XeGfx

XeGfx is an attempt at hardware-accelerated graphics for Intel Xe GPUs on macOS. The goal is one driver for every Xe part (Tiger Lake through Arrow Lake, Arc A-series, then Lunar Lake, Battlemage and Panther Lake) on every macOS from Big Sur 11 to Tahoe 26.

It does not write a GPU driver from scratch. FreeBSD's drm-kmod already runs the Linux i915 driver on a non-Linux kernel through LinuxKPI, a layer that implements the Linux kernel API on top of FreeBSD's. XeGfx puts a small FreeBSD-kernel-API layer for XNU underneath LinuxKPI, so drm core and i915 build as one kext. Userspace is planned as Mesa's ANV Vulkan driver under the Metal-to-Vulkan plugin of NvGfx, the same way that project runs NVIDIA GPUs.

XeGfx stands on other people's work. Thank you to all of them.

Code XeGfx builds or ships (their licences apply to their files):

Projects we studied (ideas, findings and warnings only; no code copied):

Work in progress. XeGfx has not driven a GPU yet. The approach itself is proven on real hardware: VedCloud's Meteor Lake port runs an i915-derived driver on XNU with Metal and Vulkan working on a Dell Latitude 5350 under macOS 15. XeGfx targets Tahoe with its own LinuxKPI shim, so treat every milestone below as open until a boot proves it here.

Hardware so far: one Lenovo Legion 5 15IAX10 (Arrow Lake-HX, 8086:7D67, Xe-LPG, display 14) on macOS Tahoe 26.7.1, BIOS in Hybrid mode so the iGPU drives the panel.

A broken GPU driver can stop a machine before anything reaches the disk, so the kext is built to be harmless until asked:

• It never loads at boot. Its only IOKit personality waits for a resource the kext publishes itself, after kmutil load -b org.watchthelight.XeGfx. If a test crashes the Mac, it reboots into a system where XeGfx is not loaded.

• It runs in stages, one sysctl write at a time:

  debug.xegfx_stage	What runs
  1	the shim's own state (clock, threads, VM, tunables, task queues)
  2	a read-only look at the GPU: IDs, BAR sizes, GMD_ID, stolen-memory base, pipe A registers, the GGTT entry behind the panel, PCH watchdog registers, published as the XeGfxProbe registry dictionary
  3	newbus over every PCI device, the DMA layer
  4	the drm and i915 init routines, i915 display disabled, then a check that the panel still scans out the same memory and pipe A still counts frames

• A stage that runs longer than debug.xegfx_wdog seconds panics on purpose, so a stall becomes a panic report and a reboot instead of a frozen screen.

• debug.xegfx_log returns the last 64 KiB of the driver's own console output, and debug.xegfx_results the result of each stage.

• debug.xegfx_env sets tunables for the next stage (compat.linuxkpi.i915_enable_guc=3 and the like), so one boot can try several settings.

• The link fails if the kext redefines any symbol the kernel exports (tools/shadow_check.py). That bug class killed the first two hardware tests.

This repository holds the XNU side: the FreeBSD-kernel-API layer (shim/), the build harness and the checks. It is pulled as a subtree into the NvGfx fork, branch xe, under gpu/xegfx. Build from there. The fork adds gpu/xkpi, an overlay that replaces the few drm-kmod files that are GPL-only, and the Metal plugin and accelerator glue. A build from this repository alone still uses drm-kmod's GPL-only headers and is only good for development.

You need the Xcode Command Line Tools (clang and the macOS SDK) and Python 3. The third-party sources are not in the repository; the scripts expect sparse clones in ~/src/xe-src:

• linux: the Linux kernel tree
• freebsd: the FreeBSD source tree (LinuxKPI lives in sys/compat/linuxkpi)
• drm-kmod: FreeBSD's drm-kmod (commit c16de0f, Linux 6.14 level)
• linux-firmware: mtl_guc_70.bin and LICENSE.i915 (Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake GuC), copied into the kext

From the NvGfx xe branch:

build/nvgfx/build_xegfx.sh      # objects, licence gate, link, KPI / shadow / kcabi link checks

Here, for work on the shim itself:

python3 harness/score.py --obj   # objects in out/obj, undefined symbols in out/undefined.txt
bash tools/link.sh               # out/XeGfx.kext
sudo tools/install.sh            # into the auxiliary kernel collection (XEGFX_MODE=uninstall to remove)

tools/kpi_split.py and the link check use kcabi, expected in ~/src/kcabi.

Testers with any Intel Xe machine are the most useful thing right now, and so is anyone who knows XNU, IOKit or i915 internals. See CONTRIBUTING.md and the open issues.

The project's own code is under the BSD 2-Clause license (see LICENSE). Third-party code keeps its own license; see NOTICE.