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Open Source Stela Layer Runs Apple Silicon Code on x86-64 PCs

Original title: A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs
58AI Score

Stela is a GPL-2.0 open source UEFI boot program that combines an arm64e-to-x86-64 AOT/JIT translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple Silicon hardware to boot macOS and most apps on ordinary x86-64 PCs. At v0.1.0 it is slow and limited in compatibility, with the project itself warning that boot success rates remain low and much hardware work is pending.

Related Entities

TOOLStelaTERMAIRCONvidiaTERMarm64e-to-x86-64 TranslationTOOLMesa NIR

Full Report

Contents7 sections

Stela

A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs. It is a UEFI boot program with an arm64-to-x86-64 translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple silicon hardware. macOS and most apps start, but it is slow and needs much more testing, as of v0.1.0

[!WARNING] Stela is very much still in development. Your current chances of it booting are low, major hardware support/fixes are on the way.

Translator

An ahead-of-time and just-in-time compiler translates arm64e code to x86-64. It covers more than 3,000 AArch64 instruction encodings, maps guest registers to host registers and caches translated code. It runs on any x86-64-v2 CPU, Intel or AMD.

NVIDIA driver

The Metal driver supports GTX 16 and RTX 20 series GPUs and newer. It compiles AIR, Metal's shader IR, directly to NIR, Mesa's IR, and supports the Metal3 and Apple7 GPU families.

Requirements

  • An x86-64-v2 CPU (about 2011 or newer), UEFI with Secure Boot off, 8 GB of RAM.
  • An NVIDIA GTX 16 or RTX 20 series GPU or newer.
  • A USB stick of 8 GB or more.
  • An empty GPT partition of at least 60 GB.
  • Network access during the install, which downloads macOS.

Stela currently models the Mac mini (M2) and runs macOS 27.

Install

  1. Download stela from the releases page.
  2. Run sudo ./stela setup (Linux, macOS) or double-click stela.exe (Windows).
  3. Choose the USB stick, the macOS version and the Mac model, then confirm. Setup erases the USB stick.
  4. Boot the PC from the USB stick.

Build

You need Rust and LLVM with Clang 21 or newer.

BASH
git clone https://github.com/tylertms/Stela
cd Stela
cargo xtask dist

This writes target/release/stela. The first build fetches and compiles Linux, Mesa and LLVM sources and takes a long time.

Stela contains no Apple software. You are responsible for following Apple's software license agreement and terms of use.

Stela's code is GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Community

Discord Server