| Asahi Linux | |
|---|---|
 | |
 Screenshot ofArch Linux ARM on Asahi Linux withKDE Plasma 5 | |
| Developer |
|
| OS family | Linux (Unix-like) |
| Working state | Official Stable (Fedora 42) |
| Source model | Open source |
| Repository | github |
| Supported platforms | Apple M1/M2 (including Pro, Max and Ultra)[2] (AArch64) |
| Official website | asahilinux |
Asahi Linux is a project thatports theLinux kernel and related software toApple Silicon-poweredMacs, started byHector Martin. It does so byreverse-engineering theSoCs, which lack documentation from Apple.
Shortly afterApple announced their transition away fromIntel x86 processors in late 2020, Linux creatorLinus Torvalds expressed interest in Linux support for theApple M1 Mac, but thought that the work to make this happen was too time-consuming for him to personally take on the necessary software development tasks.[3]
Martin announced the project in December 2020 and formally started work a month later in 2021,[4] after securing crowd-sourced funding.Alyssa Rosenzweig, who developed theopen-source graphics driver stackPanfrost, joined the project to help support the Apple Silicongraphics processing unit (GPU).[5][6] The project has been made challenging by the lack of publicly available documentation of Apple's proprietaryfirmware.[7][8]
The developers quickly realized that attempting toboot theLinux kernel compiled for Apple Silicon's processor architecture (AArch64) would be challenging, as it involved working out the functionality of proprietary Apple code used in the boot process. The work was time-consuming and took most of the year, including submittingpull requests to the main Linux kernel developers to keep development in sync and avoid regressions. However, it subsequently led to a thorough and comprehensive explanation of the previously undocumented boot process, which Martin and others published onGitHub.[7][9]
The project released an experimental alpha version of the Asahi Linux installer in March 2022. The installer offered the choice of a desktop based onArch Linux ARM, a minimal environment, or a basicUEFI environment for installingOpenBSD or alternate Linux distributions with support for Apple Silicon via a bootableUSB flash drive.[8] Despite being able to launch a UEFI shell, bootingMicrosoft Windows is not supported, and there are no plans to do so, as it would involve modifying the proprietary Windows kernel.[10] Other projects that are attempting to study a possible port of Windows to these systems specified challenging roadblocks related to Windows handling the proprietary Apple Interrupt Controller (AIC), and the 16K pages only found on theIOMMU.[citation needed]
In July 2022, the Asahi Linux team released an update with support for theM1 Ultra,Mac Studio, and early initial support for theM2 MacBook Pro.[11]
In August 2023, it was announced that Asahi was partnering with theFedora Project to release the Fedora Asahi Remix, which would supersede the original Arch-based distribution as Asahi's flagship OS.[12] The effort began in late 2021, and is an upstream-first project. The end goal of the project is to mergeupstream all changes so that the project's distribution becomes unnecessary.
In October 2023, Fedora Asahi Remix was released as a Beta, then 3 months later, as a stable.[13][14]
In February 2025,Hector Martin, founder and lead developer of Asahi Linux, announced his resignation from leading the project, citingburnout and difficulties with the Linux kernel community.[15] Subsequently, the Asahi Linux team moved to a shared governance model and began accepting funding viaOpen Collective.[16]
AVulkan driver is in a working prototype[17] andOpenGL 4.6 andOpenGL ES 3.2 are supported.[18] This driver is currently the only fully-compliant AGX (Apple Silicon GPU) driver for any widespread graphics standard.[19][20][21] While initially using the Panfrost driver implementation, the Asahi Linux Project also made use of Gallium-3D andRust for Linux based APIs for driver development.OpenCL is supported.[22]KDE Plasma rendering ishardware accelerated, while video decoding is not.
HDMI video output is supported on the Apple SiliconMac Mini and MacBook Pros with Pro chips, and there is no support for video viaThunderbolt[19] although external displays can be used via DisplayLink docks.
For performance reasons, the operating system's kernel has been configured for and supports only 16 kB pages. If a program has been designed to expect a different page size, then the program will experience alignment problems when being mapped to memory; however, a binary that targets different page sizes can be run within a micro-virtual machine.[23][24] The page size set by Linux is a global configuration (there is no support for multiple page sizes in operation).[25] The Apple GPU driver supports 4 kB and 16 kB pages.[26][27]
The project has been well received. A review inThe Register said that it ran surprisingly well for alpha software that is still in development.[20] Similarly, a review inArs Technica was impressed by the amount of hardware that was already supported early in the project lifecycle.[28]
| Android |
| ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arch | |||||||||||||||||
| Debian |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Fedora |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Gentoo | |||||||||||||||||
| Mandrake | |||||||||||||||||
| Mandriva | |||||||||||||||||
| Slackware | |||||||||||||||||
| SUSE | |||||||||||||||||
| Other | |||||||||||||||||
| Discontinued |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Products |
| ||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Services |
| ||||||||||||||||||
| Companies |
| ||||||||||||||||||
| Design andmarketing | |||||||||||||||||||
| Legal issues and labour relations | |||||||||||||||||||
| Related | |||||||||||||||||||
| People |
| ||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
