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darwin-on-arm
xnu
C2013–2018
darwin-on-arm / xnu

xnu

Porting the Darwin kernel to the AArch64/ARMv7/ARMv6-A architectures.

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
603GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Porting the Darwin kernel to the AArch64/ARMv7/ARMv6-A architectures.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-08-13 18:21:41 UTC to 2018-07-17 08:39:54 UTC.

0122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
return_0e·Jul 17, 2018
>..but XNU is now open source. Well XNU has always been 'open-source' [1] for some time on Intel machines but its just that ARM support remained closed (until 2017) which is why the darwin-on-arm [2] project existed. But I'm assuming that the OP means that the ARM64 code was recently open-sourced in the XNU sources[3] making a possible open-source ARM port much simpler. I still find it quite interesting to see some regained attempts in emulating iOS; with Corellium being the furthest at doing this. [1] (https://opensource.apple.com) [2] (https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/xnu) [3] (https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/search?p=5&q=ARM64&unsco...)
In Almost booting an iOS kernel in QEMU
mdaniel·Jul 6, 2015
[I'm going to apologize in advance for the chaos of this comment; there's a lot of moving parts and - as the expression goes - sorry this is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter. And holy fuck I wish HN had a markup language with more than 3 modes] Funny you should mention that, as I just had a scratch at it this weekend. Although OpenDarwin has ceased operations as of 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29#...), the PureDarwin project has some flickering signs of life but just barely: http://www.puredarwin.org/ and https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/puredarwi... While I was roaming around trying to see if anyone was trying to get such a beast to run in modern VirtualBox setups, I discovered that Apple used to publish ISOs of Darwin (https://opensource.apple.com/static/iso/) but I was n
Read the rest
ot lucky enough to have the CD boot in VBox, and I didn't get very far with qemu, either: http://althenia.net/notes/darwin My interest is almost solely in getting PureDarwin up and running in Vagrant/VBox with some networking support, so making headless OSX build boxes will stop being a ginormous technical and licensing clusterfuck. I have a mild interest in ReactOS for the same end game, but at this moment I will benefit from OSX toys more. Probably our best shot is to tag along on the coattails of the development that goes into making the hackintoshes run and support crazy hardware. Separately, Catherine (of opensn0w fame) is porting XNU to ARM https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/xnu and https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/wiki/wiki/Building-Darwin so that should be interesting, too, in a qemu kind of way. If nothing else, at least the kernel is receiving some attention outside of Infinite Loop.
In Apple Open Source Site

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