Some Open-Source Projects Begin Quickly Working Towards macOS ARM64 Support

[CommunityMember]

rumor is that secure boot can be disabled

Might be so for the development systems (just like the original Intel based development systems for the power -> x86 transition had a number of restrictions disabled), but given Apple's penchant for lockdown across their entire line of hardware, I suspect that the only way to boot non-Apple OS's on mac hardware of the future will involve some new Apple Silicon Jailbreak community.

[ireri]

So that is why I am interested in knowing if Apple will even let us boot alternative operating systems. Otherwise it is a useless paperweight clogging up storage for the next 5 years haha.

They have said on a recent podcast that "there will not be direct boot for alternative OS" that the virtualisation (they are working on) is the way; be it Windows, Linux or other, It sounded to me that they said the boot loader will be blocked maybe like Chrome books do or worse, I don't know, I would not hold my breath any way.

Somewhere in this podcast (English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg9F1Qjv3iU
Or summarized in this tech site (Spanish): https://www.genbeta.com/mac/apple-co...-versiones-arm

[Awesomeness]

Looks like the people at Codeweavers saw the light last year (or got tipped off) when they decided to port WINE to ARM.

Dude, that has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with this thing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surf...ro-x/processor

[V1tol]

Apple said more Intel coming, not more x86 coming.

Rumor is that iMac and MBP are the first systems to move to ARM.

Maybe, but rumors also say about AMD APU support in MacOS kernel https://twitter.com/_rogame/status/1225381275617415168

[Awesomeness]

The current Windows/ARM laptops can run Linux, although hardware support is iffy (although it's been improving.) I expect similar to be the case with the Apple machines; rumor is that secure boot can be disabled, but I wouldn't expect there to be Linux drivers for Apple's custom GPU, etc, any time soon.

Apple said in an interview (DaringFireball, IIRC) that their secure boot can be disabled and that they won't move heaven and earth to block other OSes. That, however, is pretty different from Microsoft who apparently follow a set of specs called Server Base Boot Requirements (SBBR) in their Surface X. According to https://github.com/Sonicadvance1/linux/issues/27#issuecomment-568730880 the issue of booting Linux on it is more on the Linux side (Linux on ARM not supporting ACPI boot that well) rather than a lockout on the hardware side.

[ElectricPrism]

It's cool the new Apple's wont support other OS's -- so no Linux.

You know what that means? My 8% interest in Apple laptops is now 0%.

[oiaohm]

Looks like the people at Codeweavers saw the light last year (or got tipped off) when they decided to port WINE to ARM.

\

Not a new idea to port to arm.

https://wiki.winehq.org/ARM

Wine arm support work goes back over a decade. Of course finding windows arm executable have been very hard.

https://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf2017#.22Hangover.22_project_by_Stefan_D.C3.B6singer_and_Andr.C3.A9_Hentschel

Hangover to support arm some what starts before Apple gets this idea. Yes is 2017 it starts for development boards like the Nvidia shield and for the like of the raspberry pi. Porting wine to ARM basically has nothing to-do with Apple most of the way.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/12/20908567/apple-macos-catalina-breaking-apps-32-bit-support-how-to-prepare-avoid-update

Not exactly saw the light last year. Most windows applications people want to run as still 32 bit. So the break of 32 bit support forced work on to hangover for x86 platforms of course that work was helping out hangover in general.

Really no tip off here. Just alignment of events.

[tildearrow]

Looks like the people at Codeweavers saw the light last year (or got tipped off) when they decided to port WINE to ARM.

Are you sure Rosetta can't run Wine? Oh wait it's 32-bit :<

[V1tol]

Are you sure Rosetta can't run Wine? Oh wait it's 32-bit :<

Codeweavers already made Crossover for Catalina to run even 32-bit apps on 64-bit only OS. I think it can work even now through Rosetta. Making it native is more complicated thing but they have time to do that (while Rosetta exists)

[L_A_G]

Looks like the people at Codeweavers saw the light last year (or got tipped off) when they decided to port WINE to ARM.

Sure if sensing the obvious counts as being "tipped off"...

The fact that they added a load of previously iOS-specific libraries and new ones to make it almost trivial to port iOS apps to MacOS a year ago made it screamingly obvious this was coming pretty soon-ish. Even well before that it was plainly obvious when Apple kept massively over-investing in the stagnant ARM tablet market after most makers moved on to x86 tablets, creating their own silicon that performed on par or better than x86 parts meant for laptops.

Still, this should make things quite a bit more interesting in the desktop, laptop and server markets as there hasn't really been any real competition for x86 since PPC just fizzled out out with the G5 macs around 2005. Even before that it was a particularly dull race with only one semi-marginal vendor supporting PPC while everything else ran x86 and most of that from a single vendor. Probably won't be as interesting as the days of x86 vs PPC vs Alpha vs MIPS vs SPARC from the late 90s, but a damn sight more interesting than the current "x86 Vendor A" vs "x86 Vendor B" situation.