> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
How likely is such tuning to happen within the practical lifetime of these devices? It's already been years and Linux isn't even feature complete on newer models.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
Given the enormous lifetime of these devices, I’d say chances are pretty good! The only thing that’s going to make an M series Mac obsolete is when Apple stops releasing updates. If you can run Linux on it, that thing is going to last forever.
I would assume that once you have fully functional support for entire historical SoCs, the effort stops being "get most things working on most chips" and starts becoming "adapt already-working things to the newest chips". Yes, it's been years, but there's still so much hardware that Asahi doesn't have good support for yet, and that's dividing the efforts to support the newest chips. I'm sure that once all the existing chips are well-supported, new chips will be fairly quick to bring up.
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.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
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.
They already have the ability to prevent alternative operating systems. They use the same or similar SoCs in their other product lines and those do not let you do this.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
I will admit I am a bit confused by them locking out features like that, especially since they didn't at first. I wouldn't jump to assuming it's hostile, though.
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.
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.
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.
To downvoters: historically, a decent number of Windows and Linux users would run the operating systems on Apple hardware. I myself ran a triple-boot between macOS, Windows and Linux for years (although I still mainly used the machine for macOS). Apple Silicon demolished that market, and Asahi Linux is like a light at the end of the tunnel for those users who were entirely left behind by the ARM transition.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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
How likely is such tuning to happen within the practical lifetime of these devices? It's already been years and Linux isn't even feature complete on newer models.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
Given the enormous lifetime of these devices, I’d say chances are pretty good! The only thing that’s going to make an M series Mac obsolete is when Apple stops releasing updates. If you can run Linux on it, that thing is going to last forever.
I would assume that once you have fully functional support for entire historical SoCs, the effort stops being "get most things working on most chips" and starts becoming "adapt already-working things to the newest chips". Yes, it's been years, but there's still so much hardware that Asahi doesn't have good support for yet, and that's dividing the efforts to support the newest chips. I'm sure that once all the existing chips are well-supported, new chips will be fairly quick to bring up.
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.
Apple has gone through tremendous effort to enable alternative operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/open-os-interop/
Are you sure you linked the right page? This looks like a list of workarounds the Asahi team had to figure out.
Oh, my bad, I think the one I intended was this one: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
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.
This is true, although Apple could of just as easily prevented alternative OSes as a whole if they wanted to.
They already have the ability to prevent alternative operating systems. They use the same or similar SoCs in their other product lines and those do not let you do this.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
Absolutely not. They put in the literal bare minimum possible effort short of locking down the platform entirely.
You get a jmp to some arm64 instructions of your choosing, with a bunch of CPU features locked out.
I will admit I am a bit confused by them locking out features like that, especially since they didn't at first. I wouldn't jump to assuming it's hostile, though.
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.
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.
Seems like once they got past that things weren’t too bad. Could have been way more incompatibilities waiting on the other side.
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/
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.
macOS is so terrible. Godspeed!
To downvoters: historically, a decent number of Windows and Linux users would run the operating systems on Apple hardware. I myself ran a triple-boot between macOS, Windows and Linux for years (although I still mainly used the machine for macOS). Apple Silicon demolished that market, and Asahi Linux is like a light at the end of the tunnel for those users who were entirely left behind by the ARM transition.