Asahi Linux Disputes Report That Linux 6.2 Will Run on Apple M1 Chips (twitter.com) 40
Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines."
Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up." We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet.
While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge.
Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages.
But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!
Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up." We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet.
While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge.
Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages.
But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!
I don't understand why anyone is working on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, you climb a mountain just because it's there. In this case though, you are climbing a mountain which could make future mountains become unclimbable.
What are you going to do with M3 machines if they run from on disk and in memory encrypted binaries? Get out your FIB to try to reverse engineer the decryption key? What then if on top of that they start using their own completely undocumented ISA? What if you wake up having given them even a tiny bit of support in gaining a monopoly and helped kill Linux on modern consumer computers altogether?
Stop supporting what is inherently a company hostile to open computing FFS.
And where Apple leads everyone else follows (Score:3, Insightful)
Another reason to not give Apple any kind of help in locking down and encrypting everything.
We are already seeing/seen the worst aspects of "Trusted Computing" come to pass (yeah, that thing we warned about 20 odd years ago and everyone laughed and said it would never happen). Don't empower those who put the shackles on us.
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Not just Apple -- have you seen Microsoft's "UAPI Group" and their newest DRM schemes? You're not supposed to run an OS of your choice, merely a "trusted" platform with vendor-signed "overlays".
For a time, it seemed Microsoft has became less evil. But apparently they can't shed their true nature.
For an added bonus, guess which of Microsoft employes is a key person in this scheme...
Frog in boiling water.. (Score:2)
Seems the experiment is working.
Slamming users with full lockdown all at once would cause howls, screams, and tons of lost revenue. The biggest expert down to grandma would take notice and cry foul.
So they've been doing the smart thing and slowly turning the dial higher and higher.
Re: And where Apple leads everyone else follows (Score:1)
Trust relationships were first imagined to work between domains like two computers for example. A corporate entity's first and only responsibility is to its own domain so "trusted" cannot mean the same thing.
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What if, what if, what if...
Apple *officially* supports booting "other OS" and provides the tools to do it. And they've actually spent effort on *improving* "other OS" booting to make it stable and solid. But of course, while they're doing this, they're secretly plotting to take it all away in a year or so. Apple could easily have chosen to make it so you needed a jailbreak to boot anything other than MacOS, and there would be nothing legally to stop them given MacOS's low market share. Instead they deliber
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They trace the calls being made to the hardware by the existing software, if memory is encrypted why do you think command buffers would be exempt? Of course assuming they will run unsigned code at all.
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Memory encryption is done at the memory controller level - it scrambles address and data going to and from the memory chips. The data is decrypted by anything accessing memory by the memory controller.
The purpose is to ensure that the physical RAM chips don't hold cleartext data, so if you try to hack a system
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It can also be process isolation, see Intel SGX.
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I like MacOS. I freaking love my current Linux distro.
Mac hardware just works with MacOS. But Apple won't support my 12 year old laptop which is still going strong. So I installed a Linux distro on it.
I want the same opportunity on my M1 MacAir.
Keep going, Asahi people!
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I like MacOS.
mmmmkay ...
But Apple won't support my 12 year old laptop which is still going strong.
well, a smarter person would stop investing in such hardware, and not support these companies, specially since that policy has been in effect like ... forever.
Keep going, Asahi people!
fun fact: of all things japanese do amazingly well, beer isn't one of them: "asahi" is just regular budweiser style cold piss except it is also astonishingly and unjustifiably expensive. quite a fitting name for this distro. good for them!
Re: I don't understand why anyone is working on th (Score:2)
But Apple won't support my 12 year old laptop which is still going strong. ... forever.
well, a smarter person would stop investing in such hardware, and not support these companies, specially since that policy has been in effect like
"Invest" in a 12 year PC laptop? Lol, no, that's not smart bud, it's not going to be running the ISS. How many extended warranties do you have to buy to cover that, Jesus.
At that point the hardware will be running something unsupported, and the hardware will be unsupported, that is a given. Linux fits that bill perfectly. There is zero reason to "invest" in a twelve year laptop to run Linux on, you can buy twelve year old laptops that have depreciated into negative, I'll take it off your hands prices. TO
Re: I don't understand why anyone is working on th (Score:1)
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Okay, you climb a mountain just because it's there.
Hmmm... yes? The history of open source software is full of mountains climbed just because they were there.
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A simple reason is that this forces everything in the stack, from the kernel all the way to complex userspace environments and applications, to be able to run on ARM64 CPUS in 16K memory page size mode. Currently everything kind of assumes 4K page sizes, which does run, but slower than it could, as many workloads can get a 20% performance boost in 16K page-size CPUs when running in 16K themselves. Apple Silicon CPUs are all 16K, so they provide a readily, broadly available (in the US at least) target for th
Several reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also important to note that not everyone with an Apple device bought it for themselves (or at all). I bought an iPad for my mom back in 2012, she passed away in 2016 so it passed back to me. Now I'm stuck with a tablet that would be great for running emulators in bed if Apple didn't specifically ban them from the App Store (and side-loading requires stuff to be re-signed like every week or something, absolutely not worth it). If I could put Linux on the thing, it'd probably be a lot more useful to me.
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Generally, I agree with your sentiment, but also "letting them get away with it" is a bad precedent. We've already seen similar efforts from microsoft, and from other manufacturers. Apple isn't the first, nor will be the last, to try and lock down a platform.
Breaking whatever BS protection they throw at it and doing what you want with the platform is exercising your right to use your own stuff however the hell you want. It's like the US flying over what China claims as the South China Sea. Basically, use it
When You Absolutley, Positively (Score:2)
Don't want full control of your PC - Apple.
Re: When You Absolutley, Positively (Score:2)
Yah we don't.
And we don't want to reprogram fuel injectors in our cars either.
But if you do, someone will figure it out eventually anyway, as has always been the case with Linux on Mac hardware. So what is there to gripe about.
Linux Kernel 6.2 (Score:2)
There is no such thing as "Linux 6.2", although some distributions have releases with that version number. This is Linux Kernel 6.2. The difference is important. A great many devices use the Linux kernel, but not a Linux operating system in the normal sense of the term. Every Android phone in the world for example. Linux kernel, Android user space.
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Nonsense. Linux *is* the kernel.
What you are referring to is commonly known as a 'distro'.
Re: T420 (Score:3, Funny)
Re: T420 (Score:2)
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Ha! Posted from my Smith Corona.
uh (Score:1)
"You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up."
That's just obviously false. If you can run Asahi then you can use the same kernel and support programs to run any other distribution as well. That's literally the point of the kernel.
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"You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up."
That's just obviously false. If you can run Asahi then you can use the same kernel and support programs to run any other distribution as well. That's literally the point of the kernel.
Once you've redone the userspace and are using a kernel not distributed by Ubuntu, are you really running Ubuntu anymore?
In any case, that's not the original point. The original point is that even when Ubuntu will start supporting 6.2 Kernel, it doesn't mean you will be able to install it "as is" on an M1 mac. You won't.
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Once you've redone the userspace and are using a kernel not distributed by Ubuntu, are you really running Ubuntu anymore?
"Redone the userspace"? lolol
In any case, that's not the original point. The original point is that even when Ubuntu will start supporting 6.2 Kernel, it doesn't mean you will be able to install it "as is" on an M1 mac. You won't.
You probably will. Nothing prevents them from using the code from Asahi and they have a long history of adding support for new architectures and also new features into the installer before other distributions.
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