> As long as no code is taken from macOS in order to build the Linux support, the end result is completely legal to distribute and for end users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS. Please see our Copyright & Reverse Engineering Policy for more information.
This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour? Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific, driver-y bits excluded?
Worth noting that that OSS release does not include M1 support (and Apple does not open source most of their drivers, just the kernel core), although it does include (partially redacted, not buildable, because Apple) support for other mobile chips using the same CPU cores. Perhaps the next OSS dump will finally have the M1 bits. But we're definitely on our own for all of the fun stuff beyond "Linux boots with a serial tty".
At least some really basic parts are useful as a hardware reference, e.g. things related to the interrupt controller, UARTs, and CPU quirks/errata workarounds. That said, their license is incompatible with the GPL, so we cannot take any code directly. I documented this explicitly in our copyright policy:
All the driver stuff is shipped as closed-source kexts, and interesting proprietary hardware features like GXF are missing too from the public sources for the most part.
This may be a dumb question, but are any of the Open Source components of macOS [0] useful for this kind of endeavour? Specifically stuff from XNU? Or are any useful hardware specific, driver-y bits excluded?
[0] https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1101.html