Stage 1 clear!

I can't believe we hit the kick-off goal overnight. My most sincere thanks to everyone for your support - I'm really looking forward to making this a reality!

The initial goal is a bare minimum to be able to put enough time into this to make it worthwhile, but I can't call this a full-time job yet, so please continue to support the project. Every little bit counts! Support not only allows me to dedicate more and more of my time to this, but also to purchase hardware for testing and to speed up development, and perhaps eventually to sponsor other developers to work on particular areas if the project really takes off. Remember that you don't have to stick to fixed tiers, you can customize the support amount!

I am planning a community live stream soon to talk about the project before things kick off on development, so stay tuned for details on that. This will be open to all patrons (not just the higher tiers).

As I mentioned I will start work in January, and the first Patreon charge is scheduled for Jan 1st. In the meantime, I will order a Mac Mini, which will be the first target (as the simplest/cheapest platform is always the ideal thing to start on, complexity can come later once the basics are in place). It'll be torn down and there's a good chance I will want to poke around at the board level for initial bring-up and reverse engineering, so expect a deep dive into what we can learn about the hardware.

There is a good chance I will want to get another unit shortly after the project starts, both as a back-up (if I kill my sole unit, waiting around for a replacement would be a waste of time and thus patrons' money), and also to simultaneously run macOS while I bring-up Linux. This will be especially important one the basic kernel bring-up is complete, as I will be dynamically probing hardware and drivers under macOS to reverse engineer the system, and having to reboot for that is incredibly inefficient. If there's one thing I've learned during my previous hardware RE and bring-up efforts it's that setting things up to minimize dev/RE cycle time pays back big time.

Thank you to everyone who has offered help with the project privately! As a huge open source project, this is not something I can do alone from beginning to end. I have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, so I don't need general guidance on how to approach a Linux port / platform / hardware RE project, but as is always the case, there are many specific areas that are new to me and which I will be learning as I go. This is business as usual in reverse engineering land, so don't worry, I'm not relying on others to hold my hand - but if you do have experience in any of these areas and are willing to jump on, even just to answer questions, send me a message (probably best via IRC to marcan on freenode, or email at marcan@marcan.st). Being able to bounce questions off of someone deeper in these fields can save time and help put the project on the right course from the start.

• macOS/Darwin-specific reverse engineering
• AArch64 bring-up
• AGX graphics architecture
• Linux graphics stack internals (especially the userspace side: Mesa/Gallium/etc as well as shader compilers (LLVM), since most of my past experience is with the kernel side)