Asahi Linux Adds Support for Macs on Apple M3 Chips

The Asahi Linux project, which ports Linux to Apple computers built on the company's own processors, has announced that support for the M3-series chips has been added to its installer.

According to the developers, support has reached the point where almost everything that already worked on M1 and M2 machines “just works” on the new devices too. The list of supported hardware includes the webcam, the built-in microphones, USB (up to the USB 3 hardware limit at 10 Gbit/s speeds), hardware-accelerated video decoding — including the AV1 format — as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

What doesn't work yet

There are two main exceptions. The first is full support for the DCP (Apple's display controller). The second, which matters more to many people, is the GPU. The developers are candid in their warning: don't count on performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now. They promise that news on the GPU will arrive in the coming months.

The team suggests looking for the rest of the current limitations of M3 support in a separate post on the project's blog.

The arrival of the M3 in the installer continues Asahi's years-long effort to reverse-engineer Apple Silicon hardware, for which the manufacturer publishes no documentation. Each new generation of chips has to be learned from scratch, and getting the M3's basic functionality to the “almost everything works” stage is a notable step for anyone who wants to run Linux on modern Macs. Full-fledged graphics, as has so often been the case in the project's history, remains the most labor-intensive part of the journey.

Source: LWN.net