marcan

Another overdue progress report!

Hey everyone! It's been way too long, but I finally posted another progress report along with a slew of package and installer updates!

This time we're introducing USB3 support for both the Thunderbolt ports and the missing non-Thunderbolt ports (some iMac and Mac Studio models), as well as keyboard backlight and headphone jack support across the board. In addition, M2 support is now no longer considered experimental. We're also introducing a new optional bleeding-edge kernel package whi...

New update and progress report!

Hey folks! I've just posted a new progress report and Asahi Linux release over at our blog.

We've been hard at work over the past few months fixing bugs and adding new features. There's a lot that is still in the works, but this release brings us Bluetooth support as well as support for the M1 Studio (including M1 Ultra) and, hot off the presses, M2! I know that a lot of people have been concerned about whether the project will be playing eternal catch-up to new Apple machines, so hopef...

The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here!

Hey everyone! I know I've been behind on progress reports again... and this is the reason!

There was always "one more thing" to include in the progress reports, but now that we finally have a public release, expect the regular posts to resume (and they might even become more frequent, as now we'll be talking about actual package releases too).

Enjoy!

October-November 2021 Progress Report is out!

Hey folks! Just wanted to let you know that a couple days ago I posted a new progress report for the project! Sorry that this one took so long; we've been very busy with upstreaming kernel work :-)

2022 is definitely going to be a very interesting year for the project! A lot of the groundwork is getting wrapped up, and that means we'll soon move on to things like the GPU and video accelerators. Stay tuned!

As always, thank you so much for supporting this project. It is thanks to a...

September 2021 Progress Report is out!

Hi everyone! We've just posted our latest Progress Report! It's been a fun month, and lots of things are moving forward in Linux kernel land. Hope you enjoy it!

August 2021 progress report is out!

Hello everyone! Just a couple days ago I posted our August 2021 Progress Report!

There's been a lot going on in the past few months and I realized I set the bar a bit too high with the first one, so it's been difficult to keep up to date with monthly reports. With this one I've tried to keep it a bit simpler, though it's still somewhat long-form since a lot of things happened since the la...

Quick meta update

Hey folks,

I know I haven't written an update in a while. I was going to talk about the ongoing hypervisor work and how I've been reverse engineering the M1's display controller (and preparing for doing the same with the GPU interface) in a big mega progress update which would also explain how the hypervisor works.

Unfortunately, as some of you may be aware, there have been some tragic events this past weekend that have kept me both busy and not in the right mental state to work o...

Linux 5.13 and a new hypervisor

Hi all! It's been a few busy months and I'm way overdue for another update. There has been a lot of interesting progress lately. I will be covering it in official progress updates, but here is a quick overview of what's going on.

Basic bring-up merged!

As I'm sure many of you saw, my initial M1 bring-up series was merged into the Linux kernel last month and will be coming to kernel release 5.13 (5.13-rc1 was released a few days ago). This release just has basic "it boots" suppor...

The first Asahi Linux Progress Report is out!

Hello  everyone! This has been a long time in the making, and quite a beast to write at over 10000 words. I hope it's been worth the wait!

I heard your feedback on the last post loud and clear; everyone is interested in the project's goals over sponsor perks, and several people mentioned they prefer text updates over streams. So, the sponsor rewards are now abolished, and going forward I hope to put out one of these updates monthly. The community streams can still be fun, so I'm st...

Patreon rewards and community streams

Hi all! It's been quite busy for the past few weeks; things are moving smoothly towards having baseline M1 support in the official upstream Linux kernel within the next few months, and I expect our first batch of changes to be merged soon!

If you've been following our development work on IRC or some of my recent tweets, you'll also know that I've been working on tearing apart the M1 SoC (figuratively) and learning about how it works in detail, and all of its Apple-specific features. Thi...

Quick Asahi Linux project update!

Hi folks! Sorry for being so sparse on the updates here!

I've actually been planning on doing monthly Progress Update posts on asahilinux.org, but as I was thinking of writing the January update lots of interesting things were happening... and before I knew it, we were halfway through February already. So, the first update will be for Jan-Feb in just a little over a week - stay tuned!

Here's a quick sneak peek of what's going on:

As of a few weeks ago, we got Linux bring-up ...

Status update: m1n1 is up, AIC and timers working!

A lot of things have happened over the past week!

As you may know, Apple released macOS 11.2 beta 2 just a few days ago. This version finally includes the kmutil update that we were expecting that allows users to boot their own kernels, which means that software testing and development can now begin in earnest.

And so, I have started work on m1n1, a bootloader and experimentation platform for Apple Silicon....

Website & Community Launch

We finally have a logo, a website, and a community space! Thanks for soundflora* for designing both the logo and the site.

https://asahilinux.org 

After much deliberation, I've decided to stick with good old IRC for our chat system. Matrix users are welcome ...

Project Start! UART gizmos and contribution tips

Happy new year, everyone! We're finally in 2021, and it's time to formally kick the project off! Thank you so much to everyone who pledged - it really means a lot to me to be able to do this as a job. I hope I can meet everyone's expectations :-)

I'd like to give another shout-out to those who donated hardware to help get everything started:

• Ben Stahlhood II, who sponsored a Mac Mini
• Drew Fisher, who sponsored a MacBook Air (arriving next week)
• Patrick Bern...
  2021-01-02 10:27:43 +0000 UTC View Post

GitHub Sponsors now available!

That was faster than expected! Check out the new page here:

https://github.com/sponsors/marcan

Feel free to choose the platform that best suits your needs!

Due to the split, the full-time goal progress bar on Patreon will no longer be accurate, but I'll keep you up to date as to the progress and, of course, if/when we reach it.

Getting ready for take-off

As mentioned in the Community Chat last weekend, the project's official name is Asahi Linux! The name comes from the Japanese name for the McIntosh apple, 旭 (Asahi). This is the very same apple that gave the Mac its name.

I've registered the project's Twitter account, as well as a 2020-12-25 10:21:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Community Chat #1

Livestream will be starting in just over an hour! Don't forget to drop by!

Community Livestream this Sunday

See update below

Mark the time: Sunday Dec 20th at 09:00 PST / 12:00 EST / 18:00 CET / 26:00* JST (Dec 21st 02:00 JST).

I just wrapped up some unrelated projects this past weekend (and stayed up a couple nights fixing years-old OBS bugs - hopefully this will help future streams go smoothly), so it's time to start ramping up this one!

This will be a fairly free-form stream where I'll cover progress this coming week, first steps for porting Linux, and answer y...

Updates and community livestream!

Hey everyone! I've been pretty busy wrapping up other things on my plate so I can fully concentrate on this project come January. I'm really looking forward to really kicking things off soon, quite likely ahead of time!

As some of you may have seen on Twitter, I have just acquired a Mac Mini as a first target, donated by Ben Stahlhood II. I also have a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro coming soon, thanks to donations fr...

Fun Findings #1: HID Registers

I'm not working on proper porting yet, but I can't help but do a bit of recon ahead of time. During reverse engineering and research, you always come across curious tidbits. I'll be posting these on Patreon for patrons at or above the Basic Backer tier. First one's free :-) (don't worry, no serious important research findings will be patron-exclusive).

Modern CPUs always have a pile of registers to enable/disable features or configure things. These are often used to tweak low-level plat...

Stage 1 clear!

I can't believe we hit the kick-off goal overnight. My most sincere thanks to everyone for your support - I'm really looking forward to making this a reality!

The initial goal is a bare minimum to be able to put enough time into this to make it worthwhile, but I can't call this a full-time job yet, so please continue to support the project. Every little bit counts! Support not only allows me to dedicate more and more of my time to this, but also to purchase hardware for testing and to s...

Hello, world!

Thank you so much for dropping by! I hope I can get the support to make this project a reality.

I'm currently tying up other work and projects, so I expect to begin work on this port in January, if we reach the $4k goal by then. If we do reach the goal ahead of time, I'll order an M1 Mac Mini so I have that on hand as soon as possible.

Currently, my main workstation is a Late 2015 iMac Retina 5K, which does have a couple small warts in Linux support, so I might spend some time add...