Asahi Linux 7.2: Beating Apple's Security to Keep Hypervisor Alive on M4
Progress Linux 7.2 – Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux's 7.2 progress report details a major breakthrough: emulating Apple's Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM) in the m1n1 hypervisor, restoring hypervisor functionality on M4 and newer chips. The team also implemented a UEFI Runtime Service-based PSCI conduit to enable CPU idle power management without EL3, and added support for M3 webcams, microphones, and the new ACE3 USB controller.
If only we knew how both of them worked…
- ksec
>The ARM specification mandates that cores in WFI loops should preserve all state. This is not the default mode on Apple Silicon.
I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happens.
- JLO64
> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices.
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
- owaislone
This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers
- dgunay
I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.
- znpy
> Please stop Thinking Different
Considering how much better m-series CPUs are, i’d say actually keep thinking different.