The Asahi project, which aims to port Linux to run on Mac computers equipped with the Apple M1 (Apple Silicon) ARM chip, has unveiled the first alpha release of the reference distribution, allowing anyone to see the project's current state of development. The distribution kit supports installation on devices with M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max. It is noted that the assemblies are not yet ready for widespread use by ordinary users, but are already suitable for initial familiarization by developers and advanced users.
Asahi Linux is based on the Arch Linux package base, includes a traditional software suite and comes with the KDE Plasma desktop. The distribution is built using the regular Arch Linux repositories, and all specific changes, such as the kernel, installer, bootloader, auxiliary scripts and environment settings, are moved to a separate repository. At the same time, the project is aimed at ensuring that Linux works on Apple M1 systems in a general way and is ready to contribute to the emergence of such support in any distributions.
To install the distribution, a shell script was prepared that is launched from macOS (βcurl https://alx.sh | shβ), which, depending on the chosen filling, downloads from 700MB to 4GB of data and forms a Linux environment that can be used in parallel with the existing one. macOS system. Installation requires at least 53 GB of free disk space (15 GB for a Linux distribution and 38 GB for the correct installation of macOS updates). Installing Asahi Linux does not break the existing macOS environment except for reducing the size of the disk partition used by macOS.
Declared to work properly in Wi-Fi distribution, USB2 (Thunderbolt ports), USB3 (Mac Mini Type A ports), display, NVMe drives, Ethernet, SD card reader, laptop lid switch (lid switch), built-in screen, keyboard, touchpad, keyboard backlight control, CPU frequency switching, battery charge information. M1 systems also have a headphone jack, while HDMI output is available on Mac Mini devices. Among the components, the implementation of support for which is at the final stage and will be available soon, are USB3, built-in speakers and a screen controller (backlight, V-Sync, power management).
Components not yet supported include: GPU graphics acceleration, hardware accelerated video codecs, DisplayPort, camera, Touch Bar, Thunderbolt, HDMI on MacBook, Bluetooth, machine learning accelerator, deep CPU power saving modes. The distribution has all the stock packages from the Arch Linux repositories, but there are some unresolved issues with some applications, mainly due to building the kernel with 16KB memory pages. For example, there are issues with Chromium, Emacs, lvm2, f2fs, and packages that use the jemalloc library (like Rust) or the electron framework (vscode, spotify, etc.). There have been issues with applications using the libunwind and webkitgtk libraries, but fixes have already been generated for them.
The distribution kit can be used without fear of legal problems - Apple normally allows downloading kernels that are not digitally signed on its computers without the need for a jailbreak. The project is completely legal since the port does not use code from macOS and Darwin, and the features of interaction with hardware are determined on the basis of reverse engineering, which is allowed by law in many countries to ensure compatibility.
Source: opennet.ru