CPU-caused Kernel panic during boot

[JohnAlexINL]

Unzipping the release zip file and trying to run the shellscript gives me a splash screen for the loader and crashes immediately with

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 19.6.0: Wed Aug 12 20:04:33 EDT 2026; root:xnu/RELEASE_X86_64
Kernel UUID: 2C138BD5-BD24-3418-BCB1-EF1A2D00E4FA
__HIB  text base: 0xffffff8000100000
System shutdown begun: NO
Panic diags file unavailable, panic occurred prior to initialization

System uptime in nanoseconds: 8313039134
loaded kexts:
(none)
Attempting to commit panic log to NVRAM

** In Memory Panic Stackshot Succeeded ** Bytes Traced 1408 **
Attempting to commit panic log to NVRAM

Please go to https://panic.apple.com to report this panic

I did try tweaking some of the settings in the shellscript; giving it more memory, removing some of the restrictions on the "system" resources... It seemed to me that as long as I wasn't using the "Penryn" CPU, it would not have this panic, but still does not seem to ever finish booting.

The only thing that did seem to help was switching to a different Intel CPU. Replacing Penryn with Haswell-v1 booted into a shell just fine. I'm not 100% sure why, but I thought I should share my findings.

[mszoek]

Intersting... Glad you got it booting! Penryn is sort of the gold standard for Darwin compatibility - we use it because it works for most people, but not all. Can you give more detail about your host CPU and system?

FWIW I use Skylake and that also works. We need to add more cpu detection and support code at some point.

Oh also, that shell is the current state of it. There's another file /sbin/ws that grabs the framebuffer and clears it, a test of obj-c tollfree bridging, and a few other little things on there. It's still pretty bare bones - no GUI yet.

[JohnAlexINL]

Sure! I'm on a AMD Ryzen 3 3200G and running Alpine v3.23 x86_64.