Comment by mschuster91
1 year ago
> macOS is its own hardware platform, and will naturally come up with their own separate replacement.
Actually, no. The M-series SoCs use device trees [1], and in fact their Apple SoC predecessors did just as well - the earliest I could find is the iPhone 3GS [2].
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230202-asahi-t8112-dt-v1-0-cb...
They're very device tree oriented. They've been using them since "new world PowerPC" Macs in the 90s. Even on x86, their boot loader constructs a device tree to describe the hardware to the kernel.
They have no incentive to use or benefit from ACPI. They don't have the problem of trying to scale to an innumerable number of hardware permutations. They have a limited set which they control the entire stack of. I would certainly be very confused if they went with such an overkill solution as well.
This appears logical but the reality is that the only reason you can’t immediately run MacOS on a generic X64 computer is that it doesn’t contain the licensing chip.
If you patch out that requirement (using a Hackintosh installation) and covert the ACPI tables into the format used by Apple it runs just fine, for as far as drivers are available for your hardware.
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