m1n1: A bootloader and experimentation playground for Apple Silicon

Building

You need an aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc cross-compiler toolchain (or a native one, if running on ARM64). You will also need to install the aarch64-unknown-none-softfloat toolchain for rust.

$ rustup target add aarch64-unknown-none-softfloat

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1.git
$ cd m1n1
$ make

To build on a native ARM64 machine:

• On Linux, use make ARCH=.
• On macOS using Homebrew:

$ brew install llvm lld
$ make

• On macOS using MacPorts:

$ sudo port install llvm clang
$ sudo port select llvm llvm-mp-<version>
$ make

The output will be in build/m1n1.macho.

To build verbosely, use make V=1.

Building using the container setup

If you have a container runtime installed, like Podman or Docker, you can make use of the compose setup, which contains all build dependencies.

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1.git
$ cd m1n1
$ podman-compose run m1n1 make
$ # or
$ docker-compose run m1n1 make

Usage

Our wiki has more information on how to use m1n1.

To install on an OS container based on macOS <12.1, use m1n1.macho:

kmutil configure-boot -c m1n1.macho -v <path to your OS volume>

To install on an OS container based on macOS >=12.1, use m1n1.bin:

kmutil configure-boot -c m1n1.bin --raw --entry-point 2048 --lowest-virtual-address 0 -v <path to your OS volume>

Payloads

m1n1 supports running payloads by simple concatenation:

$ cat build/m1n1.macho Image.gz build/dtb/apple-j274.dtb initramfs.cpio.gz > m1n1-payload.macho
$ cat build/m1n1.bin Image.gz build/dtb/apple-j274.dtb initramfs.cpio.gz > m1n1-payload.bin

Supported payload file formats:

• Kernel images (or compatible). Must be compressed or last payload.
• Devicetree blobs (FDT). May be uncompressed or compressed.
• Initramfs cpio images. Must be compressed.

Supported compression formats:

• gzip
• xz

License

Beginning with and including commit df7656cf17d04ec19de8acb8a78d57cc9b48fda1, fork-authored contributions on this fork's main branch are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0-or-later). The combined work distributed by this fork from that commit onward is distributed under the GPL version 2 or later, except for components that retain a separate license as described below.

Commits before df7656cf17d04ec19de8acb8a78d57cc9b48fda1 retain the licenses that previously applied to them, including the MIT license. Commits pulled from upstream m1n1, whether before or after that commit, retain their original licenses. This licensing change does not relicense third-party components or other separately licensed material.

• Copyright Cody Ho
• Copyright The Asahi Linux Contributors

Please see the Git history for authorship information.

Portions of m1n1 are based on mini:

• Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Hector Martin "marcan" marcan@marcan.st
• Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Sven Peter sven@svenpeter.dev
• Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Andre Heider a.heider@gmail.com

m1n1 embeds libfdt, which is dual BSD and GPL-2 licensed and copyright:

• Copyright (C) 2014 David Gibson david@gibson.dropbear.id.au
• Copyright (C) 2018 embedded brains GmbH
• Copyright (C) 2006-2012 David Gibson, IBM Corporation.
• Copyright (C) 2012 David Gibson, IBM Corporation.
• Copyright 2012 Kim Phillips, Freescale Semiconductor.
• Copyright (C) 2016 Free Electrons
• Copyright (C) 2016 NextThing Co.

The ADT code in mini is also based on libfdt and subject to the same license.

m1n1 embeds minlzma, which is MIT licensed and copyright:

• Copyright (c) 2020 Alex Ionescu

m1n1 embeds a slightly modified version of tinf, which is ZLIB licensed and copyright:

• Copyright (c) 2003-2019 Joergen Ibsen

m1n1 embeds portions taken from arm-trusted-firmware, which is BSD licensed and copyright:

• Copyright (c) 2013-2020, ARM Limited and Contributors. All rights reserved.

m1n1 embeds Doug Lea's malloc (dlmalloc), which is in the public domain (CC0).

m1n1 embeds portions of PDCLib, which is in the public domain (CC0).

m1n1 embeds the Source Code Pro font, which is licensed under the OFL-1.1 license and copyright:

• Copyright 2010-2019 Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/), with Reserved Font Name 'Source'. All Rights Reserved. Source is a trademark of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.
• This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

m1n1 embeds portions of the dwc3 usb linux driver, which was BSD-or-GPLv2 dual-licensed and copyright

• Copyright (C) 2010-2011 Texas Instruments Incorporated - http://www.ti.com

m1n1 embeds portions of musl-libc's floating point library, which are MIT licensed and copyright

• Copyright (c) 2017-2018, Arm Limited.

m1n1 embeds some rust crates. Licenses can be found in the vendor directory for every crate.