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Asahi Linux on M3
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-Official-M3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-Official-M3
- Krish1577 1mo agoReverse-engineering Apple's custom silicon is basically the modern equivalent of repairing a spaceship while it's actively launching. Incredible work by the Asahi team!
- bigyabai 1mo agoMakes you wonder who's choice it was to launch a half-finished rocket. AMD and Intel's rockets sit on the launch pad with GPU/CPU drivers shipped for Linux before T-10.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- BloodyIron 1mo agoTheir Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
- fsckboy 1mo ago>Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not. i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
- bayindirh 1mo agoApple silicon has features specifically designed for macOS or software running on macOS. e.g.: Rosetta 2. From Wikipedia: One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags. So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
- tensegrist 1mo agoi wonder if this is not something that asahi could eventually make use of edit: https://lwn.net/Articles/970907/ https://lwn.net/Articles/970907/
- throawayonthe 1mo agoya but that one is usable on linux, here is a real world project taking advantage of it: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/pull/2665 https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/pull/2665 you can find more apple-specific stuff by digging around in these docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/ https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/
- Danox 1mo agoThe reason Apple has the in house ability to run on multiple chip systems is because of their history going all the way back to Next and that little handheld from the early 1990s under Scully and all their work with Motorola and IBM over the years, that ability is what separates them from Microsoft who is having trouble getting Windows working with multiple CPU chips. Apple is simply better at it.
- charcircuit 1mo agoWindows in the 90s was ported from x86 to MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and SPARC.
- yencabulator 1mo ago
- Retr0id 1mo agoYou're replying to an LLM-written comment.
- menno-sh 1mo agoWhy do you believe that comment was LLM-generated?
- Retr0id 1mo agoThe dubious metaphor is what tipped me off in the first place, but then I looked at the account activity. Dormant for over a year, submits vibecoded AI project to Show HN (which gets immediately downvoted and flagged due to being slop), then leaves two LLM-style comments.
- numpad0 1mo agomacOS ships with full working drivers for everything. They're unfortunately not under AGPLv3.
- MBCook 1mo agoThey publish documentation because they need OEMs to be willing to support their products. Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
- GeekyBear 1mo agoIf selling Linux servers (or parts used in Linux servers) is a major chunk of your revenue, your company is likely to start providing first party Linux drivers? This is a shocking development.
- bigyabai 1mo agoApple's PCC standard supports Linux. It's just that Apple doesn't, so Apple Silicon plays second fiddle to Grace ARM cores and TPU hardware in the datacenter market. Nothing prevents Apple Silicon from competing with Nvidia's ARM datacenter hardware, besides Apple. The only reason the rackmount Mac had to be depreciated is because Apple realized they were LARPing as a server hardware business.
- benoau 1mo agoSome big caveats but still amazing progress!
- tunder 1mo agoStill no thunderbolt support.
- MYEUHD 1mo agoYou can contribute support for it
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- BowBun 1mo agoIndeed, not sure why you are being downvoted. Contribute to open source with the energy you have to call out missing features.
- basisword 1mo agoBecause it's a lazy response. OP might not be a software developer. Should they learn complex software engineering to try and contribute or should they call out a missing feature that's important to them so the actual developers have some data on what to prioritise?
- saghm 1mo agoIt's no lazier than saying "Still no <feature> support"
- basisword 1mo agoa) that's feedback b) it's useful in a comment thread like this so people can quickly see what the 'caveats' mentioned in the title of the post are
- saghm 1mo agoFeedback in a forum stating something the developers are probably well aware people want in a location the developers might not even be reading is not particularly useful feedback. As for the comment thread utility, sure, I guess if you think that not reading the article is valuable for the HN community, but I could just as easily argue that pushing back against comments like that could be seen as valuable for a community that values more thoughtful feedback.
- sansah 1mo agoLack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.
- brycewray 1mo agoIt's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.
- laidoffamazon 1mo agoIs there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!
- Gigachad 1mo agoIt's hard to debug sleep in a VM or some self contained system. You need to physically interact with the laptop, reboot it after it gets stuck, etc.
- embedding-shape 1mo agoAdd a tool to the harness you use that can ping you on Telegram/whatever when it gets stuck and need you to do stuff physically, tell it to use it in the workflow with you. Used this approach a bunch with Codex to work on and debug hardware stuff. Once every 5-15 minutes I receive my command, and as a good r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ human I moved the resistor/patch cable in the way the agent instructed me, eventually it got things working in the way I wanted it to.
- aspirin 1mo agoIn Soviet Russia, LLM prompts you.
- whatever1 1mo agoWhy Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
- alt227 1mo agoSo that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
- alsetmusic 1mo ago> past their intended lifespan This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
- alt227 1mo agoThe hardware is designed to last, the software is designed to force you to buy a new device after 7 years at most.
- dymk 1mo agoIs it a "a few years" or 7 years?
- wa2flq 1mo agoMy iMac Pro 2017 is an Energizer Bunny. I got almost 10 years from by MacBook Pro.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Gigachad 1mo agoDepends on your expectations. Throwing a perfectly working laptop out after 7 years because apple cut off software support is wasteful to me. It might not be for you.
- TomJansen 1mo agoI am wondering how much the spec changes per M-chip iteration? I think that after some iterations, the spec stays the same, no?
- dagmx 1mo agoYour intuition here is wrong. Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets. Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more. Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
- JLO64 1mo agoHere's the blog post from the Asahi devs announcing this: https://asahilinux.org/2026/09/m2-episode-1/ https://asahilinux.org/2026/09/m2-episode-1/
- TechSquidTV 1mo agoI thought development officially ended?
- weberer 1mo agoSome contributors left, but others were able to take over. The project is still ongoing.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- jdeaton 1mo agoThis is really incredible work but so frustrating that its necessary
- sneak 1mo agoWhy wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers… Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops. Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether.
- Muromec 1mo agoThey could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons.
- Danox 1mo agoApple doesn’t need to hire anyone. It’s a complete waste of their time if three former Apple silicon-engineers can start their own company Nuvia which licensed, designed and engineered Arm chips, said company was later bought out by Qualcomm for 1.2 billion dollars, if they can do it, there are many other smart people in the world that can do the same after all, it has been about 35 years since the birth of Linux. Where are they? Every time something new comes out hardware wise in the tech world , there’s this dying quail chorus of Linux geeks, who cry about it, not having Linux support. The only long-term solution is for a group of smart talented people to get together and take out a license from Arm and proceed to design a chip with Linux support from ground zero however, such an endeavor probably would make everyone in the Linux world mad/unhappy because in order to do something well/professional said group would have to fork Linux in order for it and hardware to have the best chance at success selling to the general public you know the group that just wants to use a computer and not jump underneath the hood to tinker with every little thing to get it working.
- xrd 1mo agoI'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi. Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet. Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
- bjackman 1mo agoI don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this. The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on. That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
- nottorp 1mo agoI don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware. When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
- zer0zzz 1mo agoAnother thing is, the M1 and later hardware is still years later some of the best arm64 hardware youre going to find. Combine that with the really affordable prices you can find on the used market and Linux arm64 on this kind of great hardware at a low price is quite appealing.
- brundolf 1mo agoAsahi on previous M-series chips supports the GPU, they just don't support it on M3 yet (they have to reverse-engineer the GPU to write the driver) More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
- colesantiago 1mo agoThis is great news. Hoping for M4 to the latest chip. We need Ashai to support more chips.
- wingworks 1mo agoMe too. I've got an M3 Mac Mini running as a linux server with parallels, but it has a weird NIC bug that crashes the mini every few weeks, keen to get of macOS and it's buggy NIC driver. (really don't want to send it into an Apple repair shop, there are non local here, it's a whole thing) Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
- trueno 1mo agowe need to be supporting asahi if we want these things. their funding has fallen off.
- Danox 1mo agoI wish they would get an Arm license and start the process like those three guys that worked at Apple and started Nuvia…
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- _zoltan_ 1mo agoDoes USB work already or is that a 2027 item?
- chews 1mo ago[dead]
- pcunite 1mo agoLet me know when we get M4 support.
- simonebrunozzi 1mo agoWhat would be the best way to dual boot MacOS and Asahi on a Macbook M2 ?
- jonesy827 1mo agoThe Asahi installer does this automatically, it guides you through sizing. You run it in a macOS terminal. By default, Asahi will be the default boot option, and to get to macOS you hold the power button on boot until it says "Loading startup options..." I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
- throawayonthe 1mo agosimply using the installer from https://asahilinux.org https://asahilinux.org the devs strongly discourage single-booting
- simonebrunozzi 1mo ago> the devs strongly discourage single-booting Weird. Do you know why?
- tarruda 1mo agoAmazing project. My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
- zer0zzz 1mo agoI have similar issues with my ultra. Have put it on a laptop, but my desk Setup with my multiple desktop computers is usb-c video based ( kind of a poor man’s kvm) , and asahi doesn’t do usb-c video yet
- apatheticonion 1mo agoRight!? Linux can be configured to idle at less than 500mb of ram - by contrast, with some aggressive shenanigans, MacOS can idle at 2-3gb. When running inference, I would love to use all of my hardware please Apple.
- aurareturn 1mo agoIt idles at 2-3GB but when your apps need the RAM, does it free up system memory so that it's closer to 500MB?
- tarruda 1mo agoI use my Mac as a headless server to run LLMs, and never even start a desktop session so it always stays at pre-login state without any applications running. Even so, I never saw it using less than 2G in htop when logged via SSH.
- luciana1u 1mo ago[dead]
- amelius 1mo agoMy bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
- hurricanepootis 1mo agoAsahi linux has been going on for a few years now
- amelius 1mo agoI recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
- apatheticonion 1mo agoOn the topic of browsers, I feel your pain. There were a good few years where they were shipping new and useful features, but they plateaued and started removing features. I can't remember the last time I was excited about browser features.
- WhyNotHugo 1mo agohttps://hister.org/ https://hister.org/ sounds like something you'd appreciate.
- zer0zzz 1mo agoMan… they absolutely do not care. An Apple engineer made the boot loader for Mac open in the first place.
- Danox 1mo agoDarwin is still sitting there all these years. It’s called market inertia.
- smm11 1mo agoI don't understand this. Buy something else to run Linux, as in anything other than Apple M series laptops. And if you want to do AI stuff, suffer with OSX using too much RAM, or again, buy something appropriate.
- pantulis 1mo agoWell I think the challenge is in the challenge itself, that's good old open-source at work and I wish both the Asahi and Omarchy teams the best of luck in this endeavor. But I agree with you that if I wanted to run Linux, I would get non-Apple hardware, will probably get better support and spend less time fixing things. The interesting thing would be having proper full M* support in Linux as this would allow for more efficient virtualization as a guest.
- publlus_enigma 1mo agoThe reason this amazing project exists is the same reason my current Mac will be my last Mac. I wish the team every success.
- emmelaich 1mo agoDo you mean 'will be my last MacOS?'
- publlus_enigma 1mo agoNo. Whilst Apple's hardware is among the best in the world, I simply can't support their direction with respect to increasingly closed hardware.
- martin1975 1mo agofreakin Qualcomm isn't faring much better w/the Snapdragon X/X2 Elite... they were supposed to be on board w/Linux, yet I dare someone who's a newb install Ubuntu on a Snapdragon box the same way they would on a ThinkPad. Funnily enough, none of these companies have issues consuming the 'free' fruits of labor of the open source community.
- trompetenaccoun 1mo agoI got my first ever Mac relatively recently and I'm shocked by how annoying MacOS is. Maybe the mistake was expecting a proper operating system that puts the user in charge and not something more similar to iOS. Also Mac forums are full of dumb users and aren't much help. Average problem solving experience: There is no solution because Apple doesn't allow it, the workaround doesn't really do what you want and the other users question why you have to do the thing you want to do anyway. "Why not just let Apple wake up your hibernating Macbook at 3:00 AM and drain the battery bro, they know what they're doing" Sadly the hardware is amazing and so much more efficient compared to Intel/AMD x86. We need M-series chips for Linux.
- stephbook 1mo ago
- mrheosuper 1mo agoThanks for the effort, guys. This makes me think, shouldn't the driver layer be generic now. All the driver does is writing correct data at correct address when needed, there is no need for OS support except triggering driver when to do that. A true HAL, any OS can run on that HAL.
- worldsavior 1mo agoThat data and that address changes, and the logic changes.
- mrheosuper 1mo agoWhy should the address and logic change, when both are defined by hardware ?
- worldsavior 1mo agoThe firmware sometimes wants more data, different places to set the data, so on. The firmware changes, and you gotta adapt the driver to it. Sometimes it's a complete overhaul.
- mrheosuper 1mo agoI am still not sure why does OS has to be aware of this, if anything, only the HAL should be aware of this FW version to have correct behavior. Every major OS already has this HAL layer, we just need to decide/design a generic and hope that every player will use it.
- shmoe 1mo agoIt is odd that Apple doesn't chip in here... they've originated so much decent stuff in the OSS space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity.
- happymellon 1mo agoApple are hostile to everything CopyLeft. Why would they "chip in" here?
- worldsavior 1mo agoWell, they will get more people buying MacBooks, though they won't really use their services.
- vorticalbox 1mo agoI do wonder if the margin on Mac isn’t that high vs the price and the services (iCloud etc) make up for that. Amazon do the same with the fire.
- coldtea 1mo agoWe know that the Mac has fine margins.
- globular-toast 1mo agoThey don't care about people buying MacBooks. They want you in their ecosystem buying i-everything.
- utopiah 1mo agoWhat makes Apple valuable is precisely its full vertical integration. Nobody else does it at that scale except maybe Sony for consoles and Microsoft but both don't have the same usage coverage and thus integration. It wouldn't be economically rational for Apple to bring down its own moat.
- 1mo ago
- xiphias2 1mo agoWhile the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot.
- chem83 1mo agoI feel like the growing polarization in that space is pretty much going to kill any chance of collaboration (for example: https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2091229491867594983?s=12&t=JHgrc6L5cPah7h0Z5BxQeQ https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2091229491867594983?s=12&t=JH...). It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview clashing over things like the downsides of corporate funding and capitalism, building system software by just throwing more AI cycles at it, rejecting data centers over environmental concerns, and pushing back on AI-generated code due to slop and security issues. I just don't see both sides putting their differences aside to work together. DHH will probably just duplicate unaligned efforts so he can completely bypass and avoid having to deal with the human element.
- mschuster91 1mo ago> It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview That is putting a lot of strain on the word "conservative". To quote Wikipedia [1]: > In 2025, Hansson published a blog post expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests, as well as mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits". In response, some members of the Ruby on Rails community called for his removal from project governance. > Hansson published another blog post[36] in July of 2026 comparing the Romani population of Copenhagen to Denmark's struggles with its wolf population growth, stating that "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them." This isn't "conservative", this is blatant far-right talking here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Contr...
- xiphias2 1mo agoWhat you are talking about is just simply political polarization which is done on purpose by poiticians, which happened whether DHH or Ashahi Linux devs wanted or not. Also there is real human element in both, I'm just going to an Omarchy meetup that's organized next week, and DHH is also organizing some (just not in my city). I believe eventhough they won't work together directly, with open source they can just use eachothers code (I believe Omarchy is using Ashahi's M1-M3 code, but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop).