Stela Boots Apple Silicon macOS on x86 PCs, and 27 Issues Followed in Two Days

A GitHub project called Stela boots Apple silicon macOS on ordinary x86-64 PCs, and its own README says "It is slow and still may not boot on supported hardware." The repository, published under the account tylertms, reached the front page of Hacker News on November 11 and had 27 open issues by November 13.

The README describes a UEFI boot program that bundles an arm64-to-x86-64 translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple silicon hardware. It presents the PC to macOS as an M2 Mac mini.

What Stela is made of

NVIDIA, whose GeForce cards are the only GPUs Stela supports, changed chief executive this week.

The translator compiles arm64e code to x86-64 ahead of time and just in time, covers more than 3,000 AArch64 instruction encodings and caches what it translates. The graphics driver compiles Apple's AIR shader IR to Mesa's NIR, and supports the Metal3 and Apple7 GPU families.

The licence is GPL-2.0-or-later. The page names no author beyond the account, shows no benchmarks and lists no releases. The Hacker News post labels it v0.1.0.

Hardware it asks for

Component	Requirement stated in the README
CPU	Intel or AMD x86-64-v2 or newer
Memory	8 GB or more
Firmware	64-bit UEFI, Secure Boot off
Disk	60 GB or more, NVMe or SATA in AHCI mode
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 16, RTX 20, 30, 40 or 50 series

The README lists no Wi-Fi or audio support yet. Bluetooth works only through USB and Intel PCIe controllers.

What the issue tracker shows

The issue tracker opened up within days. On the first page of issues, dated November 12 except one on November 13, most reports are boot failures. Issue 46 describes a reproducible x86 page fault on an HP Omen with a Ryzen 7 7840HS and RTX 4060. Issue 44 reports a Haswell i5-4590 stopping at "Setting up Stela's memory".

Several freeze at the same message, "Taking control of the other processors", on a Ryzen AI 7 350 and an Alder Lake laptop. Issue 23 reports an RTX 5070 that fails to initialize, and issue 24 reports an Intel Xe3 integrated GPU with no GPU started. Network and USB controllers also appear: an Intel I219 with an invalid NVM checksum, a Realtek RTL8168H that fails DHCP and an Intel B660 xHCI controller.

None of the issues on that page concerns licensing or Apple's terms.

What the Hacker News thread says

The thread drew 140 points and 57 comments. Commenter timw4mail wrote, "Doesn't feel very general-purpose when it only supports Nvidia GPUs." Others argued over whether Stela is an emulator, a translator or a "reverse Rosetta". Commenter userbinator called it a continuation of Hackintosh culture.

No commenter reported a benchmark, and none discussed Apple's licence for macOS. The submitter said CachyOS on a MacBook "feels much faster" than macOS, with no figures. Apple has also begun closing its Support Community, so questions about unsupported hardware will not be answered there.

What is still unknown

The README does not say which macOS versions run, and the setup flow lets users pick the version and Mac model. Nothing on the page documents performance. Whether Apple objects is unknown, since nothing in the README or the thread addresses it. The page shows no release and no roadmap.