Hector Martin

So what do you think? Is this something you'd actually throw money at? If there is enough interest that this might succeed, I'll open up a Patreon. Obviously all development would be public and open source.

On a personal level, I'm already freelance and this is the kind of work I enjoy doing, so I'd be very happy to dedicate a large fraction of my time to this. (You've seen what I can do on game consoles in my spare time, think much more than that)

I think there is no point on working on this unless a certain minimum is met such that I can guarantee a decent time investment - I don't want this to be another half-assed Linux port that makes for a fancy tech demo but nobody would actually want to use.

So I'm thinking I would set up the Patreon in "pay per creation" mode initially, or otherwise paused, and not charge anything until I reach a minimum threshold (TBD). Thoughts?

Yes, please! Someone on LKML mentioned building a small hypervisor layer to fix-up some quirks and get a more standard interrupt controller emulated. Any thoughts about that? Building a usable GPU driver would be an incredible piece of work.

Not like I didn't already write a horrible custom interrupt controller driver for the PS4 so... But yeah, if a small HV shim makes technical sense, that's a reasonable approach. A custom intermediate bootloader will almost certainly be the way to go anyway.

Yeah, totally set that up (maybe with a small GitHub readme page explaining your idea, instead of this twitter thread), for easier spreading through the web :)

Another thing in need for special care/drivers: PCIe? Not sure if Apple is using some 3rd party PCIe IP or if it's their own design.