Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices.

When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.

I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.

This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers

>The ARM specification mandates that cores in WFI loops should preserve all state. This is not the default mode on Apple Silicon.

I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happened.

Amazing progress as usual. It’s been fun watching just how much a few people can accomplish over the last few years despite working on sometimes unstable sand.

Is Asahi an LLM-hostile project? I'd imagine this is something that would be benefitted tremendously with a Fable class model

Yeah, you'll find out that va-api is not a good match for v4l2-requests. It does not pass decoded bitstream to the drivers as is, but pre-computes some things for some codecs, while v4l2-requests mostly expects original information parsed from the bitstream.

https://xff.cz/git/libva-v4l2_request/

> Please stop Thinking Different

Considering how much better m-series CPUs are, i’d say actually keep thinking different.

I was seriously worried the various incompatibilities the M3 bootloader had with Asahi's debugging setup would mean way slower bring-up than M1 and M2 had. Seems like that wasn't the case - or, at least, won't be the case anymore.

And all that with a hard fork of kernel

I'm extremely excited to hear that the hypervisor now works on M4! Can't wait to try out Asahi in a year or two.

macOS is so terrible. Godspeed!

Fantastic to see the progress and a fascinating detailed write-up.

You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.