alt Hacker NewsAsahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report
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I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems
It'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
Will 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.
Asahi 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.
I 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).
I wonder how much LLMs have been leveraged to help Asahi lately, there’s extremely powerful for reverse-engineering. Have they written about it?
I 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?
It 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.
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> 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.)