The Asahi Linux project has reached a major milestone in its years-long effort to run Linux on Apple Silicon. Developer James Calligeros published a progress report covering the Linux 7.2 kernel cycle on August 26, 2026, announcing that official support for the entire M3 Mac lineup is nearly ready for release. The full report is available on the Asahi Linux project blog.
The announcement covers the full M3 generation of Macs, including the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac models that shipped starting in late 2023. For millions of Mac owners running Apple's 2023 chip generation, this represents their first opportunity to install a community-developed Linux operating system on bare metal hardware without relying on virtualization.
The USB Port Controller Problem
The most significant hurdle for M3 support involved Apple's decision to replace the USB-C port controller used on M1 through base M3 machines. The previous generation used a Texas Instruments chip called the CD3217, also known internally as ACE2, which communicated over the well-understood I2C bus. Asahi Linux already had drivers for this chip.
Starting with M3 Pro and M3 Max models, Apple switched to a new component called ACE3 that uses SPMI, the System Power Management Interface, instead. This was a completely different bus standard that required fresh reverse-engineering before Linux could communicate with the chip at all.
Developers known by the project handle names mildsunrise and chaos_princess determined that ACE3 uses essentially the same register layout as ACE2, only wrapped in a different bus interface. Once SPMI support was implemented, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt began working across every M3 Mac model. The project blog documents this work as a straightforward port of existing logic to a new communication layer.
Audio and Webcam Completeness
The M3 audio hardware required a more involved fix. Apple introduced what the team calls a High Frequency decimator for the M3 generation, an audio signal-processing stage that requires a new set of filtering coefficients and a larger initialization sequence than equivalent hardware on M1 and M2 machines. Without the correct coefficients, the microphone driver loads but produces unusable data.
chaos_princess completed the reverse-engineering for M3 audio, and built-in microphones now function on all M3 Macs that have them. Webcam support took a simpler path. The image signal processor hardware changed little from earlier generations, and the M3 Max model simply skipped one initialization message that the driver did not expect to be missing. Adding support for the skipped message completed webcam functionality across the M3 lineup.
Display support is described as almost at feature parity with M1 and M2 systems. The team targets a specific version of Apple's macOS firmware for each hardware generation, with M3 machines targeting the display controller interface found in macOS 14.8.3. An official M3 release is expected in the coming weeks according to the blog post.
M4 and M5 Early Bringup
The report also confirms that early bringup work on M4 and M5 systems is already progressing. These chips introduced a breaking change in Apple's NVMe controller firmware within the macOS 15.x firmware bundle. Yureka and Sven Peter worked together on investigating the changes and implementing them in both the m1n1 bootloader and the Linux kernel driver. NVMe storage now works on both M4 and M5 machines.
PCIe device enumeration is functional, meaning Linux can now detect and identify hardware connected to the bus on these newer chips. Yureka also fixed a crash that occurred when Linux booted with more than one CPU core enabled.
M4 also introduced a new constraint around CPU power management. On M1 through M3, per-core power state behavior can be configured through low-level registers that ARM documentation calls chicken bits. Apple configures and locks these registers in its bootloader starting with M4. This means that issuing a Wait For Interrupt instruction on an M4 core causes it to lose its state entirely and crash. Yureka worked around this by adding a kernel command-line parameter that makes idle loop behavior configurable, including a basic no-operation loop that prevents crashes during early boot before the CPU idle driver loads.
Video Decoding and Power Management
One of the less visible but practically important achievements involves hardware-accelerated video decoding via Apple's Video Decoder block, known as AVD. Developer sofus refined AVD support to the point where H.264, H.265, and VP9 decoding now work reliably on all Asahi-supported machines. M3 and newer hardware additionally supports AV1 decoding.
The project is also making progress on direct scanout, a pipeline where decoded video frames travel directly from the hardware decoder to the display controller, bypassing GPU memory entirely. Asahi developers have wired Interchange framebuffer format support into both the display controller driver and the Mesa graphics stack. The remaining hurdle involves the KDE Plasma compositor, which currently treats Apple's GPU and display controller as separate hardware blocks.
What This Means
Asahi Linux has been porting Linux to Apple Silicon since late 2020, operating entirely through reverse-engineering since Apple does not release hardware documentation for its Mac hardware. The project has grown from a one-person effort by founder Hector Martin into a community project under shared governance following Martin's departure in February 2025.
An official M3 release would extend Linux support on Apple Silicon beyond the M1 and M2 generation, bringing the same bare-metal Linux experience to millions more Mac users. The M4 and M5 work, while not ready for daily use, confirms that the team has a viable path forward for newer hardware as well. Further coverage of the announcement appeared on Linuxiac and Tech Times.
The broader context of Apple Silicon Linux support is worth noting, especially following recent announcements about Apple's Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip. As Apple continues to push the performance envelope with its custom silicon, the Asahi Linux project demonstrates that open-source software can follow along.