Asahi Linux is almost ready to officially support Macs with Apple’s M3 chips, and work on the newer M4 and M5 models is already underway.
Full webcam support is now available for all M3-series Macs with built-in cameras. The hardware is mostly the same as before, but the M3 Max needed a small driver tweak to work correctly.
Built-in microphones now work across the M3 lineup. Apple changed the audio hardware for this generation, so the team had to do extra reverse-engineering before Linux could use it properly. USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt now also work on all M3 Macs.
Display support for M3 Macs is almost as complete as it is for M1 and M2 systems. Asahi says its M3 display controller support is nearly on par with what’s available for the older Apple Silicon models. With all the recent progress, the project is now close enough to an official release.
Work is also moving beyond the M3 generation. Asahi developers have enabled NVMe storage on both M4 and early M5 systems by adapting Linux and the m1n1 boot environment to Apple’s updated storage controller firmware.
PCIe support has improved so that Linux can now detect devices on the bus. The team also fixed a bug that caused Linux to crash after booting with more than one CPU core enabled.
However, M4 and M5 Macs are not ready for daily Linux use yet. Asahi says most hardware still does not work, and neither model can be installed through the Asahi Installer. Still, working storage, PCIe, and multicore support are important first steps.
The team is also making progress with hardware-accelerated video decoding. Support for Apple’s Video Decoder now lets H.264, H.265, and VP9 decoding work reliably on supported machines. M3 and newer Macs also support AV1 decoding.
Finally, the team is tackling one of the less visible but especially important parts of running Linux on Apple Silicon: CPU power management.
Apple’s processors manage low-power CPU states differently, so Asahi has used an Apple-specific Linux driver until now. According to devs, this works, but they can’t add it to the main Linux code because ARM64 maintainers require the standard Power State Coordination Interface, or PSCI.
For additional details, see the announcement.
