Enlarge / Slowly but surely, the Asahi Linux team is getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon Macs. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)

For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple's total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a "highly unstable experiment" to a "surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system." Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple's hardware.

The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them in December 2022 , and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver's support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple's support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010.

Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass "over 100,000 tests" to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs don't support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward.

Enlarge (credit: Asahi Linux/Fedora)

Asahi Linux, the project aiming to bring a fully functional Linux system to Apple computers running on that company's own M-series chips, has announced that its new "flagship distro" is Fedora Asahi Remix.

As announced at Fedora's Flock conference this week in Cork, Ireland, (and on Asahi Linux's blog ), the Fedora Asahi Remix should be officially released by the end of August 2023. You can try it out now , but you should "expect rough spots (or even complete breakage)."

The new distro will be "upstream-first," sending as many of its bespoke M-series tools back to Fedora's mainline offerings as possible. Hector Martin, writing on Asahi Linux's blog, notes that the existing project based on Arch Linux was "fully downstream." Asahi added its own package repository with scripts, forked kernel and Mesa packages, bootloader parts, and userspace support, but with "no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux." Neal Gompa from Fedora reached out to talk about integrating Asahi with Fedora after the project's debut, and work began in late 2021. Now it's ready to spread a bit further.

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 / 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 / Slowly but surely, the Asahi Linux team is getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon Macs. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)

We don't normally cover individual releases of the Linux kernel, partly because most updates are pretty routine. Any given Linux kernel update resolves some bugs, improves support for existing hardware, and makes some forward-looking changes in anticipation of new hardware, and kernel version 5.19 is no exception. Phoronix and OMG! Ubuntu! both have good overviews of the changes.

But there's one interesting note about this release that Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds mentions in his release notes : The kernel update is being released using an Arm-powered laptop, specifically the M2-powered version of Apple's MacBook Air .

"It's something I've been waiting for for a loong [sic] time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team," Torvalds writes. "We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now."

Enlarge / Asahi Linux is now up and running on the Mac Studio and the first M2 Macs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs were designed to run only Apple's software. But the developers on the Asahi Linux team have been working to change that , painstakingly reverse-engineering support for Apple's processors and other Mac hardware and releasing it as a work-in-progress distro that can actually boot up and run on bare metal, no virtualization required.

The Asahi Linux team put out a new release today with plenty of additions and improvements. Most notably, the distro now supports the M1 Ultra and the Mac Studio and has added preliminary support for the M2 MacBook Pro (which has been tested firsthand by the team) and the M2 MacBook Air (which hasn't been tested but ought to work).

Preliminary Bluetooth support for all Apple silicon Macs has also been added, though the team notes that it works poorly when connected to a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network because "Wi-Fi/Bluetooth coexistence isn't properly configured yet."

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Apple Silicon Macs can, however, run operating systems written for Arm processors inside of virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And those Linux VMs are getting a new feature in macOS Ventura : the ability to run apps written for x86 processors using Rosetta , the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps written for Intel Macs.

Apple's documentation will walk you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system—it requires creating a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and running some terminal commands in Linux to get it set up. But once you do those steps, you'll be able to enjoy the wider app compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code as well as Arm code.