The job of this driver is to set up the physical PCIe ports, handle MSI interrupt mapping to the M1’s AIC interrupt controller, and work together with the DART IOMMU driver to put devices in the right IOMMU groups. PCIe driver ( pcie-apple, merged): Marc Zyngier polished up the PCIe driver and all the little dependencies and changes that came along with it. These bindings are effectively the standard that allows multiple open OSes to agree on how the hardware is described, so they can boot from the same bootloader. PCIe bindings ( merged): Mark Kettenis has been working on porting U-Boot and OpenBSD to the M1, and he contributed the Device Tree bindings for the PCI Express hardware in the M1. The goal of the Asahi Linux project is to upstream everything into the Linux kernel, so all our drivers are eventually headed for upstream review.

Over September we’ve seen a lot of action on this front, with many important drivers now in review or even already merged for Linux 5.16. Those are important for bring-up, but to get a usable system we need many more. Linux drivers galoreĮarlier this year we saw the absolute lowest level drivers being merged into the kernel. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on.

At this point, Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)! The ground had been shifting until now, but we’re seeing drivers settle down. It’s been a busy month! We’ve had a lot of movement in kernel land, as well as some tooling improvements and reverse engineering sessions.

Qemu m1 linux