random blog

Visual Studio today (the IDE) is still a 32-bit x86 application. How well does it run on a Windows on Arm machine? Disclaimer: This workflow might not be officially supported currently, and might still come with some unfixed bugs. The good news is that you can just use the regular Visual Studio installation flow. After… Continue reading Visual Studio on an Arm Windows machine

I ordered an iPad Air (again) on Sunday and picked it up on Monday. So far, it’s quite good, with the Apple Pencil being the killer feature of the device. Scribble is what makes it shine, and what i’m writing this blog post with. It allows to just write text anywhere with the pencil to… Continue reading Not-an-iPad-review

I’ve been reading this blog post. (titled “Heads up: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linux OS”) The headline by itself already sets the tone for what’s next in the article. First, repositories added by default in the OS are not considered as “secret”. I’ll however give a pass to that headline as… Continue reading Open source rhetoric? or FUD?

On a side note, a jailbroken iOS device has security protections equivalent to a macOS system with SIP off and AMFI off. That’s not a good place to be security-wise. A complete AMFI disable is used there instead of a more complex mechanism to not give private entitlements to everyone. The state of the iOS… Continue reading Things to not do on Apple OSes: disabling AMFI

(NVIDIA Xavier Series SoC Technical Reference Manual 1.4p, page 576) One of the few general purpose processors in the wild with sequential consistency is the NVIDIA Carmel CPU core, present on the Tegra Xavier processor. The 64-bit Tegra K1 (with Denver) also implements sequential consistency as the memory model. It also had a coherent instruction… Continue reading Arm CPUs with sequential consistency

Yet another one… and this time in buildable form on Apple M1 devices. (tarball at https://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/xnu/xnu-7195.81.3.tar.gz) What are the Apple CPU extensions not supported though on the OSS codebase? Turns out that the answer is almost all of them. A non exhaustive list: APRR (was explicitly removed for this release): permission removal mechanism, notably used… Continue reading Notes on the new XNU source release

Apple Silicon Macs are general-purpose computers running macOS out of the box, with Apple not providing official support for 3rd-party operating systems. However, Apple doesn’t block that from happening in any way. It’s just run-of-the-mill undocumented hardware, with firmware preloaded so that we don’t have to deal with it. (except for 3rd-party silicon, such as… Continue reading (Notes on) Apple Silicon Macs

A new XNU release appeared at: https://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/xnu/xnu-7195.60.75.tar.gz. What’s not there: Tunables for Apple Firestorm/Icestorm. Hypervisor support for Apple Silicon-based Macs doesn’t seem to be there and Rosetta support …and some parts of the source code. AMX support is not present either The shiny new things: Apart from tunables, support for A14/M1. Look at the SETUP… Continue reading New XNU source release

The first RFC got submitted to upstream to solicit comments about it. It’s quite minimal, only including the interrupt controller and secondary CPU startup drivers, with the core kernel changes needed to accommodate the hardware. Notably, it doesn’t include a UART driver. It isn’t ready for mainline inclusion yet. For technical reasons evaluated on iPhones… Continue reading Linux on Apple Silicon Macs: first RFC submission

From a quick look at Windows 10X build 20279 (fe_release_10x) on 64-bit Arm: No x86(_64) backwards compatibility for UWP apps Which brings us to the next point… Arm 32-bit compatibility is not only there but required, base applications such as the Microsoft Store rely on it. This also applies to 64-bit Arm Windows desktop SKUs.… Continue reading A look at Windows 10X on Arm