The End-Of-Year 2021 State Of Linux On Apple's M1 SoC

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.

Linux 5.17 brings more Apple M1 drivers but the state of affairs isn't yet ready for end-users. There has been a lot accomplished in recent months but among the work still to be tackled are CPU frequency scaling, system sleep and CPU deep sleep support, cleaning up their work-in-progress NVMe storage patches, rewriting their early WiFi driver patches, and getting GPU acceleration working. There have also been various firmware struggles to workaround.

Recently they did get the touchpad and keyboard working on the M1-powered MacBooks as well as audio playback working. The headphone jack also has patches for getting support on the M1 while the M1 Pro/Max bring-up is still ongoing. But in any case they have been making good progress not only for the original M1 but also the recent M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs. With Linux 5.16 and 5.17 a lot has been upstreamed while 2022 is looking hopeful for getting more of the big items completed to make for a usable, day-to-day Linux system on the Apple M1 hardware.

The Asahi Linux project's current overview of the support state for different components of the Apple M1 SoC.

See the progress report for the current state of Asahi Linux for Apple M1 support on Linux.