info

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 4, 2020, at 09:18, Alejandro Imass wrote:

> quick question: is Apple using more or less the same stack and toolchain i.e. Mach + FBSD backbone and LLVM, etc. ? or has something very important changed for Apple silicon?

The very important thing that has changed is that Apple Silicon is arm64 architecture. Many existing ports have build systems that assume Macs don't use arm64 architecture and fail to build as a result. These will need to be identified and fixed, hopefully in consultation with the developers of the software.

The OS kernel is still Mach, the userland software is still largely BSD based, LLVM is still used as the compiler, on macOS 11 on any architecture, just as it was on macOS 10.x for a long time.

I hear the process of booting the operating system is quite different on Apple Silicon: it's more similar to how iOS devices boot. But these are details that do not affect us in MacPorts since we deal only in user installable software.