Asahi Linux Issues First Alpha Release For Running Linux On Apple Silicon

[andre30correia]

This alpha, made possible in part by apple's engineers gifting the team a fix for the one part of the asahi installer process that required a hacky race condition.

Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

where you read that?

[Britoid]

A real gift would be GPU documentation.

Apple likely won't, they have no commercial incentive to release it and they just don't care.

They won't block Asahi Linux and dual booting though, because for now locking down Macs and macOS like that doesn't do much for them.

That said, it's been wildly rumoured and likely true that the Apple silicon team uses Linux to test Apple silicon, because waiting for the Darwin team to add support and makes changes takes too long. This won't be open sourced or released though and is likely not even in a state that can be merged into the kernel.

[intelfx]

This alpha, made possible in part by apple's engineers gifting the team a fix for the one part of the asahi installer process that required a hacky race condition.

Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

Sounds like an interesting story. Did marcan write about it somewhere?

[partcyborg]

GPUs are easy to reverse engineer. The problem is finding someon with the time, interest, and ability to write a driver.

The best way to make one of those appear is to have someone with an M1 machine as their only computer who bricked their macOS install but really wants to play 3D games on it.

No, that wouldn't work at all, and simply is just not how successful reverse engineering projects work. You have to be able to interact with functioning hardware to understand how things work. In fact, from my understang much of this work wouldnt have been possible without some custom virtualization software that allowed things like monitoring of things like pci bus traffic

[archsway]

A real gift would be GPU documentation.

GPUs are easy to reverse engineer. The problem is finding someone with the time, interest, and ability to write a driver.

The best way to make one of those appear is to have someone with an M1 machine as their only computer who bricked their macOS install but really wants to play 3D games on it.

[Volta]

Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

It seems apple finally want to have a fast and secure system on their hardware.

[Mark Rose]

If they can sell the hardware to Linux users, that's more hardware sold.

[ⲣⲂaggins]

This alpha, made possible in part by apple's engineers gifting the team a fix for the one part of the asahi installer process that required a hacky race condition.

Apple helped them and continues to help them far more than anyone wants to admit, the load of anti-apple FUD-mongers.

A real gift would be GPU documentation.

[rhadlee]

I am concerned about combined single-vendor hardware and software stacks such as the combination of Apple Silicon and macOS. At its core, this is a highly uncompetitive situation where users are not only restricted in what operating system they can run. Worse, Apple can control what owners of M1 Macs can and cannot do with their hardware.

In my view, this calls for a legal crackdown where there has to be consumer choice on all levels of the stack. Reverse engineering the proprietary M1 hardware is a heroic effort, but is also hardly sustainable. Chances are that some of the more obscure hardware features will never be fully understood without proper documentation.

[Developer12]

I always feel that this project will end up like the open source 'nouveau' driver.

Nouveau died because nvidia took concrete steps to block it. They were writing their own power management firmware before nvidia implemented firmware signing.

Apple by contrast has invested a lot of development manpower into making this possible. The dual boot system, where different OSs can have independent levels of security? That took a lot of effort and made the system SIGNIFICANTLY more complex. Even just this past week apple fixed a critical issue for them that forced them into a race condition during the install process.

It's quite clear by now that apple has important plans and goals for linux on M1 silicon.