> 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!
> This is quite limiting, as it forces PipeWire to waste CPU cycles (and therefore battery life) on resampling audio streams that are not either 48 or 96 kHz.
So the Asahi team thinks that only supporting 48 or 96 kHz wastes battery life by forcing the software to resample audio streams. But why does Apple still do this? Presumably Apple has a very high commitment to save power and increase battery life.
https://github.com/hasenbanck/resampler#quality-analysis
This is presumably what Apple does. You kind of have to anyway or you have the stupid situation Linux used to have where only one app could play audio at a time.
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.
That’s a big reason why progress slowed recently because they were focusing on reducing their diff count.
A lot of stuff has landed in the mainline kernel, but Asahi is how they keep experimenting on new functionality.
Yes, but also no? Because I think a reasonable argument can be made that ARM Macs are like game consoles with a more rapid generation: yes there are changes between each generation, but then you've got millions of units which are good for a very long time that are all near identical. Apple definitely is not changing everything between gens at all, work they've done for M1 has been plenty useful since. And support stretches awhile. The final M3 generation chip only came out about a year ago (the M3 Ultra for the Mac Studio was March 2025).
So sure there's ongoing effort needed for newer systems, and that may require ongoing RE more then typical. I don't want to brush aside the effort there at all. But at the same time there doesn't seem to be the same long tail of hardware variations and dozens to hundreds of players doing their own little tweaks either. Aside from memory and storage, every single Mac of a given SoC is the same so each time one gets covered they all get covered and are a stable experience. It's definitely a different thing then developing for PCs, and I definitely wish there was and support serious legal backing for no rug pulls being allowed, ever. Hardware owners should always have access to the root of trust if they want it. But that aside, I don't think their efforts are wrong or somehow wasted just because each new generation might need some new work. That doesn't appear from the outside to be intractable, and fact is the pace of hardware change for computers has slowed and continues to slow. A system from many years ago can still be very good for most tasks... so long as the OS can still be updated and work. Apple themselves seem more then limiting factor there, whereas Linux shines in long term support.
But that would probably result in burn out from the crazily talented dev team :P
X86 can also be a moving target now; with Windows's driver autodiscovery mechanisms, manufacturers that don't care about Linux could still make people's life hell.
LOL
If anything Apple is infamous for keeping around hardware blocks for as long as they can. IIRC the serial port driver for everything Apple ARM dates back to the very first generations of iPods.
Of course Apple will remain a moving target, but they are orders of magnitude more stable than everyone else in the non-x86 universe.
In contrast, Asahi is specifically doing all the challenging RE work that typically gets passed over in favor of flashy headlines. If anyone can get to 95%, it's them.
[0] Prior to the M1 Mac, Apple did not allow anyone but themselves to load EL2 code. The ability to load other OSes on Apple Silicon Macs is, strangely enough, an allowed use-case. Prior to this we had to rely on once-in-a-decade bootrom security bugs.
They do try to upstream and eventually just have Linux natively support Apple Silicon!
What does this mean? Hardware support is rarely developed inside these organizations; what makes it seem like these groups would be a good home for this effort?
It makes sense to have a group of experts in a field (Apple hardware/firmware) contribute patches upstream, which is the exact system here. And Asahi have done an above and beyond job also maintaining their installation framework while carefully moving changes upstream as well.
Doing so would enabled mainstream distributions to provide maintainable M-series builds, with all that entails in terms of stability, enabling choice, maintenance or security fixes.
The whole fork + dedicated distribution made sense at the start of the project since it provided a playground for quickly iterating and experimenting (which is a no-no to do directly in the mainline kernel or in a major distribution).
But Asahi is still the only Linux on Silicon option after all these years, which is a bit worrisome. Asahi should have been a cool but temporary initiative.
At some point, the project will lose momentum and for its accomplishments to last, it should be merged into the general effort, i.e. drivers maintained directly in the Linux kernel, and the userland stuff made to be easily packaged and shipped by mainstream distributions.
i would genuinely advise anyone thinking about seriously using asahi to consider another machine for uptime and stability
I am rooting for someone to do something from the ground up in Europe. Maybe it’s gonna take someone that’s still in junior high, high school, or college who doesn’t know any better and is open towards breaking out of the boundaries.
The only way to get the battery life Framework advertised is on Windows' 'Ultra Efficiency' mode which cuts CPU performance by 25-50%, lowers brightness by 30% and deprioritizes everything in the background to such an extreme that responsiveness of those is measured in seconds.
It is not comparable at all to M-series or Snapdragon laptops happily chugging along at full capability and getting (compared to AMD / Intel) stellar battery life.
Of course, currently Asahi only supports up to M2, so if you really want Linux, the Panther Lake should still outperform most of the 4 year old M2 devices. It remains to be seen which of the following can come sooner:
* new faster chips come out that support Linux
* Asahi finally supports M5
Right now it seems that the former is more likely to be true. But we shall see.
Don't get me wrong. I do really enjoy my FW but the mac hardware is still number one for me. I'd really love is an ARM based FW. Though if I could wave a magic wand it would be mac hardware running pure linux with no caveats. I really love seeing what Asahi is building
My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
My windows days were plagued with battery issues.
I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on NixOS when I wanted to try pipewire instead of pulse.
> feel like most Linux ricers wises for a MacOS-like experience
I've put together a Hackintosh once, tried for a few weeks as the daily driver. Aside from being able to use tools that dealt with real-time audio processing, there was nothing else I wanted to copy or bring to my Linux system. It cemented my opinion that most software developers that keep touting the "superiority of MacOS" never gave a fair shot at Linux on decent hardware and were just rationalizing their prior choice.
Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux.
Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
MacOS is sometimes so weird and inconsistent that it's hard to tell whether it's a bug of Apple usual's "you are not smart/cool-enough to understand" kind of feature.
Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years.
If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them.
So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out.
Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow.
Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover.
My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation.
I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip.
And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
Definitely good to have the option, but you'll most likely never get quite the same performance or battery life on linux
Linux GUIs are _fine enough_ though the jank is still present. The good news is they will get better with more users entering the chat.
The thing to note is that, we don't want to confuse "it's not as good right now" with "It's bad so I will never use it" because that signals a lack of interest.
There is a non-zero chance that Apple could be compelled to support it if enough people express interest (historically, they have with bootcamp).
Competition is good, even if the competition is bad right now. We must encourage it.
Works like rocm seem so close. But you need either the pre-compiled packages or 2+ year old Ubuntu to compile them. https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477
Sad because I really want the better One drive integration that Ubuntu 24+ comes with.
All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.
Apple documents lots of things the genius bar won't help with. For example, Apple provides instructions for compiling custom builds of the XNU kernel. However, if you replace the stock kernel and your Mac kernel panics, the genius bar isn't going to help you. (Maybe they'd help you wipe the computer and restore everything to stock, but I imagine they'd do that if a Linux user walked in too, even today.)
I suspect Apple hasn't shared documentation because it would take time to prepare for external release (legal stuff, plus the need to avoid leaking future products). What I don't understand is why Apple hasn't made an engineer available to talk on the phone for a couple of hours a month. This would amount to a rounding error in their budget.
What do you mean by needed? A lock-in is more profitable so is needed to maximise profits.
You can't lock-in Linux users because vast majority of them won't switch to macOS and ecosystem at large. This is simply a currently untapped market they could easily almost entirely own if they wanted to. With growing Linux popularity, extra 3-4% of the laptop market share is nothing they can ignore in front of shareholders.
untrue. There are no obligations from other hardware vendors, yet you can sometimes get good drivers from them, or at least specs. I think Apple indeed want their hardware to fade out to enforce buying another. Imagine that 20% of your returning customers no longer return after 3-5 years of planned obsolence
A 1-3% of the market out of the 5% that Linux already is, is little to no monetary benefit?
Apple's MO is that it's their baby. End of. They don't do open. Their compiler is closed source, and so on.
The laptop has various pieces of hardware in it and corresponding drivers in macOS to make them tick. Did we buy the hardware and the drivers as an inseparable package, or should we be provided with the manual to make one component work when the other breaks, be that either third party trackpads or third party (Linux) drivers.
Apple might argue that drivers, unlike gears or motors, will never wear down and fail. They won’t need repairing so you don’t get to know how they work. Does right to repair only apply to products that could ever need repairing? Does it also extend to knowing how your purchased product is built so that you could repair it?
Maybe we’ll see a test case some day when a cosmic ray blows out /System/Trackpad.kext and a litigant applies to a court for the documentation to repair their laptop — to write their own driver!
(Or vice versa: a manufacturer of coffee grinders arguing in court that they are exempt from right-to-repair because they repair their machines for free at their Genius Espresso Bar.)
Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?
But the US still doesn't have the right to repair hardware, haha.
I hope the EU is listening. They won't get far with their sovereign software push if hardware cannot be used. Even on the Android side, you can't write an alternative to Android because all of the hardware has locked bootloaders and hidden drivers. Good luck reverse engineering the hardware/drivers on a Samsung Galaxy - let alone an iPhone or MacBook.
Important context to understand why.
There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them.
Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
> We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
My dear friend I thought I was alone on this hill. It brings a tear to my eye, to learn I will not die alone.
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.
Ok typical X/Wayland setups, Cmd is already the main modifier for DE features, while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.
There would be a lot of weird overlap with changing that.
DE features don't matter at all outside of cmd-tab and whatever the equivalent of spotlight is. The application level is the main modifier, and changing them all to cmd is essentially impossible at this point. A detail Haiku got just about perfect, I think.
Either way, ctrl as a gui modifier is a dealbreaker for me. It also breaks the use of readline keybindings for text entry.
But every attempt of mine to make Linux shortcuts Mac-like has had too many sharp edges to be useable. Toshy didn’t seem to work well with Wayland and felt heavy. Probably the best so far I’ve found has been keyd and custom configs for your most used apps.
A community effort might get us there. Distribute the hours of tinkering across many passionate users instead of everyone doing it in a vacuum.
> finding their way into the Asahi kernel tree are patches to enable more hardware on M3 machines. This includes support for PCIe, MacBook keyboards and trackpads support, the SMC-based RTC and reboot controller, and the NVMe controller, courtesy once again of Michael Reeves and Alyssa Milburn. This brings Linux support for the M3 up to roughly the same level as the first Asahi Linux alpha for M1!
either Asahi gets there from the software side or Framework gets there from the hardware side
Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!
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... :-/
1: https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=39143#p3...
I still want to run it on an M3 MBP so it's nice to hear progress on that is happening.
Intelligence comes in many forms. This decision is one of them.
When is Asahi likely to be viable as a daily OS?
Now there are things I can't get with Linux that I value with macOS. The integration with the phone is just not possible if am running Linux. The power management and convenient things like Apple Music, too.
I was disgusted to see Tim Cook abase himself before Trump and spent a while researching alternative phones. I did not find anything that looked like a serious option. There are things I need that are only available for iPhone or Android, it's become table stakes for life nowadays. My E-car charger required an app to function, for instance.
I admire people who "vote with their wallet" and/or suffer inconvenience for their ideals. But I am not going to install Linux (or OpenBSD) on my M1 Macbook pro. It's too essential for me the way it is.
For the record, I pour a lot of time into my 2014 macbook running arch and a thinkpad running OpenBSD, and keep an arch server/desktop running pretty much 24/7. I spend tons of time trying to find/devise things on Linux to match things I use that are closed-source/apple only.
Hats off to people who can program at the level required to make this happen. It's beyond me. And also to those trying to make Pine Phone etc a realistic option. I think that's the most important free software battleground now.
am I just a smooth brained dumb dumb that has drunk the koolaid? perhaps. but I don't lose sleep on it and am not tinkering with hardware, or software anymore, I just get stuff done now.
I mean, if you only use laptops that are explicitly unsupported by the Linux kernel then I could see what gave you that impression.
Well that's a weird choice of systems programming language.
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/e0...
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
They do currently ban LLM-assisted submissions. To be honest, even if LLMs are technically capable of writing code that assists the project, this at least helps keeps the 'floodgate' closed for certain low-quality PRs that other open-source projects are getting.
