Hey everyone,
I just bought my Memryx MX3 and I’m struggling to get the device to be recognized by my machine. I have a Macbook Air M1 (Apple Silicon) and I’m using lima-vm (running debian) as suggested in the FAQs section. The hardware is connected to my mac via a NVME M.2 enclosure that supports PCIE x 4, Thunderbolt. That enclosure is a “UGREEN 40Gbps M.2 NVMe”.
All drivers and runtime were successfully installed in the lima vm. But the device does not show up in the vm, I can see a device connected when going through the macos “System Information” tho.
After some research, it turns out that macOS does not allow pcie passthrough and the driver management in this OS is a mess. It does not even allow you to have direct access to the connected device, you have to do it via DriverKit (the macOS way to build drivers and access devices through a safe layer abstracted by the OS). Sucks cause I use my mackbook air for daily development and would have been great to be able to just attach the accelerator using the enclosure and build/test/ship code changes and then just re-attach the enclosure to the production machine.
So long story short, it is not possible to use the accelerator with macOS. On the other hand, using a laptop with a natively installed linux distro like Ubuntu and connecting the module via the thunderbolt enclosure mentioned in the post works just fine.
If you really need to develop for Memryx MX3 on a mac, then using the simulator in a vm on you mac is the way to go.
Also the mx3 is just fantastic, can’t wait for MX4
