Asahi Linux Still Working On Apple M3 Support, m1n1 Bootloader Going Rust

The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts.

Asahi Linux developers have kept working on new kernel patches and some being upstreamed for Linux 6.17 and 6.18 cycles, as previously covered on Phoronix. Notably with Linux 6.18 is the Device Trees for the Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra devices albeit more driver code is still working its way upstream.

Asahi Linux developers are also working on moving toward the Rust programming language with their important m1n1 bootloader for Apple Silicon. They feel going to Rust is important for such a critical piece of software for better maintainability, safety, and ensuring the correct logic.

Asahi Linux developers have also made progress on getting more games working on Apple Silicon devices. Wine is also now working outside of muvm and their graphics driver support continues maturing:

With the upstream Linux kernel work around Apple Silicon so far being focused on Apple M1 and M2, you may be wondering about M3 and M4 or the recently announced M5… They still are battling Apple M3 bring-up. Today’s progress report comments:

“It may be surprising to learn that very basic, low-level support for M3 has existed for quite some time now. m1n1 is capable of initialising the CPU cores, turning on some critical peripheral devices, and booting the Asahi kernel. However, the level of support right now begins and ends with being able to boot to a blinking cursor. Naturally, this level of support is not at all useful for anything but low-level reverse engineering, but we of course plan on rectifying this in due time…”

See the progress report in full over on AsahiLinux.org.