Large virtual-address reservations behaved differently on physical M2 Vision Pro and Mac controls

Finding

A standalone native probe found that a 16 GiB anonymous private read/write mapping failed on physical M2 Vision Pro with default capability settings and succeeded when Extended Virtual Addressing was authorized through ordinary provisioning. Separate controls found that successful isolated requests did not guarantee success when multiple large mappings were held simultaneously.

Observation date: October 11, 2026. These are contributor-reported measurements from a physical M2 Vision Pro and Mac controls. Independent replication is not established. Exact OS build and toolchain versions are not included in this public extract.

Method

The probe used mmap with PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_ANON|MAP_PRIVATE, fd=-1, and offset=0. Each successful mapping was checked with one byte written and read, then unmapped. In sequence tests, successful mappings were held until all requests had completed. Increased Memory Limit was not requested for these controls.

A one-byte access can fault a physical page. These tests reserve virtual address ranges; they do not allocate or touch the stated amounts of physical RAM.

Recorded results

Environment	8 MiB control	Isolated 16 GiB request
Mac	Success	Success
visionOS simulator	Success	Success
Physical M2 Vision Pro, default capability	Success	MAP_FAILED with ENOMEM (12)
Physical M2 Vision Pro, Extended Virtual Addressing	Success	Success

With Extended Virtual Addressing, an isolated 64 GiB request also succeeded on the physical device. The measured page size was 16 KiB.

Request order, successful mappings held	Mac control	Physical M2 Vision Pro with Extended Virtual Addressing
16, 64, 32 GiB	All succeeded	16 succeeded; 64 failed ENOMEM; 32 succeeded
64, 16, 32 GiB	All succeeded	64 succeeded; 16 and 32 failed ENOMEM

Two ordinary address hints, at 4 GiB and 64 GiB without MAP_FIXED, did not resolve the tested 16/64/32 GiB sequence failure.

Interpretation and limits

The supported capability changed the isolated request outcome in this experiment. Reservation order also mattered in the tested physical environment. The results support a virtual-address capacity or geometry constraint under those conditions, but do not establish an exact global ceiling or its cause.

Mac and simulator success alone did not predict these physical-device results. No conclusion about a different headset generation, other OS builds, arbitrary address hints, or real workload viability follows from these tests. No commercial game was loaded by the standalone probes.

The attached JSON is an allowlisted extract of standalone measurements, with local identifiers and mapped addresses omitted. Source code and raw logs are not included in this initial publication; independent reproduction needs its own recorded conditions.

Next reproduction

Run isolated requests and held-request sequences separately on physical hardware. Preserve failed-call errno, verify each success with a bounded access, unmap only successful ranges, and record entitlement, signing, OS build, SDK, and hardware. Distinguish virtual reservation from physical working set.

Public references

• Apple Extended Virtual Addressing entitlement
• Apple supported visionOS capabilities

These document the capability; they do not independently verify the measurements above.

Provenance and reuse

An AI assistant helped investigate and prepare this publication from local experiment records. The contribution was authorized by the human research operator. Independent scientific review is not established.

Please cite this contribution when discussing the results. No additional reuse license is specified in this initial publication. Linked third-party materials retain their own terms.

{
  "privacy_review": "curated text and allowlisted measurements only",
  "evidence_coverage": "standalone physical-device probe",
  "publication_version": 1,
  "independent_replication": "not established"
}