The community and element team responsible for creating Asahi Linux have released a new update supporting the latest Apple Mac computers powered by the M2 Apple silicon chips. As well as supporting the Mac Studio range of computers and Bluetooth connectivity. “The end result is that existing reference distro users can simply upgrade their packages, reboot, and Bluetooth should just work without any further configuration or changes!”
Asahi Linux M2 Apple Macs
“Ever since Asahi Linux started, one of the most common questions we get asked is “what about the M2?” Indeed, the M1 was only the first step, and Apple aren’t going to stop releasing new chips and machines any time soon. How does this affect the Asahi Linux project? We’ve long held that we don’t expect porting to newer chips to be nearly as much of a challenge as the first time, and that many of the drivers would work unmodified… and the M2 is the first true test of this theory. How did we do?”
“After just a 12-hour bring-up marathon, Linux was booting on the M2 with USB, NVMe, battery stats/control, CPUfreq, WiFi, and more! With a few more days of work, we were able to get the keyboard/trackpad working, bringing it to feature parity with existing systems. After some more integration work, we are proud to announce experimental support for M2 machines in the Asahi Linux installer!”
If you decide to try this on your M2 machine, keep in mind these caveats:
- This is even more experimental than M1 support, so expect bugs. To get the option to install on M2, you need to enable expert mode in the Asahi Linux installer.
- The keyboard won’t work in U-Boot/GRUB. That driver has not been written yet, and we’ve yet to figure out how we want to do the hand-off between U-Boot and Linux. You can use an external USB keyboard if you need to poke around the bootloader shells.
- Only the M2 MacBook Pro 13” is tested. We’ve added completely untested M2 MacBook Air support (because we can), but none of us have one yet! If you do, only try it if you’re feeling very adventurous (and don’t blame us if things go wrong).
- The firmware/stub used for Linux is based on a “special release” macOS 12.4 version that Apple released just for these machines. We are not committing to long-term support for this version just yet, so you may have to go through macOS and the installer to upgrade your boot components (likely to 13.0) in order to get future features such as the GPU and external display output to work (i.e. no “seamless upgrade” with just pacman, but you also won’t have to do a full reinstall). We will decide how to proceed in the future, and add the necessary upgrade mode to the installer when the time comes, if necessary. It is possible we will support 12.4 after all, but no promises.
To learn more about all the latest updates to Asahi Linux and support for the latest M2 Macs jump over to the official website by following the link below.
Source : ALinux : Liliputing
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