The NVMe Patches To Support Linux On Newer Apple Macs Are Under Review

At the start of the month we reported on out-of-tree kernel work to support Linux on the newer Macs. Those patches were focused on supporting Apple's NVMe drive behavior by the Linux kernel driver. That work has been evolving nicely and is now under review on the kernel mailing list.

Volleyed on Tuesday were a set of three patches to the Linux kernel's NVMe code for dealing with the Apple hardware of the past few years in order for Linux to deal with these drives.

On Apple 2018 systems and newer, their I/O queue sizing/handling is odd and in other areas not properly following NVMe specifications. These patches take care of that while hopefully not regressing existing NVMe controller support.

Some issues with the code were raised, but if all goes well we could see this support potentially added for the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle later in the year.

Still to be addressed for better supporting newer Apple MacBook Pro systems on Linux is touchpad and keyboard support.