Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3

Asahi Linux’s Linux 7.3 update reports substantial progress upstreaming Apple Silicon support. The macaudio driver and device-tree changes, about 3,100 lines, are ready for review after requiring significant ALSA and amplifier-driver work. The AVD driver, roughly 13,000 lines with its device-tree changes, reached the upstream submission stage after only three months in Asahi’s downstream tree. Initial device trees for M4 Pro, M4 Max and M5 can boot to a text console, while some new USB-PD, SPMI and Thunderbolt work is being developed upstream first. M3 support is now generally available, with display-controller support improving performance and battery life, enabling sleep, and making the area around MacBook notches usable.

The report also describes advances in reverse engineering and hardware support. The m1n1 boot environment can now run macOS on M4 and M5 through three virtual machines, accommodating the Secure Kernel and Exclaves required by newer systems. M3 GPU work has reached the point of initializing the hardware and drawing a triangle, though substantial work remains. Thunderbolt support is shipping for USB 3, networking and XDomain connections, but not yet for PCIe or DisplayPort tunnelling, so most docks are not supported. For PC gaming, developers adapted Android’s per-process page-size work, P3S, to let applications use 4 KiB pages on Asahi’s Linux system. This could let some Windows games run outside a virtual machine, avoiding its roughly 20% performance penalty and other limitations; demonstrations include older Battlefront and Wolfenstein: The New Order.