Fedora Asahi Remix 39 released as the new Asahi Linux flagship distribution

[Conan Kudo]

Summary

The Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project have announced the release of Fedora Asahi Remix 39, the new flagship Linux distribution for Apple Silicon Macs, supporting the majority of M1 and M2 Macs.

 

Quotes

Quote

Based on Fedora Linux 39, the Remix provides a polished experience on Apple Silicon Macs with extensive platform and device support. All MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Studio and iMac systems with M1 and M2 chips are supported. See the feature matrix on the Asahi Linux website for specifics about individual systems.

Quote

Fedora Asahi also ships with non-conformant OpenGL 3.3 support including GPU-accelerated geometry shaders and transform feedback, as well as the world’s first and only certified conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for Apple Silicon. High-quality audio is fully supported out of the box, thanks to our novel integrated DSP solution. This provides balanced sound with full loudness and dynamic range, without compromising battery life.

My thoughts

In three short years, the vast majority of Apple Silicon Macs have gone from being completely unable to run Linux to having a distribution with a polished experience that many x86 machines would love to have. It's likely to be a game-changer in the sense of raising the bar for what is expected for a high quality desktop Linux experience on every platform, and much of the work done for Fedora Asahi Remix paves the way for a much more useful desktop Linux experience on ARM with other machines in the future (such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s).

 

Sources

• Fedora Asahi Remix announcement on Fedora Magazine
• Fedora Asahi Remix landing page on Asahi Linux website
• Fedora Project website
• Fedora Asahi Remix website

[E-waste]

This is a great way to keep computers out of recycling facilities and landfills when Apple stops issuing compatible software updates. 

 

I wonder how arm compatibility works and if programs will need to be recompiled to be used by various arm revisions, like v7 and v8.  It is confusing to me, and it also seems that RISC-v will still also have this issue as well.

 

So is arm v1 supported, or what is the oldest arm revision hardware that is supported by this Linux system?  Also, what is the oldest arm revision supported by the Linux kernel, and is it older than x86_64 on it's first implementation, in the mid 2000s?

[igormp]

33 minutes ago, E-waste said:

I wonder how arm compatibility works and if programs will need to be recompiled to be used by various arm revisions

Depends on the CPU.

33 minutes ago, E-waste said:

like v7 and v8

ARMv8 supports both aarch32 and aarch64. It's up to the CPU to decide which mode it supports, there are some CPUs which are aarch64 only, so no v7 support at all.

35 minutes ago, E-waste said:

It is confusing to me, and it also seems that RISC-v will still also have this issue as well.

Risc is more a matter of extensions. Think AVX/SSE and other similar stuff, but there's only one ISA, unlike ARM.

35 minutes ago, E-waste said:

So is arm v1 supported,

no

36 minutes ago, E-waste said:

or what is the oldest arm revision hardware that is supported by this Linux system?

This linux system was built exclusively for the Mx chips, it won't work in any other ARM chip.

 

36 minutes ago, E-waste said:

Also, what is the oldest arm revision supported by the Linux kernel, and is it older than x86_64 on it's first implementation, in the mid 2000s?

What do you consider "support" to be? You can compile the linux kernel for any target which your compiler has support for.

Almost no distroes still give off-the-shelf support for armv6 (think the first raspberry), so it's usually ARMv7 and up.

Also, it's not only a matter of supporting the ISA itself, but rather the device since you need to build stuff specifically for each board considering its peripherals.

 

With that said, debian has ARMv5 support still, it's from 2001 or so iirc, their wiki page has lots of useful info: 

https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort

[E-waste]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Almost no distroes still give off-the-shelf support for armv6 (think the first raspberry), so it's usually ARMv7 and up.

Also, it's not only a matter of supporting the ISA itself, but rather the device since you need to build stuff specifically for each board considering its peripherals.

So, ARMv 5  is from 2001 and the first Pi is from 2012, about the same age of the CPU in my computer.

 

I have a 64-bit cpu from an impressive 2005, I thought 64-bit didn't catch on until around 2007/2008.  And I can still run updated Linux just fine, over 18 years later, but I can't run an arm chip with v6 from 2012 without manual compilation of the Linux kernel.

 

So, will risc-v make this situation better, without needing compilation for new chip designs?

[igormp]

35 minutes ago, E-waste said:

So, will risc-v make this situation better

No, since ISA support has nothing to do with actual hardware support.

36 minutes ago, E-waste said:

but I can't run an arm chip with v6 from 2012 without manual compilation of the Linux kernel.

As I said, debian does give support to it. It's more a matter of your distro of choice supporting this combo or not. Other distroes do not support this kind of stuff.

[E-waste]

@igormp

How much faster, having your CPU at 4.2 Ghz is your pc, compared to the extra amount of power required for the higher voltage?  A good test for this is booting virtual machines, and framerates in a game.  My cpu only goes up to 3.7 Ghz, and 3.2 base but I have it clocked down manually to 800 Mhz, and have now manually set the max cpu freq to the lowest allowed by the cpu firmware.  For simple tasks around the desktop, there is not at all any noticable performance delta.  Since I still use spinning disks, the cpu is not the main factor in program performance.

[igormp]

29 minutes ago, E-waste said:

@igormp

How much faster, having your CPU at 4.2 Ghz is your pc, compared to the extra amount of power required for the higher voltage?  A good test for this is booting virtual machines, and framerates in a game.  My cpu only goes up to 3.7 Ghz, and 3.2 base but I have it clocked down manually to 800 Mhz, and have now manually set the max cpu freq to the lowest allowed by the cpu firmware.  For simple tasks around the desktop, there is not at all any noticable performance delta.  Since I still use spinning disks, the cpu is not the main factor in program performance.

I believe this is kinda off-topic.

In addition to that, the spec in my sig is from an older build of mine, my current setup is entirely different and I just left it at stock.

[Conan Kudo]

On 12/21/2023 at 2:25 PM, igormp said:

ARMv8 supports both aarch32 and aarch64. It's up to the CPU to decide which mode it supports, there are some CPUs which are aarch64 only, so no v7 support at all.

On 12/21/2023 at 1:33 PM, E-waste said:

ARMv9 drops support for ARMv7 and ARMv8-32 (AArch32), so it's 64-bit only from that point on.