Apple Silicon PCIe Driver Queued For Linux 5.16

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.

The "pcie-apple" driver is written by reverse-engineering expert Alyssa Rosenzweig and Marc Zyngier while also based on discoveries by Corellium and OpenBSD developers. At this stage the Apple PCIe controller driver is less than one thousand lines of new code for bringing up the PCI Express bus with Apple SoCs. The focus has been on the Apple M1 with last year's Apple devices.

Besides PCI Express itself being important, this driver is all the more important as it's a prerequisite for bringing up the USB Type-A ports, Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth on the Apple M1 Mac Mini and MacBook devices. Additional drivers are coming for the Apple Silicon hardware but this is an important stepping stone in this long journey for allowing nice Apple Silicon support under Linux.

The Apple PCIe controller driver was added to PCI-next on Monday ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window next month.