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ITzTravelInTime

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 16, 2020
110
177
Italia
Hi, Apple Silicon users, i am the maintainer of a fork of the dear old kx audio driver that keeps it updated for new macOS versions as well as still supporting some of the early OS X versions (staring from OS X 10.4 and including PowerPC compatibility https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ries-driver-os-x-ppc-porting-project.2287424/).

Today i am glad to announce you my attempt at porting the kx audio driver to Apple Silicon to continue it's legacy for the next generation of macs.

First of all, this attempt was only made possible thanks to the fact that i have already ported the kx audio driver to PowerPC, in fact, to make the driver work there i had to add support for risc architecture and their memory mapped io implementations, not to mention doing a lot of porting work to make sure that the driver doesn't break if complied for multiple platforms, the result is the modern version of the code that can be compile and used with success on PowerPC, intel 32 bits and all intel 64 bits machines.

So i just figured out what was preventing me from compiling my driver for Apple Silicon, so i have decided to start a thread for testing and development of the driver.

However there is a major limitation that comes from the way in which the driver is implemented that prevents me from using it with any existing Apple Silicon machine and it's the fact the it work only with native PCIe devices, not trough thunderbolt/usb4 adapters as far as i aware, so to have any proper result here we must wait for Apple to release the rumored Apple Silicon Mac Pro and hope that it comes with PCIe slots.

For now the only known PCIe sound cards that works with this driver are the:
- Sound Blaster Audigy RX
- E-MU E-0404 PCIe
- Perhaps those Chinese PCIe sound cards featuring the EMU 10k1 chip.

Other non-PCIe cards might work using commercially available adapters, but I do not guarantee this.

That said i have already pushed the source code that compiles for Apple Silicon to github and so here it is the driver's repo for my fork: https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/kx-audio-driver

And attached to this post there is a very early universal driver build for Monterey and later version with support for both intel 64 bits (tested and working) and apple silicon (totally untested).

I leave you with a screenshot that i made when i first managed to compile an arm64e (aka Apple Silicon) build of the driver, and i hope we will make the driver work on apple silicon.


Schermata 2022-09-15 alle 12.08.57.png
 

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altaic

macrumors 6502a
Jan 26, 2004
711
484
Cool project! You really should avoid kext at all costs, though. Why doesn’t the PCIDriverKit API work? Have you seen this guide?
 

ITzTravelInTime

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 16, 2020
110
177
Italia
Cool project! You really should avoid kext at all costs, though. Why doesn’t the PCIDriverKit API work? Have you seen this guide?
Essentially this is just a lazy apple silicon compiling of the kext, porting it to a dext will require prettymuch to re-do the mac-part of the driver from scratch which is a lot of work for this old code base, and there isn't really any interest in doing that, so as long as you will be willing to use a kext it should work, i know that nowadays shipping kernel-level code is dangerous but it has been done for more than a decade with this specific driver, and it's all free and open source, in case of security concerns.
 
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