Asahi Linux Progress Report Covers Linux 7.3, M3, Thunderbolt and Licensing

Asahi Linux has published its progress report for Linux 7.3, covering upstreaming work, broader hardware support, and project policy changes. The report says M3 support is now generally available, Thunderbolt support has reached users, and the project is beginning to move its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

Upstreaming and hardware support

macaudio and avd are on this cycle's list, with macaudio and Devicetree changes at about 3100 lines and the avd driver and related Devicetree changes at around 13000 lines. Initial Devicetrees are available for M4 Pro, M4 Max, and M5 devices, and changes to the TI USB-PD and SPMI drivers plus initial Thunderbolt support were developed upstream-first where practical.

M3, virtualization and GPU work

M3 support no longer requires the EXPERT flag, and enabling DCP brings performance and battery improvements, sleep support, and a usable area around the notch on MacBooks. m1n1 can now spawn three VMs in EL1, enabling virtualization and reverse engineering of macOS on M4 and M5 series machines. M3 GPU reverse engineering has reached the point where m1n1 can initialize the GPU and draw a triangle.

Thunderbolt and gaming experiments

Thunderbolt support is now shipping downstream, but only USB3, XDomain, and Thunderbolt Networking are supported; PCIe and DisplayPort tunneling are not yet available. Gaming experiments using P3S allowed several Windows games to run outside muvm, though the current approach is hard-coded for 16 KiB hosts and 4 KiB processes and its upstream future is uncertain.

Other updates

SIMD optimizations made the Triforce microphone beamformer almost twice as fast while using less CPU time. Fedora Asahi Remix 45 shipped on the same day as Fedora Linux 45. The project is transitioning repositories to strong copyleft licensing after attempts to exploit its former MIT licensing, and it thanks supporters on OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors.

Sources: asahilinux.org