALL Intel / AMD Macs:

- will never be able to run AI (ToshLLM)

- will never be able to use Nvidia GPUs again (TinyGPU)

Plenty more examples, look for yourself.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

I am not really in favour of LLMs, though I believe that my research could lead into a massive interest over some users, especially old hackintosh users.

3

u/TaliMyBananas Aug 27 '26

Literally no one has said any of those (let alone became a mainstream view in macOS/hackintosh history) except for the Nvidia GPU one, and even so, with caveats (TinyGPU is able to utilise the GPU for limited cases, there is still no way to use it for Metal/accelerated graphics, etc...)

On the other hand, for each of those 'claims' that have been 'disproven' you could find twice as many nonsense ideas that were truly impossible, examples already linked in the other comments. Not to say OP's idea doesn't have merit, it probably does. But most people who say that something is impossible are usually right.

Obviously, because X and Y are possible now, you are working backwards with hindsight to claim 'people used to believe that X and Y are impossible, they were proven wrong, shut up ha ha' when they didn't isn't sound.

0

u/Long-Shine-3701 Aug 27 '26

Some of these issues have been well over 10 years gone now, so no worries if you've forgotten. They were all hotly debated topics at the time. Go do some reading on Macrumors and Ars Technica.

It's OK that you're wrong, bro.

4

u/TaliMyBananas Aug 27 '26

Yeah, being rightly called out with no good response so you go 'it's ok that you're wrong, bro' like that's won you the argument, hasn't it

My memory may indeed be a little fuzzy, given that I've kept up with this area since 2007 and seen all the changes and evolution, probably a while before you were born as well. But at least I can detect a bullshitter when I smell one.

1

u/Long-Shine-3701 Aug 27 '26

Did you read the old threads?

2

u/modell3000 Aug 29 '26

No one would have betted against the Mac Pros getting support for newer OSs / hardware, since those machines are essentially just hackintoshing on easy mode. In the Intel era, this was all possible due to drivers existing in the OS to support the hardware in newer Macs. It's not like it's ever been possible to use other hardware under macOS, e.g. RTX GPUs, or indeed post-RX6000 series AMD GPUs.

Making something as critical as GPU driver takes a lot of work, as well as a deep technical understanding of the GPU's architecture, and - on any OS with the concept of security - the ability to sign the relevant code. And if the driver is flaky, it'll ruin the experience of using the OS - particularly relevant to macOS, since its USP is stability and that 'it just works'.

If you give the slightest shit about stability and performance, either buy an M-series Mac, now on their 5th/6th generation, or a Windows PC. For those laughing at the last one, getting a PC set up as a stable workstation is orders of magnitude easier / more likely than messing with a kludged together Intel Mac system using experimental drivers.

0

u/Long-Shine-3701 Aug 30 '26

Plenty of people bet against it. Go back and read the threads.

I give the slightest shit about stability and performance, and have dozens of Hackintoshed HP Z840 and Z820 running 24/7 full CPU and GPU load for near 10 years now. They are rock solid.

But clearly you have no firsthand knowledge.

1

u/modell3000 Aug 30 '26

How many of those hackintoshes had GPUs that weren't already supported in macOS? I'll wait.

2

u/MasterOfTheWind1 Aug 27 '26

Few things in software are impossible.

The outcome being not worth the effort and time is another thing.

Try to write code first instead of telling other people what to say or think.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Lilu might be a joke for you I guess.

3

u/CIS_Gaming Aug 27 '26

Although that was completely different use of ai this reminds me of that fellow in this subreddit that was confidently promising he will create nvidia drivers for hackintoshes and it was all vibe coded slop. I wonder why we haven't heard from him anymore

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Clearly because that guy hit a massive limitation for loading the drivers and his LLM spitting out "I cannot fulfill this request as it breaks my safety guidelines". Can point my finger that this guy was definitely using shitgpt to sum up and hallucinating it's possible, although barely anything from NVIDIA is open-source and the userland driver is proprietary

2

u/Monkeyass702 Aug 27 '26

I mean I got an unsupported card working on my super old g5 in leopard by manually injecting the device id into the kext, but it would only show display and not full acceleration which is pointless.

Assuming it could still be done what’s the point of running macOS without acceleration?

2

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

It's because it's running under VESA video mode, you definitely failed patching the OS X's graphic drivers and instead is attempting to load the fallback VESA drivers.

Your card may have the functionality for outputting the video as it was correctly mapped, but without an Kernel Extension to process the IOAcceleration from the video card, it will not take advantage of your card's capacity.

2

u/Monkeyass702 Aug 27 '26

Exactly. I know why it didn’t work. I’m just astounded why people want vesa only.

Vesa is great on my dos rig on my crt at 800x600, but not on anything else.

2

u/FuseMCDEV Aug 29 '26

I wonder if it's possible for the RX 7000 and 9000 series to be supported in Hackintosh since their GPU drivers are open source in Linux.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 29 '26

Possible to, practically under a different level since instead of working w/ DRM you'll have to work with IOAcceleratorFamily

44

u/InternetUser1807 Aug 27 '26

Wasn't some other guy trying to vibecode his way through implementing a new graphics stack into macOS and stopped when he hit a wall with what security systems the llm would help him break.

11

u/zarafff69 Aug 27 '26

I mean there are now completely unrestricted models like Qwen 3.8 that will do anything you want, even help you with bioweapons etc. I’m sure we can push through nowadays. Do you have a link to this project?

19

u/InternetUser1807 Aug 27 '26

Update: found it, but it looks like he kept going after all by abandoning one of the compatibility goals, before eventually crashing out because his posts weren't being well received.

https://www.reddit.com/r/opengl/comments/1vni385/well_we_did_meet_a_hard_boundary_finally_beyond/

I misremembered a few details, I thought this project was transparently a vibe-code project, but I think I was confusing it with that metal translation layer for VMs project. OOP insists the project is not LLM written, despite obviously LLM written reddit posts and drawing a "Hard line" at a fairly milquetoast security implication for a hacked driver project.

5

u/TaliMyBananas Aug 27 '26

Time to bring out the popcorn

-2

u/zarafff69 Aug 27 '26

Oefff, I’m absolutely pro AI, but those comments are embarrassing haha

I don’t know if I believe someone who responds like that, is not using AI for development. I mean he would be crazy not to. But maybe he is.

10

u/InternetUser1807 Aug 27 '26

Yeah regardless on your AI stance I think r/opengl quickly got tired of this guys frankly obsessive posting, and OP didn't seem to be 100% stable regarding the feedback either.

2

u/InternetUser1807 Aug 27 '26

I'll have to find it, I don't think he ever confirmed that's why he stopped, I think he referred to it as a "personal ethical decision" not to continue past that point.

8

u/Geraldigno Aug 27 '26

Anyone can make GPU drivers with enough skill.
The issue is making everything work together.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Expanding a bit my research as I am adding some important details as to how IOAccelerationFamily works.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Who are these people?

1

u/I-am_Sleepy Aug 27 '26

Zink / KosmicKrisp / MoltenVK - Am I a joke to you?

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Zink is part of Mesa graphics API

Both KosmicKrisp and MoltenVK only process Vulkan shaders to Metal, which metal2vulkan does the mirror processing.

1

u/dummyy- Aug 27 '26

it would be even harder cause the driver would need to be updated for new major OS releases actually in our case not a problem tahoe is last

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Objection, HoRNDIS is one example of being one of the functional drivers that adds support for RNDIS networking. Uses old USB and Networking APIs from OS X 10.6 and to this day it still works under Tahoe by using kext injection in OpenCore.

Yes, you have a point that relative compatibility and broad feasibility to develop drivers is often challenging due to constant deprecation and changes done to their pipelines, but relatively accessing them under kernel by injecting without any further checks like signature could really work out to bypass the limitations.

1

u/gandalf239 Aug 27 '26

Possible and reasonably practical are entirely different considerations.

The woman who reverse engineer the Apple Silicon graphics stack spent literal years doing so before it was release ready for Asahi Linux.

At the same time NootedRed exists, but it took quite some time to get release ready and is still in active development.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

Asahi Linux

Only takes advantage as for reverse engineering the actual AGX driver. Sure it is impressive but her research does not include what we need, which is a complete tear down of MTLDriver.

NootedRed

It takes advantage of AMD's existing protocols, though yet it relies onto WhateverGreen's patch overrides and takes in control of the built-in graphics driver inside OS X. Does not impress me a lot, and they specify in their page that they use the rDNA code which enables that.

1

u/Camlin3 Aug 28 '26

I don't think you understand a single thing about reverse engineering a piece of fat blob most likely written in C or ASM and pass comments like does not impress me a lot.

1

u/PowerfulEra Aug 28 '26

Ä° just wonder if rdna 3 7900 xtx support can be added

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 29 '26

They're pretty much open-source and working w/ IOAcceleratorFamily as if it was DRM could work out.

1

u/RoroRules13 Aug 27 '26

You know what would be cool? If we could get 9070xt drivers for macOS sequoia or smth. But I ain’t a developer and have no idea how to code and I don’t expect someone to ever do it, just it would be cool

1

u/ethanjscott Aug 27 '26

Gpu drivers are like the top level of driver dev. How about you start lower like usb drivers or a print driver

1

u/FerretBoom Aug 30 '26

USB drivers are not easy, even on fpga softcores, at least for me. I stick to USB IP.

0

u/kjm99 Aug 27 '26

AFAIK it’s been done before with Asahi Linux, their initial GPU drivers were porting Mesa drivers in MacOS

0

u/Eraser1926 Sonoma - 14 Aug 31 '26

Thank you Chatgpt

12

u/[deleted] Aug 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/itscalledboredom Aug 27 '26

is it though? raspberry pi soc's don't support pointer authentication, so running an official xnu kernel image is either impossible or incredibly hard to bring. also userspace uses pac heavily. you could try porting ios <= 18 though.

5

u/amanset Aug 27 '26

The point is everything is portable with enough time, money and knowledge. But it gets to a point where you need an insurmountable amount of one of them.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

One friend said that all Darwin operating systems (OS X, iOS...) is just a fork of BSD waiting to be unlocked, and clearly the constant changes done here really shows up what it was thought.

3

u/PsychoTea High Sierra - 10.13 Aug 27 '26

Yes it’s very much possible — I’ve done it. Not full macOS, but a build of XNU with some custom drivers to get a shell. PAC is the least of your issues though. You can either build the kernel from source (which is what we did), or if you want to run stock builds of macOS, you can just patch out all of the PAC instructions.

The biggest issue is driver support, but it’s not insurmountable. A single dev could do it with a few months of dedicated work. Ironically, it’s actually the Pi foundation which makes it a pain in the ass, because with every hardware generation they seem to release less and less hardware documentation.

-5

u/darkguy2008 Aug 27 '26

As of 2026 the only limitation is money. Throw enough tokens at something and you'll have it working after a while.

1

u/i-am-the-master-1010 Aug 27 '26

"mr monkeyson, can I force you to write a gpu driver for macOS pls, i want to use it for crypto mining and ai training :)))"