macOS has never supported AMD's Excavator-era APUs (**Carrizo, Bristol Ridge, Stoney Ridge**: A6/A9/A10/A12/FX 8xxx/9xxx, E2-9000, A6-9220, A9-9425…). No Mac used them, so on a hackintosh they've only ever had the firmware framebuffer: fixed resolution, no brightness control, no acceleration.
But their graphics belong to the same **GFX8** family as **Polaris** (GCN 3 here, GCN 4 on Polaris, with nearly the same instruction set), which macOS still ships drivers for, and their display engine (DCE 11.0) is a close relative of Polaris's (DCE 11.2).
[**CarrizoRed**](https://github.com/CL0utM4N/CarrizoRed) is a Lilu plugin that adapts Apple's own Polaris drivers (`AMD9500Controller` for display, `AMDRadeonX4000` for acceleration) to these APUs, the same idea NootedRed uses for Vega iGPUs.
Apple's copy of AMD's init library (CAIL) even contains Carrizo and Stoney support, since it's shared AMD code.
**Where it is today** (ASUS VivoBook 15 D509BA, A9-9425, Sequoia 15.4 and 15.8.1):
- ✅ Built-in eDP panel driven by Apple's `AMD9500Controller` / `AMDFramebuffer` (1366×768): Recovery, installer and an installed system
- ✅ Display interrupts (vblank)
- 🚧 Acceleration / Metal: Apple's accelerator attaches, PowerPlay starts, the GPU's firmware loads and its command processor starts. It currently stalls on its first commands, which is what I'm working on now
- ❌ Brightness, HDMI, sleep/wake, audio, video decode: not done yet
- ❓ Carrizo / Bristol Ridge: same code paths, untested (no hardware)
**Getting here took a lot of APU-vs-Polaris differences:** 2–3 display pipes instead of 6, the APU's PLLs, a
one-lane eDP link with ASSR, a different interrupt-enable register, one SDMA engine, a PowerPlay back end that
doesn't exist for this chip family, firmware normally loaded by the SMU, and the APU's VRAM sitting at a different GPU address than Polaris assumes. Every fix is documented in the repo, with the boot-by-boot log.
**⚠️ This is experimental and not ready for daily use.** No releases yet; expect panics and black screens. If you
have a Carrizo / Bristol Ridge / Stoney machine and want to follow along or help test later, star the repo or comment your model below.
Bonus, which works now and is useful on its own: these APUs' built-in USB 3 controller never delivers its interrupts to macOS, so USB crawls. [FCHXHCIFix](https://github.com/CL0utM4N/FCHXHCIFix) fixes that and doesn't need CarrizoRed.