Linux is Finally on Apple M1...Kind Of.

[Lightwreather]

Summary

 You can run Linux on Apple M1, but you’ll be missing USB and graphics support.

 

 

Quotes

Quote

According to ARM-based Linux virtualization startup Correlium, now you can - but there’s a bit of a catch. More to show that it’s possible than anything else, Correlium first posted hints of an M1 version of Linux to its Twitter account on January 15th. Correlium CTO Chris Wade then made the beta build the group was using publicly available the following day but warned that it was for “advanced users only” as it didn’t have USB support at the time. Now, the group has pushed a new release that adds AIC, UUART, and SMP support, with Wade promising that the group’s next goal is to add “DART, USB, and maybe PCIE (if time persists).”

 

My thoughts

Well, this is interesting, adds more reason than ever for me to get an M1 mac.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-for-apple-m1-beta

[Spotty]

I'm guessing that's the same Correlium that Apple's currently fighting in court over selling an iOS emulator? I'm sure Apple will love this.

[Spindel]

Missing USB and graphics support is not a big surprise since I guess no one has made Linux drivers for either on the M1 chip. 

 

My take is that getting graphics support will be a big hurdle to getting Linux to run "properly" on M1 macs unless Apple releases documentation on the graphics hardware (which I doubt they will, because why would they). 

[SupaKomputa]

11 minutes ago, Spotty said:

I'm guessing that's the same Correlium that Apple's currently fighting in court over selling an iOS emulator? I'm sure Apple will love this.

IOS emulator is not the same as running another os on mac, which is not againts anything. CMIIW.

An emulator is like ripping the IOS design that violates apple IP.

[Master Disaster]

I'm confused, if it doesn't support USB then how do you install it on a thin & light with no optical drive?

[Neftex]

3 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

IOS emulator is not the same as running another os on mac, which is not againts anything. CMIIW.

An emulator is like ripping the IOS design that violates apple IP.

as the court said ios emulator doesnt have the same use as the real os and the code is original work

[tim0901]

4 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

IOS emulator is not the same as running another os on mac, which is not againts anything. CMIIW.

An emulator is like ripping the IOS design that violates apple IP.

Emulators aren't ripping iOS' design. If it runs iOS, it runs iOS. That's still Apple's software and code. All they're doing is coding the layer between - the ARM to x86-64 execution layer. Which is no different to what Apple has done with Rosetta 2, just the other way around. Rosetta 2 is, at its core, an x86-64-to-ARMv8 emulator.

 

Emulators are perfectly legal - Rosetta 2 wouldn't exist if they weren't. This has been challenged in court many times and every time the same result has been upheld. So long as the company is not distributing iOS software alongside the emulator, then they aren't doing anything wrong.

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

I'm confused, if it doesn't support USB then how do you install it on a thin & light with no optical drive?

PXE boot. 

 

Side note: it hasn't even been a year and we already have app support for non apple silicon apples and Linux sorta runs on it. I was expecting it would take much longer but within 3 years we should have windows, linux, and non native apps running without many bugs. So I guess my fear of Apple products becoming extremely segmented and independent wasn't really true. Sick

[tim0901]

Just now, BuckGup said:

PXE boot. 

 

Side note: it hasn't even been a year and we already have app support for non apple silicon apples and Linux sorta runs on it. I was expecting it would take much longer but within 3 years we should have windows, linux, and non native apps running without many bugs. So I guess my fear of Apple products becoming extremely segmented and independent wasn't really true. Sick

I wouldn't be so sure. Creating a GPU driver for this thing is going to be practically impossible. Given the GPU is a completely custom unit, it's not as simple as recompiling another GPU driver for the correct ARM revision. You'd need the official documentation from Apple outlining how the architecture works - a document that they aren't particularly interested in sharing. So while you might get basic things running, you're not going to be playing games anytime soon.

 

In other news, it now has USB support:

But, as he clarifies below, it's still software rendering only.

[Master Disaster]

4 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

IOS emulator is not the same as running another os on mac, which is not againts anything. CMIIW.

An emulator is like ripping the IOS design that violates apple IP.

Emulators are not ripping off anything as long as they contain no Apple copyrighted code within the binary and they do not distribute any ROMs or operating systems with the binary.

 

30 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

Emulators aren't ripping iOS' design. If it runs iOS, it runs iOS. That's still Apple's software and code. All they're doing is coding the layer between - the ARM to x86-64 execution layer. Which is no different to what Apple has done with Rosetta 2, just the other way around. Rosetta 2 is, at its core, an x86-64-to-ARMv8 emulator.

 

Emulators are perfectly legal - Rosetta 2 wouldn't exist if they weren't. This has been challenged in court many times and every time the same result has been upheld. So long as the company is not distributing iOS software alongside the emulator, then they aren't doing anything wrong.

They 100% are not, the web software downloads the original file directly from Apples servers in exactly the same way an iPad recovery would.

 

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

I'm guessing that's the same Correlium that Apple's currently fighting in court over selling an iOS emulator? I'm sure Apple will love this.

Apple lost the case in December, the judge threw it out with prejudice.

 

24 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

PXE boot.

I've never seen an Apple device support PXE, in fact Apple devices don't even have firmware interfaces at all. The only boot options are forced removable, target disk mode and single user mode (verbose terminal only).

 

Instead of being a derp I could have thought about it, they're probably running it on their emulator

 

[jagdtigger]

10 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

Creating a GPU driver for this thing is going to be practically impossible

Well macos is bsd at its core, if i had to bet id say they are going to dismantle the macos driver and they will try to figure out the silicon based on that.

[BuckGup]

14 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

I wouldn't be so sure. Creating a GPU driver for this thing is going to be practically impossible. Given the GPU is a completely custom unit, it's not as simple as recompiling another GPU driver for the correct ARM revision. You'd need the official documentation from Apple outlining how the architecture works - a document that they aren't particularly interested in sharing. So while you might get basic things running, you're not going to be playing games anytime soon.

 

In other news, it now has USB support:

But, as he clarifies below, it's still software rendering only.

Interesting, I wonder if external GPU support will be the only way to get GPU support

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Well macos is bsd at its core, if i had to bet id say they are going to dismantle the macos driver and they will try to figure out the silicon based on that.

It was when Jobs created NextStep, these days it contains a mix of components from Mach and BSD with some proprietary modules written by Apple.

[Mark Kaine]

It's PS3 Linux all over again! 

 

can't wait for my $2.56 compensation. even though I never bought an apple product, I actually lost the receipt!

 

2 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

I'm confused, if it doesn't support USB then how do you install it on a thin & light with no optical drive?

At the time you install it it's still an apple OS that has USB support, but as soon you reboot into Linux you'll lose that (and something completely irrelevant LIKE PCIE / GPU SUPPORT!!!) 

 

I guess. 

[tim0901]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

Well macos is bsd at its core, if i had to bet id say they are going to dismantle the macos driver and they will try to figure out the silicon based on that.

Possible, but that'll be incredibly slow to do. I would be surprised if they could reverse engineer the M1 GPU before the M2 releases, let alone maintain it for years to come.

[jagdtigger]

3 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

Possible, but that'll be incredibly slow to do. I would be surprised if they could reverse engineer the M1 GPU before the M2 releases, let alone maintain it for years to come.

It cant be that much worse than getting macos to boot on non-mac HW .

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, tim0901 said:

i wouldn't be so sure. Creating a GPU driver for this thing is going to be practically impossible.

Well not impossible, there are open source NVidia drivers on linux, apples GPUs are just as undocumented as nvidia's are. It is worth noting that the 2D graphics api being used to render that linux desktop is using the gpu, just in a legacy mode. Also the GPU is not entirely novel, it is based on the Imagination Technologies GPUs (that are documented a lot better than say an nvidia GPU).  Reverse engining of the GPU and its instruction set has already started. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html https://github.com/AsahiLinux/gpu
 

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

Interesting, I wonder if external GPU support will be the only way to get GPU support

Would require getting PCIe over USB-4 working on linux first... not even sure if that is supported on any other platform yet, if that came to M1 linux before it came to others hardware that would be incredible but then again these people seem to be very skilled.

 

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

Well macos is bsd at its core, if i had to bet id say they are going to dismantle the macos driver and they will try to figure out the silicon based on that.

The driver is closed source, so they could (and are already see above) reverse engining the output of it to work out how it works. But you have a point if they wanted once could consider them adding a `shim` layer in the linux kernel that adds the needed macOS kernel endpoints that the binary driver uses and then let users somehow copy that driver over (they would not be able to distribute it since it is not part of the open source bundle) but they could make changes needed to make it possible to run the macOS driver on linux.. then using something like mkVulkan expose vulkan on linux, however that is getting a little bit close to copy-write violations and while apple is not like Sony or Nintendo if you start to copy close sorce bits out of the OS then your going to get hit by legal.

The other (legal) option once they get KVM to work in linux is to fire up a full macOS install (from the partition it is already installed on so no copy issues) and then use that to interface with the GPU...
 

 

[PlayStation 2]

If there's a will, there's a way when it comes to Linux.

[hishnash]

4 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

It cant be that much worse than getting macos to boot on non-mac HW .

No booting macOS on other hardware is simpler, since in many cases if you need a driver you can find a linux or BSD open source one modify it (a very small amount commonly if its from the BSD space at least) compile and add it to the set of kernel drivers that boots.
 

9 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

I would be surprised if they could reverse engineer the M1 GPU before the M2 releases, let alone maintain it for years to come.

Depends people maintain the nvidia open source driver, if apple make as big a splash in the laptop space as it looks they are making then it is very possible in 3 years time there might be more devices with M* GPUs being sold the Nvidia GPUs.  

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, hishnash said:

however that is getting a little bit close to copy-write violations

They would have to write their own code from scratch on linux minus the driver. If they dont provide that they are in the clear IMO.

[hishnash]

8 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

They would have to write their own code from scratch on linux minus the driver. If they dont provide that they are in the clear IMO.

Yer the copywrite would only happen if they copy in a binary bundles from macOS. Luckily it turns out all the system firmware is loaded by the iBoot bootloader (that is provided by apple) before the bootloader boots linux so the linux team do not need to copy in any of the firmware, this includes the GPU firmware since the iBoot UI is fully metal accelerated. 

 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, BuckGup said:

PXE boot. 

 

Side note: it hasn't even been a year and we already have app support for non apple silicon apples and Linux sorta runs on it. I was expecting it would take much longer but within 3 years we should have windows, linux, and non native apps running without many bugs. So I guess my fear of Apple products becoming extremely segmented and independent wasn't really true. Sick

That's actually not how it's done. It uses the macos kernel-extension tool

Quote

To use macho: start your mac in 1TR (hold power button during boot, select Options)
and run the following commands:

  bputil -n -k -c -a -s
  csrutil disable
  csrutil authenticated-root disable

The above commands need to be run only once.

To install an image:

  kmutil configure-boot -c test.macho -v /Volumes/Macintosh HD/

To revert back to original Mac OS boot:

  bputil -n pol change

So you have to have the file already on the machine.

 

[igormp]

There are currently 2 different projects going on to bring Linux to the M1: the one reported on the OP, and the one being done by marcan, Asahi Linux.

 

Even though the people at Corellium managed to get it up and running first, I wonder if it's all legal (as in, not using any proprietary blob), and if will be good enough to land into the upstream. There was a large discussion about that on twitter between marcan and Corellium's CTO lol

 

Anyway, while I do hope that they manage to get everything in an upstreamable way without any fuss, I have higher hopes for Asahi linux since it's being done in the open from the beginning.

[tim0901]

3 hours ago, igormp said:

There are currently 2 different projects going on to bring Linux to the M1: the one reported on the OP, and the one being done by marcan, Asahi Linux.

 

Even though the people at Corellium managed to get it up and running first, I wonder if it's all legal (as in, not using any proprietary blob), and if will be good enough to land into the upstream. There was a large discussion about that on twitter between marcan and Corellium's CTO lol

 

Anyway, while I do hope that they manage to get everything in an upstreamable way without any fuss, I have higher hopes for Asahi linux since it's being done in the open from the beginning.

Personally I doubt that the people at Corellium actually have any plans to bring the project to completion.

 

Back in March they announced Project Sandcastle, supposedly a way to use Android on an iPhone. But as you can see on their GitHub, they didn't bother updating it after only a few days, despite it not being remotely finished:

Spoiler

 

[Lightwreather]

9 hours ago, tim0901 said:

Personally I doubt that the people at Corellium actually have any plans to bring the project to completion.

 

Back in March they announced Project Sandcastle, supposedly a way to use Android on an iPhone. But as you can see on their GitHub, they didn't bother updating it after only a few days, despite it not being remotely finished:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

well that's interesting