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?
Yes, but with several asterisks. You still need to bootstrap the Asahi base onto the machine. None of this would be possible without m1n1, creating a dummy macOS base to build the rest of the installation upon, and a whole range of not yet upstreamed patches.
The intended path is to install either Asahi itself, or something like Fedora Asahi-remix. But with that said, nothing is technically stopping you from repackaging all their stuff, and installing something like Ubuntu or NixOS with an overlay
Cool info to know. Actually doing anything with that info is way above what I’m prepared to do, but very cool to know that it can be done and is progressing toward everyday use
Not “mainlined” means that the changes are not in the official Linux kernel. Only Asahi works on the M series
Thanks for the clarification
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.
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…
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.
Whoah, no need to get defensive! That was just a guess based on my own observations, and I never said anything about whether they have the right to do whatever the hell they want with their own chips (which would be true regardless, I reckon).
That said, given that their business model depends on their walled garden approach, I just find myself wondering if they might’ve seen the possibility of running any old ARM executable on their silicon as a potential threat to their business model? But there’s all sorts of factors in play, so maybe I’m wrong and that whole possibility is irrelevant.
Do you happen to know if they strictly extended existing APIs?
I’m not sure why you thought my comment was defensive. It wasn’t in disagreement with you. I was pointing out that legally, because of Apple’s founder status, they have more rights to modify the ARM core than, for instance, Qualcomm or Samsung.
As far as I know both all of the ARM chips that Apple makes are heavily modified to the point that it’s never been totally clear if it is a superset or not.
Ah, I may have misunderstood the intent behind some of your wording, my bad.
The whole issue does make me hope open standards continue to gain more adoption. One can hope, right?
Anyway, again, my apologies - it does sound like we’re kinda on the same page here after all.
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.
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almost there! so close
