Yeah, I know, I read those instructions in full ;) I do have to admit that I am pleasantly surprised at how much is made accessible, I was fully prepared for this to be an opportunity to enforce mandatory codesigning, removing the ability to disable SIP or load code into the kernel, turn off secure boot, etc. but so far pretty much everything seems to be technically possible, which is nice.
However, I do still stand by my complaint; neither of us can go into too much detail of course but I think you understand that taking chips that were made to run iOS and with hardware-backed guarantees of certain properties for integrity on consumer systems makes for a poor experience when trying to do things like debug and patch the kernel. I mean, is it theoretically possible to debug the kernel? Yes, because they have been enabled superficially, but the experience of using them is much worse than you’d get on Intel (and not to mention developer-fused hardware). Personally I was only able to get it to work partially, and suspect it is even more broken/limited than how the KDK says it is; here is what I’m talking about: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/653319. If you aren’t aware, it took almost three weeks before someone could get a “hello world” up, so there is a real drag associated with this.
Again, I’m happy and pleasantly surprised to have these things, at least on macOS; it’s completely possible that these are just unintentional bugs or transitional issues or whatever, if they end up fixed I promise I will stop complaining about this particular thing. But I would like to emphasize that I do not consider the current state of affairs as laid out by the KDK to really count, regardless of the effort being put into this to make it work, which I fully understand helps back up the claim that “the Mac remains the Mac”.
However, I do still stand by my complaint; neither of us can go into too much detail of course but I think you understand that taking chips that were made to run iOS and with hardware-backed guarantees of certain properties for integrity on consumer systems makes for a poor experience when trying to do things like debug and patch the kernel. I mean, is it theoretically possible to debug the kernel? Yes, because they have been enabled superficially, but the experience of using them is much worse than you’d get on Intel (and not to mention developer-fused hardware). Personally I was only able to get it to work partially, and suspect it is even more broken/limited than how the KDK says it is; here is what I’m talking about: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/653319. If you aren’t aware, it took almost three weeks before someone could get a “hello world” up, so there is a real drag associated with this.
Again, I’m happy and pleasantly surprised to have these things, at least on macOS; it’s completely possible that these are just unintentional bugs or transitional issues or whatever, if they end up fixed I promise I will stop complaining about this particular thing. But I would like to emphasize that I do not consider the current state of affairs as laid out by the KDK to really count, regardless of the effort being put into this to make it work, which I fully understand helps back up the claim that “the Mac remains the Mac”.