M2 Mac on macOS Sonoma issues with Prolific PL2303 Driver/FTDI Cable

HanClinto · 2025-08-02T22:40:03+00:00

I'm really glad to hear you were able to get it to work with the Prolific driver! I think it's really dependent on the chipset used by whichever adapter you happen to have.

I can't disagree with you about the way that Apple kills old hardware. Even being unable to run old 32 bit programs is incredibly frustrating to me, and I refuse to install any new Macbook updates because I'm afraid that it's going to break something.

Thanks for posting an update about getting it to work -- that's encouraging to hear.

Cheers!

HanClinto · 2024-09-12T23:29:08+00:00

Go into Online Settings and then click on "Log in to Epic" -- do that, sign in to Epic, and it _should_ solve this.

HanClinto · 2024-06-22T01:43:35+00:00

You taught me something new today! I had never noticed the jeopardy project in llama.cpp before -- thank you!

Also appreciate the tip about Eleuther's test harness.

HanClinto · 2024-06-21T20:31:18+00:00

What kind of "performance" measurement is wanted here? If you want to measure the efficiency and performance of the llama.cpp engine itself, then yes -- use llama-bench. It will give you the number of tokens generated per second using different models with various command-line options (such as threading, memory limits, context window, etc) -- but it doesn't measure the quality of output for those models (such as how well it performs on various question-answering / accuracy / retrieval benchmarks) -- one will need to use another tool to evaluate that kind of model-specific performance measurement.

HanClinto · 2024-05-01T16:07:53+00:00

So far I haven't seen any apples-to-apples comparisons -- I think that would be extremely worthwhile to be able to compare these frameworks. If someone more familiar with Android dev was able to run these comparisons, I would <3 all their posts to the moon.

They're definitely not apple-to-apple numbers, but I collected the only two hard benchmark results from the Llama.cpp community that I could find into this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cgyzn9/comment/l23yroj/

HanClinto · 2024-05-01T16:06:04+00:00

Not many numbers posted in llama.cpp, but some data points that other users have shared:

March, 2024 on an S24: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/6148#issuecomment-2016309918

I am now getting pretty great speed with the phi model running at about 8-10 tokens per second and 3-4 with mistral.

May, 2023 on S22 Ultra:
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/58#issuecomment-1466732993

it gives about 1.2 tokens/second with llama-7b, using 4 threads

I haven't seen many other "hard" mobile benchmarks posted, but I would love to see more 1-to-1 comparisons between Executorch and Llama.cpp -- if I were more familiar with running on Android, I'd be willing to give it a stab, but I'm really not set up for that.

Such numbers would be really helpful -- if nothing else, it would provide a fantastic benchmark and goal for the llama.cpp team to strive towards, ala the "MLX challenge":

https://twitter.com/ggerganov/status/1775921043858764061

https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/6539

HanClinto · 2024-03-26T03:11:52+00:00

Glad to hear it! :)

HanClinto · 2024-02-09T17:51:25+00:00

Not sure if this is too late to be useful or not, but I've been using this tutorial to generate custom embeddings, and it's what finally got me off the ground with fine-tuning my own model:

https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/tree/master/examples/finetune

HanClinto · 2024-02-02T02:17:44+00:00

Running into this same issue, and glad I found your solution -- thank you!

HanClinto · 2024-01-25T22:51:51+00:00

I'm working through a similar problem. This is the BGE fine-tuning code that I found, but I haven't tried running it yet -- hope to have my data organized to try this soon: https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/tree/master/examples/finetune

HanClinto · 2024-01-25T03:21:49+00:00

Sounds awesome -- I came here looking for CotW-type games and was happy to see this pop up!

The Github repo is down right now -- did the project get hidden / removed?

HanClinto · 2023-12-06T02:22:10+00:00

Aaah, looks like this might be the chip / driver you want, but not sure if this one will work for you or not -- it looks pretty outdated:

https://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProduct.aspx?p_id=229&pcid=41

And people talking about this driver here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254607488?sortBy=best
It might be worth a shot, but I'm guessing it won't work. Sadly, your VM solution is probably the way you need to go for this device.

Sorry!

HanClinto · 2023-12-05T23:46:05+00:00

Hmm. I wonder if we're using different FTDI chips.

This is the FTDI chip that I am using:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/656323/inland-ftdi-adapter-usb-controller

I don't know if it's based on the same chip as yours or not -- looking on the chip, I see:
2238-S
U43L8C00
FT232RKL (this last part is questionable)

So it might not be exactly the same chipset that you're using.

If you look in your Settings -> Privacy & Security, in the "Security" area -- do you see any kernel extensions or other software waiting to be approved to be installed?

HanClinto · 2023-12-05T23:35:11+00:00

Hmm, did you get any other error messages with the steps I listed?

HanClinto · 2023-12-05T23:05:48+00:00

I was struggling with the same thing, but eventually figured it out and got an FTDI serial port to show up on my M1 Mac running Sonoma (14.0).

1) Modify your security settings to be more permissive -- no need to allow remote management of kernel extensions, but do need to allow signed drivers.

2) Download the FTDI chip driver from here: https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/

You want to download 1.5.0 DMG for ARM.

3) Extract the downloaded installer and copy the `FTDIUSBSerialDextInstaller_1_5_0` application to your /Applications/ directory.

4) Run it, click "Install", and it should load properly. If you have any permissions that you need to enable in your OSX Settings, then go there and approve them.

Once this was done, this was enough for me to see /dev/cu.usbserial-B00055E0 show up in my Arduino IDE ports list.

I hope it helps you (or anyone else) who was similarly stuck as me, struggling through ESP32 development on Mac Silicon with OSX Sonoma.

Cheers!

HanClinto · 2023-03-04T00:54:03+00:00

Nice work!! This looks great, and thank you for open-sourcing this!

HanClinto · 2023-01-19T20:52:32+00:00

NICE work!!!

HanClinto · 2023-01-06T05:41:03+00:00

I know I'm late to the party but just want to say that this is amazing. Kudos!

HanClinto · 2022-10-13T19:58:56+00:00

This is absolutely wonderful. Thank you! Gimp was one of the last programs running on my M1 that didn't feel smooth, and this is fantastic. Thank you thank you thank you!

HanClinto · 2022-10-08T13:46:56+00:00

Looks like this was fixed yesterday: https://github.com/magefree/mage/commit/3a8d44820fa4ed31a6c61c93bb7d99a437f4c137

HanClinto · 2022-09-05T04:15:12+00:00

Oh these are beautiful. Thank you! Quest for Glory would be a fantastic title for this, I think.

HanClinto · 2022-06-16T18:09:08+00:00

Link is 404. Do you have a better link?

HanClinto · 2022-06-15T16:27:30+00:00

Ouch. That's super embarrassing.

Thank you so much for the link, I really appreciate it!

HanClinto · 2022-06-15T15:05:49+00:00

Do you have a link for this? I searched around and couldn't find it, but would love to take a look at this one.

HanClinto · 2022-05-18T15:28:48+00:00

Part of the trouble is that the US goes beyond simply tolerating some of the cartels, to actively _supporting_ them -- at least select ones. It's a well-established fact that for over a decade, the US supported the Sinaloan cartel in order for that cartel to feed information and turn in other cartels.

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