RTX 5090 + M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
Summary
The article documents a hands-on experiment to attach a desktop RTX 5090 GPU to an M4 MacBook Air via Thunderbolt using a Linux VM and PCI passthrough, detailing hardware, virtualization, and driver quirks. It covers the engineering challenges, including memory-mapping with HVF, DMA with Apple DART, and patches like a coalescing mapper and kprobes to adjust NVIDIA driver behavior. It concludes that while the setup is feasible and can enable AI inference and gaming workloads, it is not practical versus native hardware, and highlights the ongoing need for better macOS/Linux support and upstream improvements.