How Asahi Linux Got Linux Running on Apple M2 Macs in Just One Month

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In the July 2022 release report, the Asahi team announced that within just 12 hours they got Linux booting on M2 chips with USB, NVMe, battery statistics/control, CPU frequency scaling, and Wi‑Fi working, and a few days later added functional keyboard and trackpad support.

However, the M2 support is still experimental; some hardware remains unsupported. The team advises users to enable expert mode in the installer and be aware of several caveats:

Running Linux on M2 is more experimental than on M1, so bugs are expected; enable expert mode to access installation options.

The keyboard does not work in U‑Boot/GRUB because the driver is missing; use an external USB keyboard for firmware debugging.

Only the 13‑inch M2 MacBook Pro has been tested; the M2 MacBook Air is expected to work but is not officially supported.

The Linux firmware/stub is based on a special macOS 12.4 release; future updates may require upgrading the boot components via macOS to maintain functionality such as GPU and external display support.

Despite remaining issues, the team has made a significant step forward and is working on a prototype GPU driver capable of running real graphics applications and benchmarks, though it is not yet included in the current release.

The team also succeeded in running Asahi Linux on Mac Studio equipped with M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips, noting that the process is not difficult but requires modifications to the bootloader and device tree to handle a SoC with multiple chips.

Asahi Team: Apple Engineers Rarely Make Major Chip Changes

The M2 support was achieved in about a month, much faster than the M1 port, because the team could reuse much of their existing work; Apple’s chip designers often reuse components and avoid major hardware changes unless necessary.

Through reverse engineering and kernel debugging, the Asahi team confirmed that NVMe, USB, and SMC functions work seamlessly on M2 devices.

What Impact Will Linux on Apple Silicon Have?

Since 2020, developer Hector Martin has driven the effort to run Linux on Apple hardware, despite early skepticism from the community and comments from Linus Torvalds about the lack of GPU support on M1.

Asahi Linux now runs on M1 MacBook Air, offering native multiboot support without compromising macOS security features such as FileVault, and even allowing 4K Netflix playback.

Benchmarks show the Asahi Linux Alpha build compiles up to 40% faster than macOS, and the project has already rendered a basic triangle on Apple M1.

The long‑term goal is to enable any Linux distribution—from Ubuntu to ChromeOS Flex—to run on Apple‑silicon Macs without extensive manual work, providing a fallback option for future macOS versions that may drop support for older hardware. OpenBSD has also been ported to Apple silicon.

Source: CSDN