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You totally can after a little bit of time waiting for M4 bringup!

https://asahilinux.org

It won't have all the niceties / hardware support of MacOS, but it seamlessly coexists with MacOS, can handle the GPU/CPU/RAM with no issues, and can provide you a good GNU/Linux environment.


Asahi doesn't work on M3 yet after a year. It's gonna be a bit before M4 support is here.

IIRC one of the major factors holding back M3 support was the lack of a M3 mini for use in their CI environment. Now that there's an M4 mini hopefully there aren't any obstacles to them adding M4 support

Why would that matter? You can use a MacBook in CI too?

How? What cloud providers offer it? MacStadium and AWS don't.

I guess you could have a physical MBP in your house and connect it to some bring-your-own-infrastructure CI setup, but most people wouldn't want to do that.


Cloud providers don't seem too relevant to a discussion of CI for kernel and driver development.

Why not?

How do you imagine that a cloud computing platform designed around running Macs with macOS would work for testing an entirely different OS running on bare metal on hardware that doesn't have a BMC, and usefully catching and logging frequent kernel panics and failed boots?

It's a pretty hard problem to partially automate for setups with an engineer in the room. It doesn't sound at all feasible for an unattended data center setup that's designed to host Xcode for compiling apps under macOS.


GitHub’s self hosted runners are as painless as they can get, and the Mac Mini in my basement is way faster than their hosted offering.

I meant using a physical device indeed.

"a little bit of time" is a bit disingenuous given that they haven't even started working on the M3.

(This isn't a dig on the Asahi project btw, I think it's great).


Speaking of decompilers, would Binary Ninja be a safe bet to pick? I've been told IDA is the gold standard, but it's also expensive for someone who wants to recreationally reverse engineer.


Binja decompiler is more-or-less fine. Its not as mature as IDA or Ghidra but its not a bad decompiler.

Though for me the big selling point on Binja is the Intermediate Languages (ILs). HIgh-level IL is the decompiler but you also get Low-level and Medium-level ILs as steps between assembly and source. If the decompiler is a bit funky you can look at the ILs to get a better idea of what is happening. the ILs are also just much nicer to read than plain assembly so I tend to use them a lot.

Its a feature that isn't really matched on any other platform. Ghidra and IDA both have a single IL that is more machine readable compared to Binja's human-readable ones.


IDA Free has essentially all the features of Pro nowadays, if you're only looking to do x86_64 on Windows/Linux.

https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/

The only thing you lose out on is Python scripting, which is kind of big, but for a free tool you really can't complain.

You probably want to use both IDA and Ghidra since they have different strengths/weaknesses and community plugins.


Honestly just use Ghidra. It has it's quirks but it's pretty good. And open source. If it's good enough for the NSA it's probably good enough for recreational use.


If Ghidra is made by NSA, does it mean that it can have backdoors for non-US users?


The code is open source and has been looked at by several people over the years. It would be quite hard for the NSA to sneak in a backdoor but it is never out of the question. However, the risk is so extremely minuscule when compared to other alternatives since they are not even open source.


It's a bit silly, but sometimes I have to remind myself that fungi aren't plants.


Right? I didn’t know until relatively recently they’re considered a third kingdom: flora, fauna, funga.


Animals are more closely related to fungi than we are to plants. Our closest shared ancestors were likely these little guys: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanoflagellate

Source: I took Bio 101 last semester so I'm pretty much an expert now.


I think protists (like the amoeba) are considered a fourth kingdom within the eukaryotes. But that isn't even the highest level of classification: eukaryotes are only one of three domains of life, the other two being bacteria and archaea. (Eukaryotes are believed to have originated as symbiotic unions of ancestors of archaea and bacteria.)


It's more like animals, fungi and plants are weird colonial protists.


And the fourth kingdom that are neither plants, animals, nor fungus: Protista. The "animalgae"


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