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> macOS uses CPU instructions that aren’t available yet on non-Apple ARM CPUs, so you can’t have hardware accelerated virtualization,

Does anyone know what these instructions are? And could you not trap and emulate them if the hypervisor detects an invalid instruction?



Somewhat related (KVM for iPhone processors): https://alephsecurity.com/2020/07/19/xnu-qemu-kvm/


Bunch of Apple-specific MSRs, mostly.


And some ML acceleration that was built directly as ISA instructions? Not that these would be used in the boot process and basic apps...


Ah OK. Not really instructions then :-)


I noticed he was using -d unimp on the qemu command line so qemu should print unimplemented features when it encounters them. (Of course that only prints them, you'll still need to research / reverse engineer to discover what they are).


So in the future macOS will run on arm64e architecture? Could Linux[1] run on that as well? Any chance of seeing more ARM laptops in the future?

1: https://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port


macOS already runs on arm64e, that's what was given to developers as part of the Universal App Quick Start program.


I think it was Craig Federighi from Apple who said that they don't plan to support booting of any other OS. They want you to use to use their virtual machine manager instead.




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