alt Hacker NewsFedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3
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Asahi is one of the projects I support monetarily cause I really hope that one day I can run linux natively on my M4 max with GPU acceleration. They did an amazing job with M1 and M2 - great to see they are still pushing forward after the departure of Alyssa Rosenzweig, who did a lot of the work on the GPU support for those.
Edit: Here is their donation page if you're interested in chipping in as well: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux
Relevant 39C3 talk from three weeks ago:
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.
Related but not:
I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).
I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.
Note, SW rendering. Still great to have that.
> Yes [SW rendering], should have clarified in the original post sorry! Hopefully GPU to come soon, still investigating that. I believed they changed the ISA so we have to modify our compiler, and I love compilers, so it should be fun! :)
source: https://bsky.app/profile/integralpilot.bsky.social/post/3mde...
Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.
Can't wait M1 to not be supported by Apple anymore to snack up some of that awesome hardware for cheap and run linux on it.
According to Asahi's own documentation, they're far from done from the M3. So I guess "now working" is probably a bit misleading...
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/#tab...
This is super cool and a big achievement, although it's worth noting that this is with llvmpipe graphics (i.e. CPU not GPU).
Although, I was daily-driving Asahi on an M1 Pro before GPU support was here and it was very usable.
Is there any kind of multi-boot support if someone wants to mainly run macOS but checkout Linux on M-chips 'part time'?
I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!
Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.
Does this include the newer M3 ultra? Huge news if true!
Promising progress, I'm excited to try it when they get more things working on M3 Pro
Can anyone point me to a good report of the current working status and known drawbacks of Asahi on Apple Silicon? Would there ever be a reason to run it on a Mac Mini or Apple desktop device? Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?
This is awesome, but we'll still need to hear the full support status. Which subsystems are covered by existing development, which need new drivers. Can't wait for the update on https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
I would never buy a Mac, but what's the issue with supporting Mx processors?
Are they a generic ARM platform or something highly proprietary with ISA extensions and the like?
And if Apple is pulling a Nintendo here why is this project allowed to exist in the first place? It's not like they are getting hit with an anti-trust any time soon.
Have they fixed the touchy trackpad issues? Super impressive work, and I want to want this, but...
If anyone else wants the closest thing to a MBP running Linux without waiting for Asahi to fully work, I can highly recommend the HP ZBook G1A.
* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.
* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.
* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!
Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
oh awesome! I had assumed they were just targeting M1/M2 for the time being
This is great news. If Apple ever get around to releasing actually pro M5 MBPs I'm buying one and turning this M1 MBP into a linux laptop.
Do the M-series have better wifi support than the last Intel range?
Is there a way to make a clean Asahi Linux installation?
still m1 family is the only one that fully(not acutally) supported apple silicon by asahi? I have m1 pro macbook pro btw
While it's awesome that it runs there doesn't seem to be GPU support yet as the screenshot reports the llvmpipe software renderer. From what I understand there are significant difference between the M2 and M3 GPUs so this unlikely to be implemented soon. Unless it turns out this original analysis turns out to be wrong.
Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.
Really cool, though if I was looking for a Linux laptop today, I’d be watching the Intel Panther Lake products rolling out.
The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance.
Review embargos for the top SKU just dropped today.
I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.