Aurora Silicon¶
Windows on ARM for Apple Silicon.
Apple Silicon Macs do not expose the hardware interfaces Windows expects — no GIC, no standard PCIe topology, no conventional storage or display controllers. Aurora Silicon builds the missing layer: a boot chain, HAL extensions, and the Windows drivers for Apple's own silicon blocks.
Windows boots to a desktop from internal storage on a MacBook Pro 14-inch M2 Pro, with the GPU rendering and presenting frames to the physical console.
Where things stand¶
| Capability | State |
|---|---|
| Windows boots from internal SSD | Working |
| Native AIC2 interrupt path (no GIC emulation) | Working |
| Vulkan on the Apple GPU | Working — Honeykrisp advertises 1.4.354 |
| Direct3D 11 via DXVK | Working — feature level 11.0 |
| Presentation to the physical console | Working — 1,200-frame runs |
| WDDM miniport | In progress — builds and tests clean; hardware start next |
| Accelerated DWM desktop | Not yet — needs the WDDM present path and a native D3D11 UMD DDI |
| SMP | In progress |
Research software
This is not production-ready and has had no complete security review. It can crash Windows, corrupt data, or leave hardware needing recovery. Use it only on systems and installations you can afford to lose, and keep a verified recovery path.
What is being built¶
Drivers — 43 Windows driver projects covering interrupts, DART, PCIe, NVMe, USB4 and DWC3, display and DCP, SMC, SPI/I²C HID, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, audio, and more.
Graphics — a full GPU stack on Windows: a KMDF render node for AGX, Mesa's Honeykrisp Vulkan driver ported to Windows, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton on top for Direct3D.
Boot chain — m1n1, Project Mu/UEFI and ACPI tables,
plus auroradbg for build, boot, logging and recovery.
d3d12agx — a research effort on Linux: a native Direct3D 12 driver for AGX with no Vulkan layer, aimed at eventually replacing the translation chain above.
Hardware¶
Development targets M1 Pro and M2 Pro systems. The M2 Pro MacBook Pro 14-inch
(j414s) is the primary and most validated target. M5 Pro has had preliminary
testing but is blocked on an unresolved iBoot issue.
See Hardware support for what is tested versus expected.
Getting involved¶
Development happens on GitHub and in
Discord — contact djdev or rttdev.
Independent project
Aurora Silicon is an independent experimental effort. It is not an official product of, or supported by, Asahi Linux or the upstream NT-for-ASi project, though it builds on public work from both.
Please do not report bugs caused by these experimental drivers to either project unless one of their maintainers explicitly asks for that information — report them here.