Asahi Linux Adds Official M3 Mac Support, but GPU Acceleration and Sleep Aren’t Ready

Update, Sept. 15: Expert mode is no longer required to install Asahi Linux on M3 Macs, according to a note added to the project’s announcement. The standard command is now curl -L https://alx.sh/ | sh.

Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with Apple’s M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, after the project merged M3 support into its installer. “Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC!” developer James Calligeros wrote in the announcement.

The project said almost everything that works on M1 and M2 machines now works on M3. That includes the webcam, internal microphones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, hardware-accelerated video decoding with AV1 support, and USB up to the hardware limit of USB 3 at 10 Gb/s.

GPU, sleep and HDMI still missing

The two big gaps are full support for the DCP display controller and the GPU. “Do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now,” the announcement said, adding that more GPU news would come in the coming months. Without DCP support, sleep doesn’t work because of limitations in the firmware-provided framebuffer, and the HDMI port on MacBooks that have one is disabled. The project said sleep will be addressed once full DCP support is wired up for M3.

MacBooks and iMacs with M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max are supported. The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is not yet.

The GPU gap makes anything beyond a 2D desktop painful, The Register noted, and the synopsis of a talk planned for the X.Org Developer’s Conference at the end of September pointed to hurdles caused by hardware differences from earlier chip generations.

At launch the M3 support was gated behind the installer’s Expert mode because the code was fresh, and the team aimed to drop that requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta. After installing, users are told to run a full system upgrade with dnf upgrade –refresh.

The support is in the downstream Asahi Linux builds. Mainline Linux has initial M3 support for basic booting, and other patches remain to be upstreamed in Linux 7.4 and later, Phoronix reported.