Time for another overdue progress report! This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller!
Asahi Linux is the project bringing Linux to Apple’s M1 and M2 platform, and they continue to make great strides. I’m still skeptical about how wise it is to buy expensive hardware you have zero control over to run an operating system not explicitly endorsed, but y’all are smart enough to make those calls on your own.
It’s about the future when Apple stops supporting the hardware. It will probably be a little bit until the M1/M2 Macs are as usable as people expect them to be.
Apple also added a raw image mode to the firmware (?) to load binaries which aren’t in the Mach-O format. That’s not a feature they need, so they seem to be fairly open to the idea of helping the ports without releasing any proprietary information.
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1396740-apple-adds-feature-in-macos-121-that-only-benefits-asahi-linux/
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994
I’ve also heard Apple uses Linux to qualify iDevice hardware, so they might have reasons to see this work.
I just wait for the hand-me-downs of this expensive hardware when the owner has moved onto the next shiny thing.
That’s what I do too. I do usually buy from Apple’s refub site if it’s going to be a personal machine rather then an experiment.
Thom Holwerda,
I agree, there is good reason to be wary of proprietary hardware. How awesome would it be for consumers if apple would sell chips to 3rd parties who could provide M1/M2 computers with systemready compliance for alternative operating systems to code for! But unfortunately I don’t think that’s realistically going to happen.
While the lack of official support is kind of par for the course for all alternative OS users, even on x86, it does help a great deal that windows PCs are built to industry standards. Alternative operating systems benefit from these standards as much as microsoft does. I’m a big proponent of industry standards for ARM, but there would be a big gaping hole if apple weren’t part of it.
It looks like Apple is using a version of iBoot to start Arm Macs. This makes sense since the M1/M2 procs are derived from the Apple’s A series chips.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/aside/sec0e73c3016/1/web/1
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac71d5623/1/web/1
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-for-ios-and-ipados-devices-secb3000f149/web
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/12/booting-an-m1-mac-external-disks-and-local-boot-policy/
Flatland_Spider,
Yes, using proprietary solutions is to be expected with apple. My last post was more a wish than a prediction. In fact I predict the opposite of what I wished for, haha. That’s just what we get with ARM vedors. For better or worse, this is why we need Asahi Linux. They’re doing great work, but it’s work that shouldn’t have been necessary in an ideal world.
I curious about if Apple was still using UEFI on the Macs, so I went down a rabbit hole. 🙂
Flatland_Spider,
Yes, and an interesting one it is. Your last link particularly was extremely informative.
If we could see through the looking glass (*) to look 10-20 years ahead and see whether apple allows or disallows alternative operating systems on macs in the future, it would tell us whether or not we’re right to be concerned about macos owner control. They are in a quantum state of existence, Whether or not the pitchforks are necessary depends on that quantum state, haha.
* see what I did there? 🙂
In my mind it’s not so much about the Apple hardware itself (though obviously I am invested as I own a M1 Mac and I currently dual boot OpenBSD and macOS on it thanks to the Asahi project), it’s about all the advances made in Linux on ARM in general thanks to the hard work done by these brilliant developers. Aside from the Raspberry Pi, Linux on ARM is a minefield of vendor-locked bullshit, and even the Pi has issues surrounding the boot process and firmware blobs. Hell, there’s a super powerful ARM system still on offer from Nvidia that can only run a heavily patched 5.10 kernel, what madness is that?
The hard work done by the Asahi team gets upstreamed into the kernel, making it available for all ARM developers to benefit from. Sure, some of it is Apple hardware specific, but overall it has gone a long way towards making Linux on ARM something to look forward to instead of something to dread.
How many PC motherboards explicitly endorse anything other than Windows?
I mean – I don’t know Apple products – I used one at school to type a report and I briefly had an iPad (The cheapest product I could lay my hands on to debug an issue for work – expensed) but does the Apple boot firmware have an update mechanism that can remove what you’ve put on there? (I mean – I was once told that there was once a motherboard that had a modem on it that had a BIOS that would dial up the manufacturer to check for updates so it wouldn’t overly surprise me…)
If it doesn’t, they’re probably better than most of the motherboard manufacturers…
xslogic,
It depends on the platform. You just need to look to IOS to see what a war of escalation between owners jailbreaking and apple updates to stop them looks like. In that case since apple uses updates to take control back from owners, jailbreaks have to turn to disabling automatic updates. There is a risk of not being able to jailbreak again.
I haven’t seen evidence that apple has started doing this on it’s macos laptops, but at the same time I haven’t seen express permission or commitment from apple to allow macos owners to boot alternatives. For me this would be an uncomfortable gray area because it involves speculating about apple’s intentions. The demise of dual booting is a negative for ARM macs and apple probably doesn’t want to bring any attention to it. But once the transition to this new architecture is completed, is apple going to start tightening the reigns? I think there are many people who wish apple would make it’s intentions clear, do they respect owner control over macos hardware or is their ultimate goal to turn it into IOS? To my knowledge they’ve been rather silent on this point.
While it wouldn’t be impossible to do that, I’m not aware of a mainstream platform that performs automatic updates from outside of the OS. Generally updates happen when booting the original OS.
IOS has the dubious combination of being a bridge between the user and a mobile phone radio and have access to the Apple Pay details.
Embedded systems can typically take updates from outside the main OS. (There are a few platforms where it’s a stipulation. Sometimes it’s the bootloader that handles it. Sometimes it’s a separate image that the bootloader will load instead of the main image under a variety of reasons – the main image being corrupt being one of them – but I’ve seen platforms where the main image writes a flag into flash and reboots)