Yet another Hacker News

A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs

64 points iceboundrock 3 hours ago 21 comments

iceboundrock 3 hours ago | parent

A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs. It is a UEFI boot program with an arm64-to-x86-64 translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple silicon hardware. macOS and most apps start, but it is slow and needs much more testing, as of v0.1.0

stingraycharles 58 minutes ago | parent

Is the intent to support running macOS on it, or rather for e.g. Linux that targets Apple Silicon?

perfsakuya 3 minutes ago | parent

To support running the Apple Silicon version of macOS on x86-64 PCs.

orionblastar 3 hours ago | parent

This repository needs a star and a follow. It stops Intel Macs from becoming obsolete, but it is slow and buggy.

rbanffy 2 hours ago | parent

I don’t think there is anything that can make Intel Macs not obsolete. Embrace it - that’s their charm and you should use them as they were intended to be used, and experience them as they were designed, as artifacts of their time.

iceboundrock 2 hours ago | parent

I installed CachyOS on my MacBook 16,1, and it feels much faster than with macOS, but the D side is still hot though.

LeFantome 50 minutes ago | parent

No thank you. They can sit in a museum 30 years from now. Today, they are still amazing and productive machines (once you get macOS off them).

code_duck 1 hour ago | parent

Apple still supports the latest ones up to Tahoe, and probably security updates for a few years. You can install Windows 10 (no idea about 11) but that is only updated through next year. After that, there's Linux, of course.

1over137 28 minutes ago | parent

macOS does get some security updates for the non-latest version, but it does not get all security updates.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...

yjftsjthsd-h 3 hours ago | parent

So, basically an emulator layer that doesn't need a host OS? (I'm not really interested in running Darwin, but that's a cool concept)

cromka 2 hours ago | parent

"An ahead-of-time and just-in-time compiler translates arm64e code to x86-64."

No, not the same, actually. It's more of a Rosetta, but other way round, if I understand this right.

yjftsjthsd-h 1 hour ago | parent

Rosetta is an emulator (or, I suppose, a series of emulators), i.e. a piece of software that makes a computer pretend to be another kind of computer. This is also a bit of lower level software that makes a (x86_64) computer pretend to be a different kind of computer (aarch64), in this case, by AoT and JIT translation, though that's an implementation detail. What distinction are you trying to make?

throwaway27448 6 minutes ago | parent

Is this not how qemu works? Is rosetta not considered an emulation layer? For all its name suggests otherwise, I would certainly refer to wine as an emulator, and it also uses these techniques.

schmeichel 2 hours ago | parent

Huge. I have been desperately looking for a project like this to be able to use https://github.com/seedds/nxnative to be able to play my copy of BOTW on IOS. Thank you for sharing this, I will be trying it this evening.

sneurlax 2 hours ago | parent

Is this really needed? I got it working on macOS pretty easily without this. It's all in private repos tho, not exactly easy to share by URL unless you're willing to sign up for a gitea.

rbanffy 2 hours ago | parent

Sounds like a great use for those new Epyc processors with 256 cores…

jamesy0ung 2 hours ago | parent

I noticed Golden Gate still ships with an x86_64 kernel (not kernelcache), I wonder if this is any useful

james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % sw_vers ProductName: macOS ProductVersion: 27.2.1 BuildVersion: 26B131 james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % file /System/Library/Kernels/kernel /System/Library/Kernels/kernel: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64 james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % strings /System/Library/Kernels/kernel | grep "Darwin" @(#)VERSION: Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:40:09 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_X86_64 Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:40:09 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_X86_64 Darwin

vintagedave 1 hour ago | parent

This is fascinating. If x64 isn’t supported in Golden Gate why is this present?

stingraycharles 1 hour ago | parent

Not saying this is the reason, but we build and test and release our software on platforms nobody uses, as it catches rare compiler / memory / UB bugs we otherwise wouldn’t have (eg win32 and FreeBSD)

1over137 31 minutes ago | parent

Lots of people use FreeBSD :)

ndiddy 59 minutes ago | parent

Reminds me of how some of the dev versions of Snow Leopard still boot on PowerPC.