Enlarge / Everything Asahi Linux's four-person team has done to make Linux work on Apple's M-series chips is remarkable, but "ready to run" is a stretch. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)

It's an odd thing to see the leaders of an impressive open source project ask the press and their followers to please calm down and stop celebrating their accomplishments.

But that's the situation the Asahi Linux team finds itself in after many reports last week that the recently issued Linux 6.2 kernel made Linux "ready to run" on Apple's M-series hardware . It is true that upstream support for Apple's M1 chips is present in 6.2 and that the 6.2 kernel will gradually make its way into many popular distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. Work on Apple's integrated GPU by the four-person Asahi core team has come remarkably far . And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air .

But the builders of the one Linux system that runs pretty well on Apple silicon are asking everybody to please just give it a moment.

Enlarge (credit: Parallels)

In the absence of a version of Boot Camp that runs on Apple Silicon Macs, the best way to run Windows on them has been to use a virtualization app like Parallels or (more recently) VMware Fusion . The problem is that, until now, the Arm version of Windows that runs on Apple Silicon Macs hasn't technically been allowed to run on anything other than Arm PCs that come with it due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions.

These licensing problems haven't technically stopped people from running the Arm version of Windows on other hardware, including Apple Silicon Macs and the Raspberry Pi, but it could be more of an issue for IT managers who wanted to deploy Windows on Macs without worrying about legal liability.

Today, Microsoft is formally blessing Parallels as a way to run the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs. Windows running under Parallels has some limitations—no support for DirectX 12 or newer OpenGL versions, no support for the Linux or Android subsystems, and a few missing security features. But it can run Arm-native Windows apps as well as 32- and 64-bit x86 apps thanks to Windows 11's code translation features; pretty much anything that isn't a game should run tolerably well, given the speed of Apple's M1 and M2 chip families.

Enlarge / Has any game been more associated with proof of concept than SuperTuxKart? It's the "Hello World" of 3D racing. (credit: Asahi Linux)

For the brave people running Linux on Apple Silicon, their patience has paid off. GPU drivers that provide desktop hardware acceleration are now available in Asahi Linux , unleashing more of the M-series chips’ power.

It has taken roughly two years to reach this alpha-stage OpenGL driver, but the foundational groundwork should result in faster progress ahead, writes project leads Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina. In the meantime, the drivers are “good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games.”

Older games that don't require Vulkan support, like the original Quake trilogy, should work (within alpha-release limits) on Asahi Linux on M-series Macs.

The drivers offer non-conformance-tested OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series Apple devices. That’s enough for desktop environments and older games running at 60 frames per second at 4K. But the next target is Vulkan support . OpenGL work is being done “with Vulkan in mind,” Lina writes, but some OpenGL support was needed to get desktops working first. There's a lot more you can read about the interplay between OpenGL, Vulkan, and Zink in Asahi's blog post .

For a while now, Asahi Linux has been making do with software-rendered desktops, but M-series chips are fast enough that they feel almost native (and sometimes faster than other desktops on ARM hardware). And while the Asahi project is relatively new , some core bits of Apple's silicon are backward compatible with known and supported devices, like the original iPhone. And Asahi's work is intended to move upstream, helping other distributions get up and running on Apple's hardware.

The team of developers includes three core members—Rosenzweig, Lina, and Dougall Johnson—plus Ella Stanforth, who works on Vulkan drivers and future reuse. The developers note that their work stands "on the shoulders of FOSS giants." That includes the NIR backend, the Direct Rendering Manager in the Linux kernel, and the Gallium3D API inside the open source Mesa drivers, which themselves build on 30 years of OpenGL work.

Installing the new drivers requires running a bleeding-edge kernel, Mesa drivers, and a Wayland-based desktop. The team welcomes bug reports, but not of the "this specific app isn't working" variety. Their blog post details how and where to submit reports about certain kinds of GPU-specific issues.

Enlarge / Two examples of Stable Diffusion-generated artwork provided by Apple. (credit: Apple)

On Wednesday, Apple released optimizations that allow the Stable Diffusion AI image generator to run on Apple Silicon using Core ML , Apple's proprietary framework for machine learning models. The optimizations will allow app developers to use Apple Neural Engine hardware to run Stable Diffusion about twice as fast as previous Mac-based methods.

Stable Diffusion (SD), which launched in August, is an open source AI image synthesis model that generates novel images using text input. For example, typing "astronaut on a dragon" into SD will typically create an image of exactly that.

By releasing the new SD optimizations—available as conversion scripts on GitHub —Apple wants to unlock the full potential of image synthesis on its devices, which it notes on the Apple Research announcement page. "With the growing number of applications of Stable Diffusion, ensuring that developers can leverage this technology effectively is important for creating apps that creatives everywhere will be able to use."

Enlarge / Microsoft Teams running on a Mac. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced plans to roll out an Apple Silicon-native version of Microsoft Teams, but the release isn't going to happen overnight.

In a blog post on its website, Microsoft claims the update will offer "a significant boost in performance" to users of Macs with Apple's M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, and M2 chips.

Teams has just been running as an Intel app via Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs since the beginning of the Apple Silicon transition in 2020. Direct competitors Zoom and Slack have offered native Apple Silicon support since December 2020 and February 2021, respectively.

Enlarge / VMWare Fusion running on a Mac Studio.

The transition from Intel to Apple Silicon Macs has gone smoothly for most software, thanks to the Rosetta 2 compatibility software and app developers who have quickly added Apple Silicon support to their software. But the ability to run Windows and Windows apps, either directly on the hardware via Boot Camp or via a virtual machine, still isn't officially supported.

But makers of paid virtualization software have been working to close that gap. Parallels Desktop 17 will run the Arm version of Windows 11 inside a virtual machine, and yesterday VMware released a beta version of VMware Fusion 12 that can do the same thing.

VMware's blog post details some of the changes they've made to support Windows 11, many of which parallel the work that Parallels has done. To meet Windows 11's TPM requirement, the software creates an encrypted file that is used to store the same kinds of data that an actual TPM would store on a real PC. VMware also includes a basic 2D graphics driver so that the Windows desktop can be rendered properly on high-resolution displays, plus a basic networking driver.