I often wonder whether the folks at Apple have the Asahi team on their radar. Are they in awe of the reverse engineering marvels coming out of the Asahi project, or are they indifferent to it?
They are aware. They are also aware of the designs sitting in the cabinet right next to them in Cupertino that would make all the reverse engineering instantly unnecessary.
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
Great work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course.
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
Apparently there's changes to boot that are more or less understood, but require some heavy work to handle.
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.
In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch
Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local
patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that
must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?
Just came to praise the seven heroic souls who are working on this wonderful project that my M1 is just waiting to install once battery life meets my needs. And may I ask why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?
I was watching Bladerunner last night, specifically the part where Ford is zooming in on the photograph using voice commands.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
My favorite feature of the Touch Bar was that, if memory serves well, force push was right next to cancel in one of the IDEs, can't recall if Xcode or Intellij.
It would be nice if projects like this were more willing to take on paid devs, and accept regular payment. have some sort of a subscription? I don't say that because my money is burning a whole in my pocket, but because I want to see more hardware support and stability. more testing, QA, but hunting.
With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
I don't own Apple hardware, but just reading through it made me appreciate how gifted these souls are, doing the god's work. I hope they succeed with upstreaming their contributions and have a first-class Linux on ARM support.
That is a tremendous update. Thank you for providing a great read about the diligent efforts of an increasing number of talented contributors: Oliver and Janne and Alyssa M and Shiz and Robert and Sven and James and Neal and chaos_princess and Davide and Lina and Michael and Sasha and Alyssa R have been killing.
Anyone know if the M4 GPU support has improved? I might not use Asahi "today" but I'm sure the day will come when my M4 laptop will be deemed "vintage" despite being perfectly fine hardware, and on that day I am most likely to flip over. Hopefully by then the GPU support is much richer.
Couldn't Apple make a change that renders all this work a waste of time? i.e. lock out other OSe's from booting for example. I applaud the effort but given MacOs is already a capable unix I don't see the rewards being worth it.
This is amazing work, and I certainly respect the talent of those involved.
That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
I wonder how this will be impacted by the Steam Frame et. al.
Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.
If “long running agents” have any use, this feels like the kind of project where they should be put to work. You have an oracle implementation (macOS) and a well defined problem with lots of grueling trial and error.
If Apple decided to bring back BootCamp and allow to boot Windows Arm and Linux with their full support... they would wipe out the competition. And I actually think they'll do this soon, especially now that Windows Arm is getting better and Linux more popular, especially for gaming. This would also shield them from antitrust laws, to some extent.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadSuch a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.
Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
At least PCs are open to a greater degree, despite Microsoft's attempts otherwise.
Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.