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Projects

Aurora Silicon is one goal — Windows running properly on Apple Silicon — split across the layers it takes to get there.

Boot chain and platform

Getting Windows to start at all: m1n1 for bring-up and hypervisor tracing, Project Mu for UEFI firmware and ACPI tables, and a native HAL extension so Windows drives Apple's interrupt controller directly rather than through an emulated GIC.

Boots to desktop from internal storage on M2 Pro.

Drivers

43 Windows driver projects for hardware Windows has never seen: DART, PCIe, Apple's NVMe controller, USB4 and DWC3, the display coprocessor, SMC, SPI HID, Broadcom Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, audio, sensors.

Some are working, some are early. Each carries its own README with the authoritative status.

Graphics

A GPU stack on Windows, built on Mesa's reverse-engineered AGX support: a KMDF render node, Honeykrisp ported to Windows for Vulkan, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton above it for Direct3D.

Vulkan 1.4 and D3D11 run on hardware, with frames presented to the physical console. The WDDM miniport — the piece that gets the Windows desktop itself accelerated — is in bring-up.

d3d12agx — research

A separate experiment, on Linux: a native Direct3D 12 driver for the Apple GPU with no Vulkan layer at all. Shader bytecode compiles straight to AGX machine code.

Research 553 of 557 on the Direct3D 12 conformance suite, against 505 for the Vulkan-based route on the same GPU. Only four tests remain, each with a named cause. It has no presentation layer and is not part of the Windows stack today.

If it matures and is ported to a Windows UMD, it would collapse D3D12 → vkd3d → Vulkan → AGX into D3D12 → AGX.

How the layers stack

              Windows on ARM
                    │
   ┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
   ▼                ▼                ▼
 drivers        graphics         boot chain
 43 projects    Vulkan/D3D11     m1n1 · Mu/UEFI · ACPI
                DXVK · vkd3d     AicHal
                    │
                    ▼
              AppleAgxGpu.sys
                    │
                   AGX

d3d12agx sits outside this diagram for now — it is Linux-side research aimed at replacing the vkd3d → Vulkan hop later.