I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.
> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices.
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers
How likely is such tuning to happen within the practical lifetime of these devices? It's already been years and Linux isn't even feature complete on newer models.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
Given the enormous lifetime of these devices, I’d say chances are pretty good! The only thing that’s going to make an M series Mac obsolete is when Apple stops releasing updates. If you can run Linux on it, that thing is going to last forever.
I would assume that once you have fully functional support for entire historical SoCs, the effort stops being "get most things working on most chips" and starts becoming "adapt already-working things to the newest chips". Yes, it's been years, but there's still so much hardware that Asahi doesn't have good support for yet, and that's dividing the efforts to support the newest chips. I'm sure that once all the existing chips are well-supported, new chips will be fairly quick to bring up.
Fantastic to see the progress and a fascinating detailed write-up.
You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
I will admit I am a bit confused by them locking out features like that, especially since they didn't at first. I wouldn't jump to assuming it's hostile, though.
Most of those accommodations are for macOS, and make very few (if any) concessions for alternative operating systems. We're talking Qualcomm-tier effort.
Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple's support is (somehow) behind Nvidia's foot-dragging.
They already have the ability to prevent alternative operating systems. They use the same or similar SoCs in their other product lines and those do not let you do this.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
Amazing progress as usual. It’s been fun watching just how much a few people can accomplish over the last few years despite working on sometimes unstable sand.
I was seriously worried the various incompatibilities the M3 bootloader had with Asahi's debugging setup would mean way slower bring-up than M1 and M2 had. Seems like that wasn't the case - or, at least, won't be the case anymore.
Yeah, you'll find out that va-api is not a good match for v4l2-requests. It does not pass decoded bitstream to the drivers as is, but pre-computes some things for some codecs, while v4l2-requests mostly expects original information parsed from the bitstream.
To downvoters: historically, a decent number of Windows and Linux users would run the operating systems on Apple hardware. I myself ran a triple-boot between macOS, Windows and Linux for years. Apple Silicon demolished that market, and Asahi Linux is like a light at the end of the tunnel for those users who were entirely left behind by the ARM architecture transition.
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
You get a jmp to some arm64 instructions of your choosing, with a bunch of CPU features locked out.
Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple's support is (somehow) behind Nvidia's foot-dragging.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
https://xff.cz/git/libva-v4l2_request/