General Installation Guide for Apple Silicon

OpenBSD on Apple Silicon relies on the awesome work done by Asahi Linux. Great thanks to them for all the hard work!

Currently, there are some caveats in running OpenBSD on Apple Silicon:

• M1 and M2 models are supported. M3 and M4 aren't (yet).
• Graphics acceleration doesn't work, thus no video playback.
• Due to system internals, macOS is required - dual booting is a must.
• Built-in WiFi works but might be flaky.
• Restoring a broken installation or partition layout requires another Mac.

Installing OpenBSD on Apple Silicon hardware requires repartitioning the disk. The installation script will walk you through that, step by step. It is important to realize that repartitioning afterwards is not easy and buggy - potentially causing data loss. Therefor, it is recommended to think through the desired partitioning.

macOS is required, currently, due to how firmware is being fetched. In this moment, it is not possible to single boot OpenBSD. Do consider that macOS needs sufficient space allocation to handle updates - which can require quite the amount of temporary space.

The INSTALL.arm64 documentation has a section on how to install OpenBSD on Apple Silicon. Alternatively, Tobias Heider (tobhe@) has created a custom version of the Asahi installer, which fetches OpenBSD and even throws in a nice logo. It can be installed the following way:

curl https://tobhe.de/openbsd/install | sh