Linux isn’t quite “ready to go” on Apple silicon, but give it time

It’s strange to see the leaders of an impressive open source project asking the press and their followers to calm down and stop celebrating their accomplishments.

But that’s exactly the situation the Asahi Linux team found themselves in after numerous reports last week that the newly released Linux 6.2 kernel made Linux “ready to run”on Apple’s M-series hardware. It’s true that native support for the Apple M1 chips is in version 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 has progressed surprisingly well with Asahi’s core team of four. And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux run on his favorite portable hardware, even releasing a kernel in August 2022 for the MacBook Air M2.

But the makers of the only Linux system that runs pretty well on Apple silicon are asking everyone to wait a bit.

“You will not be able to run Ubuntu or any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don’t get your hopes up,”the Asahi Linux team tweeted on Sunday morning. In a lengthy response, they added: “We are constantly improving kernel features, and 6.2 notably added device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long way to go before upstream kernels can be used on laptops. No trackpad/keyboard support yet.”

This is far from the only problem. Asahi Linux ‘s own feature support document details a long list of things that work in both its own version of Asahi and the upstream version of Linux in general. In all Apple chips, the USB 2/3 feature, video decoder, and various CPU states are either under development, available for testing at the peripheral level, or not yet announced. On certain Apple devices, items such as microphones, webcams, speakers, HDMI output, and other essentials do not work.

Asahi’s papers show a wide range of impressive accomplishments, given how the team typically reverse-engineers everything about Apple’s new system-on-a-chip or its legacy ARM components. And yet, as the Asahi team points out, it’s not ready for every Apple M-series device, nor for standard distributions.

The main hurdle for other distributions, allowing new Mac owners to become very frustrated with how their systems work, is the 16K page size that must be built into the kernel for it to work. “To our knowledge, no generic ARM64 distribution ships 16K cores today,” the Asahi team tweeted. The team suggests that distributions will need to repackage Asahi’s userspace tools and either offer 16K kernels or wait for more standard 4K kernel builds to become “kind of usable “.

Asahi notes that it is “already working on some”distributions, and expects to announce support for Asahi “for the main distribution in the near future.”Back in March 2022, when Asahi was ready to install but still very new, the team noted that for those looking for a “Just Works”distro with a USB drive (insert an informed Linux chuckle here), Asahi Linux doesn’t will be “done” for another year, maybe two.” Almost a year has passed since then, but it seems like two.