| ▲ | OutOfHere 17 hours ago |
| What is the prospect for newer M support, e.g. M3, M4? I am hesitant to adopt something that doesn't work with current and future models. |
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| ▲ | WD-42 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Asahi is all reverse engineering. It’s nothing short of a miracle what has already accomplished, despite, not because of, Apple. That said some of the prominent developers have left the project. As long as Apple keeps hoarding their designs it’s going to be a struggle, even more so now. If you care about FOSS operating systems or freedom over your own hardware there isn’t a reason to choose Apple. |
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| ▲ | matthewfcarlson 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To be clear, the work the asahi folks are doing is incredible. I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff. I’ve heard it’s mostly because there wasn’t an m3 Mac mini which is a much easier target for CI since it isn’t a portable. Also, there have been a ton of hardware changes internally between M2 and M3. M4 is a similar leap. More coprocessors, more security features, etc. For example, PPL was replaced by SPTM and all the exclave magic. https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c... As always, opinions are my own | | |
| ▲ | WD-42 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is what ruffles my jimmies about this whole thing: > I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff. The reverse engineering is a monumental effort, this Sisyphean task of trying to keep up with never-ending changes to the hardware. Meanwhile, the documentation is just sitting there in Cupertino. An enormous waste of time and effort from some of the most skilled people in the industry. Well, maybe not so much anymore since a bunch of them left. I really hope this ends up biting Apple in the ass instead of protecting whatever market share they are guarding here. | |
| ▲ | ZiiS 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I strongly support a projects stance that you shouldn't ask when it will be done. But the time between the M1 launch and a good experience was less than the time since M3 I would love to know what is involved. |
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| ▲ | SamuelAdams 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Have they though? Hector just added support for the power button, I wonder if he is officially back? https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/20251215-macsmc-subdevs-v6-4-0... | | |
| ▲ | aliceryhl 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's an email from James Calligeros. All this patch says is that the author is Hector Martin (and Sven Peter). The code could have been written a long time ago. |
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| ▲ | GeekyBear 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The new project leadership team has prioritized upstreaming the existing work over reverse engineering on newer systems. > Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term. https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ For instance, in this month's progress report: > Last time, we announced that the core SMC driver had finally been merged upstream after three long years. Following that success, we have started the process of merging the SMC’s subdevice drivers which integrate all of the SMC’s functionality into the various kernel subsystems. The hwmon driver has already been accepted for 6.19, meaning that the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensors controlled by the SMC will be readable using the standard hwmon interfaces. The SMC is also responsible for reading and setting the RTC, and the driver for this function has also been merged for 6.19! The only SMC subdevices left to merge is the driver for the power button and lid switch, which is still on the mailing list, and the battery/power supply management driver, which currently needs some tweaking to deal with changes in the SMC firmware in macOS 26. Also finally making it upstream are the changes required to support USB3 via the USB-C ports. This too has been a long process, with our approach needing to change significantly from what we had originally developed downstream https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/ |
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| ▲ | schmuckonwheels 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a very straightforward problem with a relatively simple solution: Stop buying Apple laptops to run Linux. |
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| ▲ | jjtheblunt 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hard disagree : try the UTM app on the App Store (or build it from open source) and you get Apple Silicon native virtualization and super simple installation of Aarch64 linuxes from an iso. i've been doing this for maybe a year, after frustration with power draw and sleep modes (and dual boot) with Asahi. it's been great...and Apple silicon is still super efficient, which is why i said hard disagree. |
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| ▲ | 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | eigenspace 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The project is effectively dead |
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| ▲ | esjeon 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Given the speed of the progress that Apple has made on their hardware (from M1 to M5), I think the project was already doomed since the very beginning. Reverse engineering per-se is a huge talent drain that wastes tremendous amount of man-hour on a closed problem. Also, the strong SW-HW integration of Mac is sophisticate and fragile, that is difficult to analyze and replicate. Nailing all those details is not only time consuming, but also limited in the scope, and never yield anything beyond status quo. I’m quite glad that those talented guys finally escaped from the pit hole of reverse engineering. It maybe fun and interesting, but its future was already capped by Apple. I wish they find another fashion, hopefully something more original and progressive. Stop chasing and push forward. | |
| ▲ | shadowpho 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What why? | | |
| ▲ | willis936 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Very little progress made this year after high profile departures (Hector Martin, project lead, Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig - GPU gurus). Alyssa's departure isn't reflected on Asahi's website yet, but it is in her blog. I believe she also left Valve, which I think was sponsoring some aspects of the Asahi project. So when people say "Asahi hasn't seen any setbacks" be sure to ask them who has stepped in to make up for these losses in both talent and sponsorship. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html | | | |
| ▲ | nicoburns 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because key developers have left the project, and developers who are capable of such work are few and far between. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | >are few and far between They are more common than you would think. There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary. | | |
| ▲ | donkeylazy456 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary. You explained it well by yourself. |
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| ▲ | eigenspace 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's really hard to do and nobody is paying for it? |
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| ▲ | markus_zhang 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Without official support, the Asahi team needs to RE a lot of stuffs. I’d expect it to lag behind a couple of generations at least. I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough. |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | M1 is indeed quite adequate for most, but each generation has brought substantial boosts in performance in single-threaded, multi-threaded, and with the M5 generation in particular GPU-bound tasks. These advancements are required to keep pace with the industry and in a few aspects stay ahead of competitors, plus there exist high end users whose workloads greatly benefit from these performance improvements. | | |
| ▲ | markus_zhang 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree. But Apple doesn’t sell new M1 chip laptops anymore AFAIK. There are some refurbished ones but most likely I need to go into a random store to find one. I only saw M4 and M5 laptops online. That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Sure it is probably better for Apple to move forward quickly though. | | |
| ▲ | wtallis 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In the US, Walmart is still selling the M1 MacBook Air new, for $599 (and has been discounted to $549 or better at times, such as Black Friday). In general, I don't think it's reasonable to worry that Apple's products aren't thoroughly achieving economies of scale. The less expensive consumer-oriented products are extremely popular, various components are shared across product lines (eg. the same chip being used in Macs and iPads) and across multiple generations (except for the SoC itself, obviously), and Apple rather famously has a well-run supply chain. From a strategic perspective, it seems likely that Apple's long history of annual iteration on their processors in the iPhone and their now well-established pattern of updating the Mac chips less often but still frequently is part of how Apple's chips have been so successful. Annual(ish) chip updates with small incremental improvements compounds over the years. Compare Apple's past decade of chip progress against Intel's troubled past decade of infrequent technology updates (when you look past the incrementing of the branding), uneven improvements and some outright regressions in important performance metrics. | |
| ▲ | Kirby64 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Why would this be true? An M5 MacBook Air today costs the same as an M1 MacBook Air cost in 2020 or whenever they released it, and is substantially more performant. Your dollar per performance is already better. If they kept selling the same old stuff, then you spread production across multiple different nodes and the pricing would be inherently worse. |
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| ▲ | stetrain 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you want the latest and greatest you can get it. If an M1 is fine you can get a great deal on one and they’re still great machines and supported by Apple. | |
| ▲ | lagniappe 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >I don’t get why it does that. I've got a few ideas |
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