Austro Dongle with M1 Macs

[michael.g.miller]

I'm thinking about upgrading my clunker Intel MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro. Problem is, I want to be able to run engine diagnostics on it in AOG situations.

Has anyone tested the Austro Engine Wizard software with an M1 Mac (probably running under UTM)?

[michael.g.miller]

Anyone out there with an M1 Mac and an Austro dongle?

[Boatguy]

I've been planning the same thing myself. I have an M1 MacBook Pro and I've been running other Windows apps under Windows 11 and Parallels 18 with no problems. Today MS announced support for Windows running under Parallels on ARM machines.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft ... d-m2-macs/

[jast]

I have an M1 mac and a dongle, however I have not tried to use it with Windows 11 under Parallels. I assume it should work, because Windows completely emulates x86 and x64 architectures and the AustroEngine software doesn’t need a lot of computational resources.

We actually put a cheap windows 10 laptop which supports USB charging (basically a no name windows tablet) where everything is correctly set up into the plane. So in case of an ECU failure you don’t have to first get the software up and running.

[michael.g.miller]

ARM for Windows would certainly be nice, but I don't think you can run x86 drivers on it, which I'd assume are needed for the dongle. I'd guess you have to emulate full x86 Windows under UTM.

Anyone with a M1 Mac and dongle want to try and report back?

[Boatguy]

To clarify, Apple Silicon, M1, M2, etc. is ARM based. So the announcement from Microsoft is implicitly giving the green light to Apple processors to run Windows as a native app. But that doesn't address the apps which were compiled for x86 that are running on Windows.

Apple has their own emulation software running underneath everything else which does the x86 emulation. I'm writing this on my M1 Max MBP and the Activity Monitor shows there are 19 Intel processes running.

I expect that it will work with no problem.

[RookieFlyer]

To clarify, Apple Silicon, M1, M2, etc. is ARM based. So the announcement from Microsoft is implicitly giving the green light to Apple processors to run Windows as a native app. But that doesn't address the apps which were compiled for x86 that are running on Windows.

Apple has their own emulation software running underneath everything else which does the x86 emulation. I'm writing this on my M1 Max MBP and the Activity Monitor shows there are 19 Intel processes running.

I expect that it will work with no problem.

While Apple Silicon is ARM based, it's not ARM as the rest of the world's ARM ecosystem know it. There are significant hardware differences in how interrupts and memory are handled, which means Microsoft would have to re-write significant portions of the Windows base code for it to run natively on Apple's silicon.

Given Apple's small market share outside of North America, I doubt Microsoft will invest in the changes needed for Windows on ARM run natively on Apple hardware. Also, the hacker community have tried and failed so far at building a 'normal' ARM to Apple ARM conversion layer to enable Windows to natively boot and run on Apple silicon.

Instead, what Microsoft have done, is give their blessing to licensing Windows on ARM inside a couple of MacOS virtualization apps. The catch is, the Windows on ARM's x86 emulation layer does not provide for x86 coded hardware drivers to run, and I would suggest this will very likely prevent the Austro dongle working 'as is'. That's not to say Austro couldn't in future rewrite their dongle driver code to overcome this limitation, but I wouldn't hold my breath.