Asahi Linux Runs into Issues with M4 Support
Due to Apple Silicon changes, the Asahi Linux project is at odds with adding support for the M4 chips.
The Asahi Linux project was created to bring Linux to Mac hardware running Apple Silicon. So far, things have been fairly smooth sailing for the project. However, with the M4 chips, things haven't exactly gone as planned.
On Mastodon, Sven Peter had this to say: “Looks like M4 support for Asahi Linux is going be rather painful. We’re still focusing on upstreaming M1/M2 support, but other people have been trying to bring up m1n1 on M4, and it looks like a few things changed.”
What's changed? According to Peter, “When configuring a macho boot object we now get dropped into an environment where Apple’s SPTM is running in GL2 and we are supposed to talk to it from EL2 with MMU already enabled to setup pagetables. This neither works for Linux nor for running XNU under our hypervisor to reverse engineer the new hardware.”
Because the project cannot run XNU under the hypervisor used to reverse engineer the hardware, the project will have to fall back to reverse engineering and kernel auditing or (as Peter brings up) hijacking “XNUs exception handlers and pagetable code and patch the tracing in there.”
This roadblock has made for a serious challenge to getting Asahi Linux working with M4 chips. There's no timetable for when/if M4 will be supported.
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