The Asahi Linux project published a new blog post outlining recent development efforts in getting Apple Silicon hardware working with their downstream Linux distribution. There is ongoing work on bringing up Apple M3 support, fixing boot support for macOS 27 beta systems, Apple Video Decoder (AVD) support progress, and more.

A few weeks ago was news that the macOS 27 beta broke the ability to boot Asahi Linux. That issue was tracked down to the Apple macOS installer setting some APFS file-system metadata to set a flag indicating that a volume is bootable. On macOS until now, that flag wasn't necessary but is now enforced with macOS 27. Asahi Linux thus became unbootable without any data loss, but now a fix is being deployed in the Asahi installer so it will properly set that bootable flag in the metadata.

The Asahi Linux news post also reminds users not to try macOS beta releases due to issues such as that booting issue or incompatibilities with system firmware and more.

With the downstream Apple M3 code in Asaho Linux, they also have more common functionality now working for M3-class Macs. Progress is being made across supporting all the core components but "we still have a ways to go before we can start enabling Asahi Installer support for these machines, but progress is rapid so watch this space!" As noted in prior Phoronix news, with Linux 7.2 there is initial M3 boot support but it will take longer before all these M3 support additions are upstreamed to the mainline kernel.

Thanks to a new Asahi Linux contributor, there has also been progress on supporting the Apple Video Decoder (AVD) by coming up with a custom firmware solution. New developer "sofus" has been working on V4L2 support while ultimately this work will also be important for VA-API and/or Vulkan Video as well in the future.

Asahi Linux also published a big update to their m1n1 bootloader that now makes use of Rust for its stage two builds.

More details on this latest Asahi Linux work can be found via the progress report.