Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0

While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical.

I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.

These kinds of reverse engineering projects are extremely challenging. With skills & field knowledge, it's "easy" to get to "80%" and have something useful for you and the most dedicated users. But reaching the "95%" required for a polished & general public ready experience needs nearly as much effort, often on tedious and time consuming tidbits.

>.. macOS only ever programs CS42L84 to operate at either 48 or 96 kHz, we could only add support for those two sample rates to the Linux driver ..

> However, CS42L42 supports all the other common sample rates, and while the register layout and programming sequence is different, the actual values programmed in for 48 and 96 kHz are the same across both chips. What would happen if we simply took the values for all other sample rates from the CS42L42 datasheet and added those to the CS42L84 driver? As it turns out, you get support for those sample rates!

> The patch to enable hardware support for 44.1, 88.2, 176.4 and 192 kHz sample rates on both the input and output of the headphone jack was submitted directly upstream, and has been merged for 7.1. We also backported this to Asahi kernel 6.19.9, allowing users to take advantage of this immediately.

Nice bit of chip sleuthing and reverse engineering from the Asahi team!

I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tire fire with endless bugs and churn between versions.

When I think about it, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't want to help this effort and just provide all the documentation.

All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.

Really hope that by the time all my M4 Macs are no longer updated by Apple I can just switch to Asahi and get a 1:1 compatible OS in terms of supporting all the hardware my Macs come with.

"Amaze, amaze, amaze!"

I wonder if there would be interest in an Asahi Remix spin focused on a more Mac-like out-of-the-box experience: cmd as the main modifier key, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, theming, gestures, etc.

Of course, you can tweak any distro however you want, but I think a curated default experience is a different thing.

While I love Asahi as such and am really blown away by the effort, my setup requires an encrypted ZFS root file system, which is unreasonably hard to achieve with a Mac.

The fact, that there has to be a macOS partition for maintenance ruling out ZFSBootMenu somehow is very unfortunate - but I've accepted it.

Maybe the new Framework 13 Pro will be at least in the region of an alternative... :-/

These kind of project reports showing consistent breakthroughs and clearly a finger on the pulse of what users are encountering as pain points are a good indication that the Asahi team are real pros :)

Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!

M3 support nearly at alpha is fantastic news, and I'm really looking forward to M4 in the future. I am not looking forward to whatever Apple has planned this year for macOS, or next.

Is anybody running Linux headlessly on the m4 mac minis successfully? I'm seeing them flying around used now at tempting prices...

Fascinating project like always. Thank you Asahi team!

Genuine question: can't LLMs be used to accelerate this project?

I run Asahi (the previous release) on an M2 Air and it works great except for high power drain when sleeping.

I still want to run it on an M3 MBP so it's nice to hear progress on that is happening.

Does anyone knows if it runs on M4 Mac machines?

Is there an equivalent of this for iphones so we can give them a second life?

[dead]

I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.

[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/e0...