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A comment on The first conformant M1 GPU driver. Parent comment

Re:The first conformant M1 GPU driver by dlivingston on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @01:45PM (#37226180)
> _clearly_ spent a lot of time and resources to make third-party OSes viable on Apple Sillicon Macs.

This actually isn't clear to me -- can you explain? Besides keeping an open bootloader [0], I'm not aware of any affirmative actions Apple has taken.

[0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Open-OS-Ecosystem-on...

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Re:The first conformant M1 GPU driver by klausa on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @02:25PM (#37226697)
The open bootloader didn't magically appear one night in Apple's git repository.

It boots in a notably different way than iOS machines do, and has some (AFAICT) pretty unique capabilities, including a fully-verified signed-boot of macOS partitions, while allowing third-party kernels at the same time.

Asahi's "Introduction to Apple Silicon" [0], and specifically "Security modes, Boot Policies, and machine ownership" paragraph outlines some of that, Apple's "Platform Security" [1] whitepaper does too.

Asahi's docs also explicitly state the same thing [2].

If you still don't think that shows significant amount of work and care were put into deliberately allowing third-party OS's to work on those machines, I don't think I can convince you otherwise.

[0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web

[2]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Apple-Platform-Secur...

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