Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

150

ppizzaiolo about 6 hours ago 35 commentsRead Article on asahilinux.org

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

71% Positive

Analyzed from 791 words in the discussion.

Discussion (35 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

JLO64•about 4 hours ago

> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices.

When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.

owaislone•about 3 hours ago

This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers

dgunay•about 1 hour ago

I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.

benoau•about 1 hour ago

It depends on how long Apple want to support the devices, if the support matches the longevity of the devices maybe nobody really needs Asahi. I believe all Intel Macs have received their final macOS version now so it is almost time for Apple to make that decision for the M1 generation. I think an M1 Pro, Max or Ultra (or even an M1 with 16GB of RAM) still has many good years left.

gehsty•34 minutes ago

Does anyone have to run Linux on an M series? I’m fairly confident it’s one of the most complex ways of running Linux…

euio757•about 1 hour ago

But, power efficiency isn't the primary reason I'd like Apple hardware with linux software.

Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux.

oblio•about 1 hour ago

> wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility

I'm not convinced it's only "several years".

Asahi was launched in January 2021. So 5 and a half years ago. Asahi, as far as I can tell, supports most of M1 and M2 features, so generations launched in November 2020 (6 years ago) and June 2022 (4 years ago).

I would be very surprised if a decade from now the story won't still be the same thing: 90% of features for systems half a decade old with software package gaps in important areas and everything slightly less optimized than MacOS.

Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.

dmitrygr•about 1 hour ago

> but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency

Have they? What AMD or Intel laptop with Linux on it can hold a candle to and M4 air or an M4max pro? Genuinely curious, cause I found none...

oblio•about 1 hour ago

AMD Strix Halo?

MBCook•about 5 hours ago

Amazing progress as usual. It’s been fun watching just how much a few people can accomplish over the last few years despite working on sometimes unstable sand.

djfergus•about 4 hours ago

Fantastic to see the progress and a fascinating detailed write-up.

You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.

LoganDark•about 4 hours ago

Apple has gone through tremendous effort to enable alternative operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/open-os-interop/

bigyabai•about 3 hours ago

Most of those accommodations are for macOS, and make very few (if any) concessions for alternative operating systems. We're talking Qualcomm-tier effort.

Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple's support is (somehow) behind Nvidia's foot-dragging.

HDBaseT•about 2 hours ago

This is true, although Apple could of just as easily prevented alternative OSes as a whole if they wanted to.

laidoffamazon•34 minutes ago

Is Asahi an LLM-hostile project? I'd imagine this is something that would be benefitted tremendously with a Fable class model

alberth•22 minutes ago

> Meanwhile, donations and pledges kept slowly decreasing, and have done so since the project launched. Not enough to spell immediate doom for my dream of working on Asahi full time in the short term, but enough to make me wonder if any of this was really appreciated. The all-time peak monthly donation volume was the very first month or two. It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had.

I think the issue is funding is so low the developers don’t even have access to newer Apple Siicon, let alone funding for token costs, etc.

https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...

TiredOfLife•43 minutes ago

And all that with a hard fork of kernel

megous•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, you'll find out that va-api is not a good match for v4l2-requests. It does not pass decoded bitstream to the drivers as is, but pre-computes some things for some codecs, while v4l2-requests mostly expects original information parsed from the bitstream.

https://xff.cz/git/libva-v4l2_request/

kmeisthax•about 2 hours ago

I was seriously worried the various incompatibilities the M3 bootloader had with Asahi's debugging setup would mean way slower bring-up than M1 and M2 had. Seems like that wasn't the case - or, at least, won't be the case anymore.

MBCook•about 2 hours ago

Seems like once they got past that things weren’t too bad. Could have been way more incompatibilities waiting on the other side.

LoganDark•about 4 hours ago

I'm extremely excited to hear that the hypervisor now works on M4! Can't wait to try out Asahi in a year or two.

tiahura•about 2 hours ago

macOS is so terrible. Godspeed!