James Gill JJTech0130

Running Quartus + Questa on Apple Silicon

The current methods to run an Intel FPGA workflow on Apple Silicon involve two possibile approaches:

Using a WoA Virtual Machine: Performance is terrible (already in amd64 Windows platforms is terrible, adding two virtualization layers on top of it leads to eternal compilation times) + space wasted for all the Microsoft bloatware
Using a Docker Container: Performance is better than WoA, but the USB drivers are not working

Running Linux on UTM with Rosetta enabled should tackle these problems

Disclaimer for Baremetal installation

This guide could possibly work also when installing Debian directly on the Mac with Asahi Linux, but it is not recommended for beginners: with the standard installation procedure the Linux Kernel uses a default page size of 16K, and the rosetta binary is not designed to run with this page size. By recompiling the Linux Kernel to use 4K page sizes it should work flawlessly, but expect slower perfomance and/or higher power usage

Running Third Party Kernel Extensions on Virtualization Framework macOS Guest VMs

As of macOS 12 (Monterey), Apple's Virtualization framework has nice support for macOS guest virtual machines, but with severe limitations: For example you can't install a macOS guest on Intel Macs, install guests with newer versions of macOS than the host, copy and paste between the host and the guest, or install third party kernel extensions in the guest. As usual for Apple, the functionality they do support is nicely implemented, but they've left out so much that the result is only marginally useful -- at least compared to

Enable & Using vGPU Passthrough

This gist is almost entirely not unlike Derek Seaman's awesome blog:

Proxmox VE 8: Windows 11 vGPU (VT-d) Passthrough with Intel Alder Lake

As such please refer to that for pictures, here i will capture the command lines I used as i sequence the commands a little differently so it makes more logic to me.

This gists assumes you are not running ZFS and are not passing any other PCIE devices (as both of these can require addtional steps - see Derek's blog for more info)

This gist assumes you are not running proxmox in UEFI Secure boot - if you are please refer entirely to dereks blog.

How to Defang macOS System Protections

If you want to change things on the root drive of a Mac you will need to take some steps to disable the built in security of the system. Most of these steps are the same regardless if you are on Intel or Apple Silicon. If there is a difference it is noted.

Note that all of these things put a Mac into an unsupported and less secure state.

Make sure you either perform these steps in a VM or that you reset the protections after you are done poking around

Protections and Terms

(This list is not exahustive on the details of each. Check the links at the end for more info.)

WARNING: BIOS modding can be dangerous. You run the risk of bricking your device. I am not responsible for broken devices.

This tutorial was created for my HP Pavilion 15 laptop. I cannot confirm that this works on any other devices.

Finding variable

We need to find the offset, varstore, and possible values for the DVMT pre-alloc.

	//
	// ViewController.m
	// JBDetectTest
	//
	// Created by seo on 3/27/25.
	//

	#import "ViewController.h"
	#import <dlfcn.h>

	PurpleSystemAppPort
	PurpleSystemEventPort
	UIASTNotificationCenter
	com.apple.ABDatabaseDoctor
	com.apple.AppSSO.service-xpc
	com.apple.AuthenticationServicesCore.AuthenticationServicesAgent
	com.apple.CARenderServer
	com.apple.ClipServices.clipserviced
	com.apple.CoreAuthentication.daemon
	com.apple.DeviceAccess.xpc

	for function in filter(lambda f: f.name == "_objc_msgSend", bv.functions):
	selector = function.lowest_address + 4
	selector = list(bv.get_code_refs_from(selector))[0]
	selector = list(bv.get_data_refs(selector))[0]
	selector = list(bv.get_data_refs_from(selector))[0]
	selector = bv.get_data_var_at(selector).value
	# objc_msgSend itself, probably
	if not selector:
	continue
	selector = selector[:-1].decode()

	// Disables SSL pinning by replacing functions with no-ops.
	function unpin() {
	var SecTrustEvaluate_handle = Module.findExportByName('Security', 'SecTrustEvaluate');
	var SecTrustEvaluateWithError_handle = Module.findExportByName('Security', 'SecTrustEvaluateWithError');
	var SSL_CTX_set_custom_verify_handle = Module.findExportByName('libboringssl.dylib', 'SSL_CTX_set_custom_verify');
	var SSL_get_psk_identity_handle = Module.findExportByName('libboringssl.dylib', 'SSL_get_psk_identity');
	var boringssl_context_set_verify_mode_handle = Module.findExportByName('libboringssl.dylib', 'boringssl_context_set_verify_mode');

	if (SecTrustEvaluateWithError_handle) {
	var SecTrustEvaluateWithError = new NativeFunction(SecTrustEvaluateWithError_handle, 'int', ['pointer', 'pointer']);

	//
	// UIApplication+VolumeButtons.swift
	//
	// Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/70815088
	//

	import UIKit

	// Stub protocol to allow us to call private methods
	@objc private protocol UIApplicationPrivate {