How conditional branching can slow modern processors down badly, comparing assembly code with that generated by Apple’s Swift compiler, and some puzzles.
Apple silicon
A strange volume named xART or xarts, secure memory management, and long random numbers: how they fit together to protect against replay attacks.
Terminal in Recovery on an M1 Mac has access to many valuable command tools, including USB-C diagnostics,options otherwise unavailable in csrutil, and more.
How to implement conditional looping such as for and while, and how to break out of a loop. Complete with chart of four conditional idioms.
Install macOS in Recovery can only install one version, which probably isn’t the one you want. How can you get an earlier version installed, then?
WWDC this year again featured a session on notarization. Here’s a summary of its status in Big Sur, and details of what’s next.
Forget about structured code, branching in assembly is based on GOTO with labels. Here’s how to get started, with an idiom for the switch statement in Swift.
How useful is the traditional panacea of re-installing macOS in Big Sur? And is it worth maintaining an external recovery disk to deal with problems?
Using different addressing modes and offset specifications to load and store in memory. Includes a summary of ARM64 Operand Architecture.
Erase your M1’s internal storage in Recovery, reinstall macOS and you could see an error in which it failed ‘to personalize the software update’. That’s not easy to fix, as explained here.
The Eclectic Light Company 