According to macOS Help, safe mode stops some software from loading, and performs a check of the startup disk. Here’s a more detailed and accurate account of what it does.
Apple silicon
Metal provides low-level access to 3D graphics, rendering and compute features in GPUs. With the deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL, it’s vital, especially for M1 Macs/
An accessible summary of the CPU cores in M1 chips, and how they appear to be managed by macOS to get the best for different classes of process.
Results from running 10-70 identical compute-intensive processes on M1 chips shows the differences in strategy between background and high priority settings.
Running processes at different Quality of Service affects their performance differently on Intel and M1 Macs. This explains what happens.
macOS manages the loading and frequency of M1 cores according to the QoS set, and rules which differ between the original M1 and the M1 Pro.
How the two Efficiency cores in the M1 Pro and Max chips can match the performance of all four E cores in the original M1.
A better Disk Utility, understanding Spotlight, Time Machine to APFS, an introduction to ARM assembly language, Shortcuts, and wiping it all.
How can the two E cores in an M1 Pro/Max apparently match the performance of the four in the original M1? Answers, please.
Assigning ownership to an external bootable disk doesn’t always work in Recovery mode on an M1 Mac. But there’s an easy workaround.
The Eclectic Light Company 