4 ms·

What is the prospect for newer M support, e.g. M3, M4? I am hesitant to adopt something that doesn't work with current and future models.

markus_zhang 11mo ago
Without official support, the Asahi team needs to RE a lot of stuffs. I’d expect it to lag behind a couple of generations at least. I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough.
- lagniappe 11mo ago
  >I don’t get why it does that. I've got a few ideas
- stetrain 11mo ago
  If you want the latest and greatest you can get it. If an M1 is fine you can get a great deal on one and they’re still great machines and supported by Apple.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  M1 is indeed quite adequate for most, but each generation has brought substantial boosts in performance in single-threaded, multi-threaded, and with the M5 generation in particular GPU-bound tasks. These advancements are required to keep pace with the industry and in a few aspects stay ahead of competitors, plus there exist high end users whose workloads greatly benefit from these performance improvements.
  - markus_zhang 11mo ago
    I agree. But Apple doesn’t sell new M1 chip laptops anymore AFAIK. There are some refurbished ones but most likely I need to go into a random store to find one. I only saw M4 and M5 laptops online. That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Sure it is probably better for Apple to move forward quickly though.
    - Kirby64 11mo ago
      > That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Why would this be true? An M5 MacBook Air today costs the same as an M1 MacBook Air cost in 2020 or whenever they released it, and is substantially more performant. Your dollar per performance is already better. If they kept selling the same old stuff, then you spread production across multiple different nodes and the pricing would be inherently worse.
    - wtallis 11mo ago
      In the US, Walmart is still selling the M1 MacBook Air new, for $599 (and has been discounted to $549 or better at times, such as Black Friday). In general, I don't think it's reasonable to worry that Apple's products aren't thoroughly achieving economies of scale. The less expensive consumer-oriented products are extremely popular, various components are shared across product lines (eg. the same chip being used in Macs and iPads) and across multiple generations (except for the SoC itself, obviously), and Apple rather famously has a well-run supply chain. From a strategic perspective, it seems likely that Apple's long history of annual iteration on their processors in the iPhone and their now well-established pattern of updating the Mac chips less often but still frequently is part of how Apple's chips have been so successful. Annual(ish) chip updates with small incremental improvements compounds over the years. Compare Apple's past decade of chip progress against Intel's troubled past decade of infrequent technology updates (when you look past the incrementing of the branding), uneven improvements and some outright regressions in important performance metrics.
    - stetrain 10mo ago
      Apple does still sell the M1 through resellers. Also there’s nothing wrong with buying used or refurbished. Apple doesn’t have to keep making older tech for people to continue getting use out of it.
eigenspace 11mo ago
The project is effectively dead
- shadowpho 11mo ago
  What why?
  - eigenspace 11mo ago
    It's really hard to do and nobody is paying for it?
  - nicoburns 11mo ago
    Because key developers have left the project, and developers who are capable of such work are few and far between.
    - charcircuit 11mo ago
      >are few and far between They are more common than you would think. There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary.
      - donkeylazy456 11mo ago
        > There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary. You explained it well by yourself.
  - willis936 11mo ago
    Very little progress made this year after high profile departures (Hector Martin, project lead, Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig - GPU gurus). Alyssa's departure isn't reflected on Asahi's website yet, but it is in her blog. I believe she also left Valve, which I think was sponsoring some aspects of the Asahi project. So when people say "Asahi hasn't seen any setbacks" be sure to ask them who has stepped in to make up for these losses in both talent and sponsorship. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
WD-42 11mo ago
Asahi is all reverse engineering. It’s nothing short of a miracle what has already accomplished, despite, not because of, Apple. That said some of the prominent developers have left the project. As long as Apple keeps hoarding their designs it’s going to be a struggle, even more so now. If you care about FOSS operating systems or freedom over your own hardware there isn’t a reason to choose Apple.
- matthewfcarlson 11mo ago
  To be clear, the work the asahi folks are doing is incredible. I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff. I’ve heard it’s mostly because there wasn’t an m3 Mac mini which is a much easier target for CI since it isn’t a portable. Also, there have been a ton of hardware changes internally between M2 and M3. M4 is a similar leap. More coprocessors, more security features, etc. For example, PPL was replaced by SPTM and all the exclave magic. https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c37194 https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c... As always, opinions are my own
  - ZiiS 11mo ago
    I strongly support a projects stance that you shouldn't ask when it will be done. But the time between the M1 launch and a good experience was less than the time since M3 I would love to know what is involved.
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    This is what ruffles my jimmies about this whole thing: > I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff. The reverse engineering is a monumental effort, this Sisyphean task of trying to keep up with never-ending changes to the hardware. Meanwhile, the documentation is just sitting there in Cupertino. An enormous waste of time and effort from some of the most skilled people in the industry. Well, maybe not so much anymore since a bunch of them left. I really hope this ends up biting Apple in the ass instead of protecting whatever market share they are guarding here.
- SamuelAdams 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
schmuckonwheels 11mo ago
This is a very straightforward problem with a relatively simple solution: Stop buying Apple laptops to run Linux.
- jjtheblunt 11mo ago
  Hard disagree : try the UTM app on the App Store (or build it from open source) and you get Apple Silicon native virtualization and super simple installation of Aarch64 linuxes from an iso. i've been doing this for maybe a year, after frustration with power draw and sleep modes (and dual boot) with Asahi. it's been great...and Apple silicon is still super efficient, which is why i said hard disagree.
GeekyBear 11mo ago
The new project leadership team has prioritized upstreaming the existing work over reverse engineering on newer systems. > Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term. https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ For instance, in this month's progress report: > Last time, we announced that the core SMC driver had finally been merged upstream after three long years. Following that success, we have started the process of merging the SMC’s subdevice drivers which integrate all of the SMC’s functionality into the various kernel subsystems. The hwmon driver has already been accepted for 6.19, meaning that the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensors controlled by the SMC will be readable using the standard hwmon interfaces. The SMC is also responsible for reading and setting the RTC, and the driver for this function has also been merged for 6.19! The only SMC subdevices left to merge is the driver for the power button and lid switch, which is still on the mailing list, and the battery/power supply management driver, which currently needs some tweaking to deal with changes in the SMC firmware in macOS 26. Also finally making it upstream are the changes required to support USB3 via the USB-C ports. This too has been a long process, with our approach needing to change significantly from what we had originally developed downstream https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/

markus_zhang 11mo ago

Without official support, the Asahi team needs to RE a lot of stuffs. I’d expect it to lag behind a couple of generations at least. I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough.

lagniappe 11mo ago
>I don’t get why it does that. I've got a few ideas
stetrain 11mo ago
If you want the latest and greatest you can get it. If an M1 is fine you can get a great deal on one and they’re still great machines and supported by Apple.
cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
M1 is indeed quite adequate for most, but each generation has brought substantial boosts in performance in single-threaded, multi-threaded, and with the M5 generation in particular GPU-bound tasks. These advancements are required to keep pace with the industry and in a few aspects stay ahead of competitors, plus there exist high end users whose workloads greatly benefit from these performance improvements.
- markus_zhang 11mo ago
  I agree. But Apple doesn’t sell new M1 chip laptops anymore AFAIK. There are some refurbished ones but most likely I need to go into a random store to find one. I only saw M4 and M5 laptops online. That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Sure it is probably better for Apple to move forward quickly though.
  - Kirby64 11mo ago
    > That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Why would this be true? An M5 MacBook Air today costs the same as an M1 MacBook Air cost in 2020 or whenever they released it, and is substantially more performant. Your dollar per performance is already better. If they kept selling the same old stuff, then you spread production across multiple different nodes and the pricing would be inherently worse.
  - wtallis 11mo ago
    In the US, Walmart is still selling the M1 MacBook Air new, for $599 (and has been discounted to $549 or better at times, such as Black Friday). In general, I don't think it's reasonable to worry that Apple's products aren't thoroughly achieving economies of scale. The less expensive consumer-oriented products are extremely popular, various components are shared across product lines (eg. the same chip being used in Macs and iPads) and across multiple generations (except for the SoC itself, obviously), and Apple rather famously has a well-run supply chain. From a strategic perspective, it seems likely that Apple's long history of annual iteration on their processors in the iPhone and their now well-established pattern of updating the Mac chips less often but still frequently is part of how Apple's chips have been so successful. Annual(ish) chip updates with small incremental improvements compounds over the years. Compare Apple's past decade of chip progress against Intel's troubled past decade of infrequent technology updates (when you look past the incrementing of the branding), uneven improvements and some outright regressions in important performance metrics.
  - stetrain 10mo ago
    Apple does still sell the M1 through resellers. Also there’s nothing wrong with buying used or refurbished. Apple doesn’t have to keep making older tech for people to continue getting use out of it.

eigenspace 11mo ago

The project is effectively dead

shadowpho 11mo ago
What why?
- eigenspace 11mo ago
  It's really hard to do and nobody is paying for it?
- nicoburns 11mo ago
  Because key developers have left the project, and developers who are capable of such work are few and far between.
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    >are few and far between They are more common than you would think. There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary.
    - donkeylazy456 11mo ago
      > There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary. You explained it well by yourself.
- willis936 11mo ago
  Very little progress made this year after high profile departures (Hector Martin, project lead, Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig - GPU gurus). Alyssa's departure isn't reflected on Asahi's website yet, but it is in her blog. I believe she also left Valve, which I think was sponsoring some aspects of the Asahi project. So when people say "Asahi hasn't seen any setbacks" be sure to ask them who has stepped in to make up for these losses in both talent and sponsorship. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html

WD-42 11mo ago

Asahi is all reverse engineering. It’s nothing short of a miracle what has already accomplished, despite, not because of, Apple. That said some of the prominent developers have left the project. As long as Apple keeps hoarding their designs it’s going to be a struggle, even more so now. If you care about FOSS operating systems or freedom over your own hardware there isn’t a reason to choose Apple.

matthewfcarlson 11mo ago
To be clear, the work the asahi folks are doing is incredible. I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff. I’ve heard it’s mostly because there wasn’t an m3 Mac mini which is a much easier target for CI since it isn’t a portable. Also, there have been a ton of hardware changes internally between M2 and M3. M4 is a similar leap. More coprocessors, more security features, etc. For example, PPL was replaced by SPTM and all the exclave magic. https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c37194 https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c... As always, opinions are my own
- ZiiS 11mo ago
  I strongly support a projects stance that you shouldn't ask when it will be done. But the time between the M1 launch and a good experience was less than the time since M3 I would love to know what is involved.
- WD-42 11mo ago
  This is what ruffles my jimmies about this whole thing: > I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff. The reverse engineering is a monumental effort, this Sisyphean task of trying to keep up with never-ending changes to the hardware. Meanwhile, the documentation is just sitting there in Cupertino. An enormous waste of time and effort from some of the most skilled people in the industry. Well, maybe not so much anymore since a bunch of them left. I really hope this ends up biting Apple in the ass instead of protecting whatever market share they are guarding here.
SamuelAdams 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

schmuckonwheels 11mo ago

This is a very straightforward problem with a relatively simple solution: Stop buying Apple laptops to run Linux.

jjtheblunt 11mo ago
Hard disagree : try the UTM app on the App Store (or build it from open source) and you get Apple Silicon native virtualization and super simple installation of Aarch64 linuxes from an iso. i've been doing this for maybe a year, after frustration with power draw and sleep modes (and dual boot) with Asahi. it's been great...and Apple silicon is still super efficient, which is why i said hard disagree.

GeekyBear 11mo ago

The new project leadership team has prioritized upstreaming the existing work over reverse engineering on newer systems. > Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term. https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ For instance, in this month's progress report: > Last time, we announced that the core SMC driver had finally been merged upstream after three long years. Following that success, we have started the process of merging the SMC’s subdevice drivers which integrate all of the SMC’s functionality into the various kernel subsystems. The hwmon driver has already been accepted for 6.19, meaning that the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensors controlled by the SMC will be readable using the standard hwmon interfaces. The SMC is also responsible for reading and setting the RTC, and the driver for this function has also been merged for 6.19! The only SMC subdevices left to merge is the driver for the power button and lid switch, which is still on the mailing list, and the battery/power supply management driver, which currently needs some tweaking to deal with changes in the SMC firmware in macOS 26. Also finally making it upstream are the changes required to support USB3 via the USB-C ports. This too has been a long process, with our approach needing to change significantly from what we had originally developed downstream https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/