The developers of Asahi Linux have just released an experimental Linux distribution capable of booting and running on a Mac Studio.
Macs with an Apple Silicon chip can, in principle, only run macOS. In principle only because the team of Asahi Linux developers has already been working for several months on a distribution capable of running on Macs with an M1 processor.
After many hours of work and reverse engineering, they have already released an alpha version of Asahi Linux which partially boots and runs on Mac Mini, Macbook Air and Macbook Pro with M1 processor.
If the operating system starts and can be used, it was not fully functional until now, in particular ignoring certain functions such as Bluetooth. But far from being discouraged, the developers of Asahi Linux, always hard at work to perfect their OS have just published a new version of Asahi Linux. And the news is very good since the distribution not only supports Bluetooth, but it also works on the Mac Studio, and above all, it now supports machines with an M2 chip.
From the Mac Studio M1 Ultra to the M2 chip
In the blog post they published, the developers explain that they immediately looked into support for the M1 Ultra chips as soon as Mac Studio was released. If this did not cause them a major problem, they still had to make some changes, especially at the bootloader level, to get there. Under Asahi Linux, all the Mac Studio peripherals are functional, with the exception of the front USB port on the model with an M1 Max processor. The same goes for the USB type A ports on the other models or for the GPU for which a driver is under development.
To fix the Bluetooth incompatibility problem, one of the team members finally managed to fix the problem quite easily with a bit of reverse engineering. But the highlight of the show is undoubtedly the support for the M2 chips. After a marathon of only 12 hours of development, the Asahi Linux team managed to start the distribution on a machine equipped with an M2 processor.
The icing on the cake, the USB ports, NVMe, battery control and statistics or Wi-Fi, were even perfectly functional. However, it took a few more days of work to get the trackpad working before an experimental version of Asahi Linux was released that supported M2 machines.
Source :
Asahi Linux