Keeping things simple, the goal is to hopefully run Windows on Apple’s M1 chip (and hopefully future Apple silicon chips too given tweaks to the foundation!).

Why a whole project for this?

Contrary to how it may appear on the surface, Apple’s chips are architecturally very different from standard ARM64 chips from companies like Qualcomm or MediaTek and a lot of hardware enablement needs to be done as a result. Thankfully a lot of work has already been done in this area for Linux through the Asahi Linux project (huge thanks to them for all the hard work they’ve done and made open source please show them some support!), though plenty of work remains to be done since Windows does some things differently from Linux and there are things the Asahi folks can ignore but I cannot.

(An example: The Asahi Linux folks can’t use PSCI, the ARM standard for core bringup, for starting the other ARM cores since they plan to run Linux in EL2 and Apple does not implement EL3. Windows requires PSCI, and this combined with other circumstances means I’ll need to get PSCI working on the Apple cores.)

When will the project be done?

Whenever it’s done.

This is not going to be a trivial project to finish, there’s a lot of Apple specific oddities I must account for and things I need to do to ensure the M1 is able to boot Windows in a stable way. I’ll need time to make sure everything works properly so there’s no ETA on anything thus far.

Disclaimer

This project is not guaranteed to be successful. I’ll do my best to ensure it goes to completion but ultimately, there is zero guarantee that I will be able to get Windows working in a great way by the end of it all. But I’m going to try my absolute hardest