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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Presumably ARM hackintoshes are, or will be, possible too? Recent ARM processors (eg: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X) have performance comparable to Apple’s M-series, and are even finding their way into desktops. So there shouldn’t be a shortage of candidate hardware in the coming years!

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ARM processors significantly differ from Apple Silicon. Apple's M series are not fully compliant with the ARM64 ISA and contain undocumented instructions. There was a discussion about that a few month ago on /r/hackintosh https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/1c9rfdz/is_hack...

> "Apple's M series are not fully compliant with the ARM64 ISA"

Do you have a source/evidence for this claim (other than a reddit comment)? Apple's processors are (should be) not only fully compliant with the ARM64 ISA (AArch64), but Apple actively contributes to defining new revisions of the ISA.

It's true that M series has had some private extensions. eg: the TSO memory model to support Rosetta, and the AMX matrix co-processor. But that doesn't mean they aren't fully compliant with the ISA. And in any case, as of the M4 CPU, Apple have reportedly replaced AMX with the new, official ARM SME matrix instructions anyway.

My understanding is that it will be much harder as ARM is way less standardized than the Intel x86 platform. This is something that Linus Thorvalds has talked about in the past [1]. Think about how huge an effort it is to get Linux to run on Apple’s ARM machines or how some distros have a Pi specific variant. I guess getting macOS to run on other ARM machines could be similar challenging.

1: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410627/why-linux-pioneer-lin...

I would love to know more about this. Would it not be (at least theoretically) possible to hackintosh ARM, as Asahi Linux reverse engineered at least some parts of the M series?

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