Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

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• Hacker News
• Is the github sponsors link a 404 for everyone else?
  by Gigachad
• Not for me, perhaps fixed in the last hour already.
  by zamadatix
• It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
  by sneak
• I read somewhere that Apple even uses Linux kernels to bring up new hardware but I don't know if it's actually/still true.
  by mhh__
• Apple open-sourced their container tooling and they also support Linux in their Virtualization framework. Anyone can run any compatible Linux now in a VM, with bare-metal speed but limited to virtio devices. To me it's baffling that more people don't run Linux this way.
  by w10-1
• They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.
  by troyvit
• Are you really baffled as you say?

  Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.

  Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.

  And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.

  by carlosjobim
• Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer.

  I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.

  Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.

  CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.

  And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.

  But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.

  I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.

  There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.

  by Grombobulous
• My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.
  by GTP
• Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store.

  Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.

  by figmert
• Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.

  They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?

  by jeroenhd
• I wonder what the dev/CI process looks like on this.

  Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?

  by coxmi
• m1n1 does a lot of fun stuff here: https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/tethered-boot/

  It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.

  by viraptor
• God bless the asahi team
  by Forgeties79
• I really wish Apple would fund a small team to open source some documentation and drivers to help Asahi along. I know they won't, but I can dream. It would be a drop in the bucket for Apple but would cement their hardware as de facto for silicon valley engineers (even more so than today).
  by noveltyaccount
• They do, what Apple does release is referenced often in discussions.

  https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f89...

  https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/c13d95d0-911f-48f6-b4ca-8a5e9a...

  by SamuelAdams
• Apple's own hypervisor framework is close enough to what you said that i run Fedora and Arch Linux builds via the UTM app, set to use Apple Silicon virtualization (_not_ emulation), which is a wrapper around said framework.

  it's excellent, and made me reformat and erase Asahi a couple years ago.

  https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

  https://docs.getutm.app/installation/macos/

  by jjtheblunt
• It is exciting that they are working on AVD driver.
  by CafeRacer
• if i use ffmpeg or VLC on a M1+ Mac, does it use AVD?
  by brcmthrowaway
• It's nice to see M3 support progressing well.

  They first mentioned that efforts to add M3 support were starting in February:

  > For quite some time, m1n1 has had basic support for the M3 series machines. What has been missing are Devicetrees for each machine, as well as patches to our Linux kernel drivers to support M3-specific hardware quirks and changes from M2. Our intent was always to get to fleshing this out once our existing patchset became more manageable

  https://asahilinux.org/2026/02/progress-report-6-19/

  by GeekyBear
• As someone rocking a M3 Pro, I personally don't expect to be able to try Asahi out until mid/late next year on my MBP, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless!
  by JLO64
• > The firmware loaded by XNU is not verified by the CM3. It will begin executing from its reset vector when signalled, no matter what is actually there. What if we just… used our own firmware?

  Without taking away from the unutterably awesome achievement of writing custom firmware against a proprietary moving target, I worry about this one specifically. While Apple will hopefully continue the practice of not going out of their way to break third-party OSes, it doesn’t seem unlikely that they will introduce hardware signing for firmware blobs or the data they supply at runtime when programming the hardware; that’s a reasonable security concern for Apple to address. I hope this gamble pays off though!

  by zbentley
• The firmware blobs (and the system files) for MacOS live on a read only partition that is digitally signed.
  by GeekyBear
• Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow.

  There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.

  It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.

  by shvarr
• If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative.

  M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.

  by torben-friis
• > pace of development is doomed to be too slow

  When the new leadership team took over, they announced that they would prioritize upstreaming the existing work over adding support for newer hardware.

  Upstreaming their changes into the kernel took time.

  Now the announced that they had started work on the M3 in February and things are progressing well.

  > On top of the above, we also have PCIe, WiFi, Bluetooth, NVMe, keyboard, trackpad, and other core SoC block drivers working in Linux for M3 series machines. Most of this work has come by way of Yureka, who has been very busy hacking on both m1n1 and Linux with her M3 series machines for a while now. We still have a ways to go before we can start enabling Asahi Installer support for these machines, but progress is rapid so watch this space!

  That sounds more like talented people doing meticulous work than doom.

  by GeekyBear
• Will this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro?

  I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.

  by simonmales
• i've been using nixos on an m2 air for a year now, the kernel is enough
  by tensegrist
• Upstreaming something like this is a monumental task, even small changes can take ages. It will take a while.
  by realusername
• The founder of asahi linux famously quit due to how hard it was to upstream patches. It’s not easy to deal with linus’ project.
  by leenixx