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Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report
- CafeRacer 3mo agoIt is exciting that they are working on AVD driver.
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoif i use ffmpeg or VLC on a M1+ Mac, does it use AVD?
- Forgeties79 3mo agoGod bless the asahi team
- humanfromearth9 3mo ago[flagged]
- sneak 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoI’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems
- amelius 3mo ago[flagged]
- lopis 3mo agoThese efforts will also save a lot of old macbooks from the landfill in the future.
- rbits 3mo agoWhat do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.
- preisschild 3mo agoApple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable. And I'm not even talking about drivers
- bzzzt 3mo agoUEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development? It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.
- preisschild 3mo agoYou don't have to support "legacy stuff", just make sure a modern linux kernel can boot without apple-specific workarounds
- coxmi 3mo agoI wonder what the dev/CI process looks like on this. Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?
- viraptor 3mo agom1n1 does a lot of fun stuff here: https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/tethered-boot/ https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/tethered-boot/ It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sneak 3mo agoIt is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
- figmert 3mo agoBecause Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store. Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
- boxed 3mo agoThe ad revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the app store rent, which is a drop in the bucket compared to hardware sales.
- eru 3mo agoDo you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?
- MYEUHD 3mo agohttps://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment iPhone: 50.4% Mac: 8.1% iPad: 6.7% Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6% Services: 26.2% I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue. Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
- 3mo ago
- simonmales 3mo agoWill this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro? I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.
- mort96 3mo agoThey are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers. Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease. Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there's Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/ https://ubuntuasahi.org/ EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1 https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
- weikju 3mo agoYou can still run Arch, and Ubuntu Asahi also exists. (1) They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported. 1- https://ubuntuasahi.org/ https://ubuntuasahi.org/
- hparadiz 3mo agoI wish more people on HN learned how to build their own kernel and run it. A distro is just window dressing and flavor.
- awesomeusername 3mo agoThere is a bit more to it on ARM I'm afraid. The device trees are complex and it feels to me it takes it out of the realm of 'anyone can and should do it'
- jakogut 3mo agoDevice trees are certainly less portable across hardware, and more difficult to create than just booting a generic kernel on a machine that supports ACPI. However, the device tree is shipped as part of the kernel, and as long as the bootloader correctly loads the DTB and kernel, it's no more difficult to swap out the userspace portion/rootfs than any other Linux system, generally.
- Gigachad 3mo agoIs the github sponsors link a 404 for everyone else?
- zamadatix 3mo agoNot for me, perhaps fixed in the last hour already.
- eqvinox 3mo ago> The defacto industry standard for audio ICs is I²S, an I²C-based bus optimised for audio data. Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C. (Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
- a1o 3mo agoThanks for this comment, it lead me to look into I2S and I learned something new!
- phire 3mo agoYeah, it's much closer to SPI. The reason why they both follow the same naming scheme is that Philips Semiconductor (now NXP) made both.
- jessienark 3mo ago[flagged]
- TazeTSchnitzel 3mo agoI²S is a remarkably simple design. There's no protocol handshakes, it's just raw PCM. I like how it's designed so sender and receiver can use totally different sample bit-depths (in either direction) without any incompatibility. https://web.archive.org/web/20070102004400/http://www.nxp.com/acrobat_download/various/I2SBUS.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070102004400/http://www.nxp.co...
- shvarr 3mo agoAsahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow. There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished. It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.
- torben-friis 3mo agoIf they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative. M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.
- shvarr 3mo agoM1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch. Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.
- cromka 3mo ago[dead]
- rowanG077 3mo agoThat's simply not true. I have been daily driving asahi for 2.5 years or so now on an M2 Max macbook. In it's been one of the most reliable and smooth experiences I have had ever using linux. DP alt made is working fine for me. I'm not sure about battery, I never measured.
- KolmogorovComp 3mo agoI wonder how much LLMs have been leveraged to help Asahi lately, there’s extremely powerful for reverse-engineering. Have they written about it?
- johnwalkr 3mo agoThey forbid their use. https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/ https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
- KolmogorovComp 3mo agoIt's a shame (in practice, although I get the philosophical idea). I think the lawsuit chances are very low because FAANG right now depend way too much on LLM being legal, so they would not want to shoot themselves in the foot.
- GeekyBear 3mo agoIt's nice to see M3 support progressing well. They first mentioned that efforts to add M3 support were starting in February: > For quite some time, m1n1 has had basic support for the M3 series machines. What has been missing are Devicetrees for each machine, as well as patches to our Linux kernel drivers to support M3-specific hardware quirks and changes from M2. Our intent was always to get to fleshing this out once our existing patchset became more manageable https://asahilinux.org/2026/02/progress-report-6-19/ https://asahilinux.org/2026/02/progress-report-6-19/
- JLO64 3mo agoAs someone rocking a M3 Pro, I personally don't expect to be able to try Asahi out until mid/late next year on my MBP, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless!
- noveltyaccount 3mo agoI really wish Apple would fund a small team to open source some documentation and drivers to help Asahi along. I know they won't, but I can dream. It would be a drop in the bucket for Apple but would cement their hardware as de facto for silicon valley engineers (even more so than today).
- jjtheblunt 3mo agoApple's own hypervisor framework is close enough to what you said that i run Fedora and Arch Linux builds via the UTM app, set to use Apple Silicon virtualization (_not_ emulation), which is a wrapper around said framework. it's excellent, and made me reformat and erase Asahi a couple years ago. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://docs.getutm.app/installation/macos/ https://docs.getutm.app/installation/macos/
- noveltyaccount 3mo agoSo osx is just a bootloader for Fedora?
- jjtheblunt 3mo agothe analogy (even if humorous) isn't exact, since i can have apple silicon's hypervisor running macos and fedora/arm and arch/arm all concurrently, and can have full desktop environments on the linux instances, full-screened to individual macos desktops.
- SamuelAdams 3mo agoThey do, what Apple does release is referenced often in discussions. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f891ac0bb64f3d375211650a4c1ff8ca1ea/osfmk/arm64/machine_routines_asm.s#L1129 https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f89... https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/c13d95d0-911f-48f6-b4ca-8a5e9aacef6c@kernel.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/c13d95d0-911f-48f6-b4ca-8a5e9a...
- surcap526 3mo ago[dead]
- zbentley 3mo ago> The firmware loaded by XNU is not verified by the CM3. It will begin executing from its reset vector when signalled, no matter what is actually there. What if we just… used our own firmware? Without taking away from the unutterably awesome achievement of writing custom firmware against a proprietary moving target, I worry about this one specifically. While Apple will hopefully continue the practice of not going out of their way to break third-party OSes, it doesn’t seem unlikely that they will introduce hardware signing for firmware blobs or the data they supply at runtime when programming the hardware; that’s a reasonable security concern for Apple to address. I hope this gamble pays off though!
- GeekyBear 3mo agoThe firmware blobs (and the system files) for MacOS live on a read only partition that is digitally signed.
- zbentley 3mo agoThen how was the Asahi team able to load their own firmware? I was concerned about that process--whatever it is--being something apple might lock down. If it's already likely locked down to Apple's satisfaction, that's good news.
- GeekyBear 3mo agoMacs allow the machine owner to install (and boot) a completely unsigned OS on a different partition without having it affect security when you do boot MacOS. The Mac partitions are encrypted by default and the system partition is signed and read only.
- scritty-dev 3mo ago[flagged]