The Asahi Linux project is changing its license from MIT to GPL due to exploitation of their work.

The developers of the Asahi Linux project, which is working on porting Linux to Mac computers with Apple Silicon ARM chips, have announced a shift from using the permissive MIT license to the copyleft GPLv2+ license. This decision was made due to attempts to appropriate their work for selfish purposes. Some unscrupulous manufacturers have been abusing the rights granted by the MIT license and borrowing Asahi's developments to undermine the original project and aggressively monetize Linux on systems with Apple Silicon chips.

In some cases, creators of commercial clones have copied still-raw code from personal forks of the Asahi developers, whose work is unfinished, and have published derivative works without mentioning authorship or rewriting the code using AI tools to hide the borrowing of code from another project. The MIT license allows such manipulations and does not protect against misappropriation of others' work.

Initially, the Asahi project chose the MIT license to support and attract contributions from developers in BSD systems and other free operating systems, but in today's realities, the project finds itself defenseless against unscrupulous usage. Notably, in 2002, the Wine project encountered a similar situation, which was forced to change its license from MIT to LGPL to counter the emergence of proprietary forks, protect the ecosystem from fragmentation, and encourage the contribution of changes back to the main project.

In addition to announcing the license change, the Asahi Linux project reported on the work accomplished over the past few months. Among the achievements:

• Drivers for macaudio (sound subsystem) and avd (Apple Video Decoder) have been submitted for inclusion in the main kernel, with patches implementing them including approximately 3100 and 13000 lines of code, respectively. Basic DeviceTree descriptions have been added for the M4 Pro, M4 Max, and M5 devices. When possible, Asahi developers have begun applying an upstream-first strategy, where changes are initially developed in the main kernel. This strategy has been applied for the development of TI USB-PD, SPMI, and Thunderbolt drivers.
• Support for M3 chips has been stabilized and removed from experimental development status. Compared to the previous report, support for the display controller (DCP) has been implemented, which has improved performance, extended battery life, enabled sleep mode, and added the ability to use the area around the 'notch' with the camera on MacBook screens.
• The issue with reverse engineering M5 chips has been resolved, where mini-applications started to be used in isolated enclaves managed by the Secure Kernel microkernel, employed for tasks such as indicating camera activation. It was possible to run three virtual machines simultaneously under the m1n1 boot loader for Secure Kernel, enclaves, and macOS with SPTM.
• Reverse engineering of M3 GPU chips is advancing, which differ significantly from M1 and M2. GPU initialization has been implemented in the m1n1 boot loader, and support for rendering basic primitives has been added.
• Patches have been sent to include support for the Thunderbolt controller in the Linux kernel, which is different from Intel controllers and unusually tied to the power management module (PMGR). Currently, only USB3, XDomain, and network passthrough over Thunderbolt are supported (PCIe and DisplayPort passthrough do not work).
• The project to run Windows games without a virtual machine is ongoing. The issue arose because Windows games built for x86 architecture expect 4K memory pages, while Apple systems use 16K page sizes. To circumvent the page size mismatch, a the virtual machine Linux kernel compiled with a different memory page size was launched, which led to a performance decrease of about 20% in games.

  To work around this limitation, Asahi developers ported the P3S (Per Process Page Size) functionality present in Android kernels that allows changing page sizes based on individual processes. Using this capability, it became possible to run games like Star Wars Battlefront, Wolfenstein: The New Order, GTA IV, and Fallout: New Vegas without a virtual machine.

• The implementation of the spatial audio filter (beamformer) for MacBook microphones has been optimized using SIMD instructions, which nearly doubled sound processing speed and reduced CPU load.

Source: opennet.ru