3d ago

Linux Will Finally Be Able To Reboot Apple M1/M2 Macs With The v6.17 Kernel

www.phoronix.com

17 comments

Wait, Linux works on m series chips now?! I totally missed that news!
EDIT
Oh wait, i think this sounds like just a step toward making that happen. Still good news!
- It has run on them for several years - a lot of stuff just hasn’t been mainlined yet and is only in custom patches for Asahi Linux right now. This is part of the process of mainlining.
  
  Meaning like the kernel runs on them, or you can actually have a fully standard Linux like ubuntu running on it?
Has anyone here used Asahi? How well does it tend to work? I'm wondering when the bulk of the work will be done by the kernal and you could then install any random ARM distro.
- I daily Asahi. Pros: I am fast af, and I love the system. Cons: battery life is much worse (good 30-40% less battery life), battery drain while sleep is high, HDMI over USB C hub doesn’t work. All things considered, I daily it instead of MacOS.
- That will only work if executables compiled with ARM as the target can run on Apple silicon. My understanding was that even though they used ARM as the basis they made significant changes to the instruction set, which would require being able to compile targeting the M1/M2 chips.
  I'm not 100%, but I suspect this will be a problem...
  
  iirc the M line of chips is a superset of ARM instructions. So all programs compiled for aarch64 should be able to run but programs compiled for M chips probably won't be able to run on aarch64 targets.
  
  Apple was part of the founding of the current version of ARM and produced the first consumer mobile ARM device. As a result they uniquely have extreme latitude to use the ARM core however they want. There are differences to the hardware as well as the instruction set. The combined graphics memory and ram for instance.
almost there! so close

17 comments