Asahi Linux can now be used natively on Macs with the M1 chip. It took almost a year for developers to run the Linux operating system natively on any Mac-based on the Apple M1 SoC.
According to their progress report, “Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!“.
A lot has happened in the past month, especially in driver development, and certain stability has been achieved. Many important drivers are now at least in the review phase; others are already merged in the Linux kernel 5.16.
The drivers for the PCIe bindings, a PCIe driver (PCIe-apple) and a USB-C-PD driver (tps6598x) are merged, while the Pinctrl-driver (apple-gpio-pinctrl), the I²C driver (i2c -pasemi) and the ASC-mailbox-driver (apple-mailbox) are being reviewed.
“With these drivers, M1 Macs are actually usable as desktop Linux machines!“, said Héctor Martín, the project leader. “While there is no GPU acceleration yet, the M1’s CPUs are so powerful that a software-rendered desktop is actually faster on them than on, e.g. Rockchip ARM64 machines with hardware acceleration.”
“For running x86 apps Rosetta style, there is FEX, which I’m very excited to try out. It should work with Wine to allow you to run Windows games too… Once we have a stable kernel foundation, we will start publishing an ‘official’ installer that we expect will see more wide usage among the adventurous.” — Hector said in a conversation with The Register.
