Apple News Archives

When it comes to the Apple M1 and M2 support on Linux, one of the biggest obstacles to suitable daily use for end-users is the current lack of GPU acceleration. Reverse engineering has been happening for the Apple Silicon graphics processor, early experiments being carried out under macOS and Asahi's m1n1 environment, and the next step will be to start writing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver. To some surprise, the feasibility of writing this DRM kernel GPU driver in the Rust programming language is being explored.

Sven Peter who has worked a lot on various aspects of Apple Silicon enablement for Linux today posted the patches enabling Apple Bluetooth driver support for Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware and also for some Apple x86 Macs.

Asahi Linux has issued an update with initial support for the Mac Studio powered by the M1 Ultra SoC as well as having initial (experimental) suppoirt for the new Apple M2 hardware.

While Apple just recently introduced their first M2-powered Apple Silicon devices, thanks to the dedication of Hector Martin with Asahi Linux and not too many breaking changes over the M1, Asahi Linux is looking at "soon" having a Linux release to support the new platform.

Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux.

MIT CSAIL today is lifting the embargo on a new hardware vulnerability affecting the Apple M1 SoCs (no word yet on exposure with the recently announced Apple M2) and dubbed the "PACMAN" attack.

In addition to announcing the M2 SoC, Apple used its WWDC keynote to also announce macOS 13 "Ventura". One of the interesting technical changes with macOS 13 is the ability to use Apple's Rosetta software for speedy execution of Linux x86_64 binaries running on ARM Linux VMs from Apple Silicon.

Apple's WWDC keynote this year was used to announce the M2 processor alongside a slew of other announcements.

While there has been progress with the Mesa code targeting Apple M1 to run basic tests like glmark2, that has traditionally been an effort running under macOS with its kernel driver. This week the Asahi Linux crew celebrated their first rendered triangle running with a fully open-source driver stack.

In addition to Linux 5.19 set to add NVMe support for the Apple M1 systems, the Apple eFuse driver also from the open-source community is geared up for landing in this next version of the Linux kernel.

While the Apple M1 Linux support is off to a great start and using Asahi Linux is offering good CPU performance and most functionality working to at least some degree, the biggest blocker remaining is getting the Apple M1 3D graphics working. The latest progress on that front is the Mesa code working to begin correctly render glmark2, a basic OpenGL / GLES benchmark.

The latest Apple M1 excitement on Linux for the mainline kernel is the NVMe driver is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window.

A new Apple SoC CPUFreq driver has been posted by Asahi Linux's Hector Martin with the CPU frequency scaling driver, of course, being important for achieving optimal performance and power/thermal management.

Intel's Thunderbolt "Light Ridge" controller was introduced all the way back in 2010 for Apple Macs and the updated Intel Thunderbolt 2 "Falcon Ridge" controller is from 2013. Now in 2022 under Linux the Thunderbolt driver will be better matching the Apple macOS behavior when daisy chaining multiple Thunderbolt displays.

Sent out last week amid the busy Linux 5.18 merge window days were the patch series wiring up an Apple NVMe driver for use with the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max SoCs.

The Asahi Linux project for running Linux on Apple Silicon (currently the Apple M1 SoCs) is out with its first official alpha release.

Apple is at it again with further showing off the potential of their Arm-based Apple Silicon with today rolling out the M1 Ultra SoC.

The upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel cycle will bring a number of improvements for Apple keyboards -- both for the Apple Magic Keyboard and the keyboards integrated with their various MacBook computers.

As with most modern SoCs/processors, proper CPU frequency scaling / performance state management is absolutely critical for achieving good performance out of the hardware either for ensuring the CPU is hitting its capable performance states and also to reduce power consumption / heat when not needed in order to avoid thermal throttling and prolonging battery life. Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon.

The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021.

The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions.

Last month Apple announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs while already the very latest Linux patches originally written for the Apple M1 that launched last year paired with some small changes is allowing the open-source platform to boot on the M1 Pro MacBook.

Along with the Apple Silicon PCIe driver, another new driver for supporting Apple Silicon (primarily with a focus on the Apple M1 for now) with the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle is a new pinctrl/GPIO driver.

Separate from all the ongoing Apple Silicon/M1 bring-up work for the Linux kernel, the Linux 5.16 cycle is set to support this year's Apple Magic Keyboard.

Queued this week into the Linux PCI subsystem's "next" branch is the Apple PCIe driver needed to enable PCI Express support for Apple SoCs such as the M1.

Apple today announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max as their most powerful SoCs ever built by the company. The new chips feature up to a 10-core processor, 32-core GPU, and up to 64GB of unified memory.

The Asahi Linux project that has been working nearly the past year on bringing up Apple M1 support under Linux has issued their September 2021 porting and reverse engineering report.

The latest patches sent out for review/testing on the long mission for enabling Apple M1 support on Linux is the USB Type-C connectivity.

While Linux 5.13 landed initial Apple Silicon M1 support, it was just the very initial bits. Now for Linux 5.15 we are seeing another step in the bring-up with the community-created Apple M1 IOMMU driver being merged.

Running Linux on the Apple M1 with various out-of-tree patches is now capable of booting to a GNOME desktop albeit lacking any OpenGL/graphics acceleration.

While Linux 5.12 saw initial support merged for the Apple M1, it was quite the basic support with more robust support still to come. Besides the graphics support being a large work-in-progress, one of the areas now coming about is the new PCI Express driver that is necessary for supporting more functionality of this driver.

A new status report has been published by the developers of "Asahi Linux" that are continuing to work on providing Linux support for the Apple Silicon initially with the M1 SoC.

For those that find themselves using an Apple Magic Mouse, the finger-sliding scrolling experience should be improved come Linux 5.15.

As expected, support for the initial Apple M1 SoC support and 2020 Apple Silicon devices (Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) has landed into the Linux 5.13 kernel.

While the independent effort to get the Apple M1 ARM-based SoC working under Linux has just been happening for a few months, with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle the very preliminary support for Apple's M1 and initial M1-powered devices looks to land.

Standard mouse functionality of Apple's Magic Mouse 2 works currently under Linux but the "hid-magicmouse" mainline driver might finally be extended to fully support the Magic Mouse 2.

Hector Martin, who has been working on the crowd-funded effort to bring Linux up on the Apple M1 SoC and the modern Apple devices using that in-house silicon, has sent out the third iteration of his kernel patches.

For more than four years Apple's MacBook Pro has featured the Touch Bar as a display / control bar input device above the keyboard on these laptops. While there have been reports of Apple potentially phasing out the Touch Bar in future models, an open-source Linux driver for the component is still working its way toward the mainline kernel.

Earlier this month Hector Martin and the Asahi Linux developers posted their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple M1 ARM SoC platform for the mainline kernel with devices like the 2020 Mac Mini / MacBook Pro / MacBook Air devices. The second iteration of those Apple M1 Linux patches have now been posted.

Security firm Corellium has been working on enabling the Apple M1 SoC under Linux and last month they posted initial Linux kernel patches for the Apple M1. Meanwhile independent developer Hector Martin has also been working on Apple M1 enablement via crowdfunding and today he posted his initial set of Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple 2020 hardware under Linux.

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle.

Following a very active past couple of days, developers from security startup Corellium have followed through on their word so far of publishing the Apple Silicon patches to the Linux kernel mailing list for possible upstreaming in the future that allow the Linux kernel to boot with Apple M1 hardware.

Apple-focused security/virtualization startup Corellium has posted a very primitive build of Linux for Apple M1 Mac devices.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on reverse-engineering Arm GPUs and in particular the multi-year effort so far working on the Panfrost open-source driver stack has taken up an interest in Apple's M1 graphics processor.

As was widely expected for today's Apple event, the Cupertino company just announced their first three Macs powered by Apple Silicon.

With the newly-minted Linux 5.6 kernel is initial support for USB4 based on Intel's Thunderbolt code while for Linux 5.7 is a wide variety of other USB changes.

Linux has supported the Apple Magic Keyboards since 2018 handling the Bluetooth connectivity and also needing some special handling for the numeric keypad. While that normally would be the end of the story, recent firmware updates to the Apple Magic Keyboard have caused problems.

The Linux 5.7 kernel that will be out in the late spring / early summer is poised to see support for USB fast charging support for Apple iOS devices.

Darling is the open-source project we first covered back in 2012 that aimed to be able to run macOS software (binaries) on Linux. It's what Wine is to running Windows programs on Linux but rather to be able to handle Apple/Mac software. While we haven't heard much from the project recently, they still are pursuing their goal.

For those running Linux on older Apple MacBook Pros and other Macs sporting Thunderbolt 1/2 controllers, there is better support for them coming with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle.