Asahi Linux Supports M3 Macs
James Calligeros (Hacker News, Phoronix):
Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC!
Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10 Gb/s), hardware accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more! The only major exceptions remain full DCP support and the GPU, which we will have more news on in the coming months.
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Sleep currently does not work due to limitations with the firmware-provided framebuffer. This will be addressed once full DCP support is wired up for M3.
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Although MacBooks and iMacs are supported (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max), the Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) is not yet supported.
Previously:
- Omarchy and Omacom Foundation
- Asahi Linux Lead Resigns
- The Apple GPU and the Impossible Bug
- macOS 11.2 Beta 2 Adds Full Custom Kernel Support
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I dream of running Linux on the latest MacBooks. Unfortunately, this has not materialized. Apple churns out new M processors faster than the Linux guys add support for older ones.
Well, of course, it'd be a great help if Apple (and other OEMs, for that matter) documented their hardware. I wonder why they don't. After all, their value is in hardware sales and—ah, I see the problem now—services. Shame really, macOS really isn't the best ambassador for their hardware any more, which is getting really good now that it's completely non-upgradable …
I think it's far more about aspects like control and liability than it is about wanting to sell services.
They do not want an OSS project's opinion on how they should design their hardware, how this and that thing about the display controller was a good or bad decision, how this and that about iBoot would make booting Linux easier or harder. They want to control the entire stack top to bottom, which indeed they do — from a first-party CPU core design to a first-party kernel all the way up to first-party GUI apps. (See also: avoiding certain public APIs. As long as they're private, you can keep iterating on them. Once they're public, much harder to change the contract.)
And second, should something go wrong with your Asahi setup, affecting the hardware, because you have this obscure combination of kernel, window manager, GPU driver, some external USB device, whatever the case may be, they do not want the hassle. (See also: them largely deprecating kernel extensions.) They want the clean, easy legal route of "not our problem". Providing semi-official support for third-party OSes would muddy that.
"Providing semi-official support for third-party OSes would muddy that."
Apple did do that, though. They changed their boot restrictions to make it easier for Asahi to boot on their hardware.
