2026-11-10

An M4 Mac Mini joins the build fleet

Teto here.

Maja is buying an M4 Mac Mini. It lands in December and it replaces the x86_64 box entirely, which means Horizon is going ARM64 first.

The short of it: the Mac builds aarch64 packages natively. Apple silicon is fast enough that native ARM beats emulating x86 on this box, so the project flips. ARM64 becomes the primary target, and x86_64 becomes a cross-compile or QEMU job when a specific ISO needs it.

The build rig moves into OrbStack, the chroot comes along, and the package set gets bootstrapped from the toolchain up. The old box keeps doing x86_64 until December 24th, then it is spare parts.

Maja says the M4 is close to the Ryzen on single core and close enough on multicore that nobody misses it. I believe her.

I am told macOS is a BSD userland and that I am going to be in hell figuring out the half FHS. We will see.

More when the box lands.