Apple Internals: Swift in the Kernel
65 points by heavyrain266
65 points by heavyrain266
This is interesting as heck, TIL about Embedded Swift. I'm gonna have to see if this works out well enough with WebAssembly to be useful for my evil plans with Anubis.
TIL about bridgeOS. Wikipedia claims it loads before UEFI services load. Is that true?
The T2 Macs have the T2 act as the root of trust and start the x86 CPU.
start the x86 CPU
I presume you mean that as a euphemism for "the main CPU" since Mac hardware hasn't had an Intel CPU in quite a long time
I mean x86 since Apple Silicon Macs don't have this "secondary" processor, they just have the single SoC. The booth path there is much simpler; the main CPU gets started, iBoot loads (and doesn't have EFI), iBoot loads the real OS.
To expand: the reason for bridgeOS was to establish an Apple-defined chain-of-trust (instead of trusting Intel ME), such that they can be sure the TouchID chip was proper. That was T1. With T2, they expanded its scope to include things like SSD encryption and whatnot. With their M-series, they integrated all those features on-die, and bridgeOS was no more.