Operating systems › Apple macOS › macOS 11 Big Sur
macOS 11 Big Sur
2020
macOS Big Sur, the 2020 release with a major visual redesign and the first version to run on Apple Silicon Macs.
Reference & documentation
External technical references for programming macOS 11 Big Sur and for writing emulators.
| Resource | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference ↗ | Format | Mach-O header, load commands, segments spec |
| APFS on-disk format specification (libfsapfs) ↗ | Format | Detailed APFS container, volume, B-tree structures |
| XNU syscalls.master (BSD system call table) ↗ | Interrupt list | Canonical Darwin syscall numbers and prototypes |
| Writing ARM64 Code for Apple Platforms ↗ | Programming | Apple's ARM64 ABI: register usage, calling conventions |
| HelloSilicon: ARM64 Assembly on Apple Silicon ↗ | Programming | Hands-on Darwin arm64 assembly tutorial, 16 chapters |
| AAPCS64: Procedure Call Standard for AArch64 ↗ | Reference | Official ARM64 calling convention and register usage |
| macOS Big Sur 11.1 Release Notes ↗ | Reference | Official API changes and behavior notes |
| XNU Kernel Source (apple-oss-distributions/xnu) ↗ | Source | Official Darwin/macOS kernel: Mach + BSD + IOKit |
| Extracting system libraries from Big Sur dyld cache ↗ | Tool | Build dyld_shared_cache_util to extract Big Sur libraries |
| dyld-shared-cache-extractor CLI ↗ | Tool | Extract libraries from Apple's dyld shared cache |