Asahi Linux Nears M3 Release With Webcam, Mic, USB 3 and Thunderbolt Support

Updated Oct. 26, 2026, 1:45 a.m. ET: Adds that Asahi Linux officially added M3 support to its installer on Sept. 6.

Update: Asahi Linux officially added M3-series Macs to its installer on Sept. 6. At first it was gated behind Expert mode, a requirement the project dropped on Sept. 15. Supported machines are MacBooks and iMacs with the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max. The webcam, microphones, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and hardware video decoding work. Sleep, HDMI output and full GPU acceleration don’t yet, and the M3 Ultra Mac Studio isn’t supported.

The Asahi Linux team says it’s almost ready to ship official support for Apple’s M3 Macs. Its Linux 7.2 progress report covers M3 peripheral support, CPU power management, a workaround for Apple’s newer security architecture, and early M4 and M5 bring-up. “We are pleased to announce that we are almost ready to cut an official release! We will have more to say about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!” the team wrote.

M3 hardware support

• Webcam: The M3 Max needed only one extra initialization message, which chaos_princess added to the driver. That enabled the webcam on every M3 machine that has one.
• Microphones: M3 chips add a “High Frequency” decimator that needs new coefficients and a much larger initialization message, and the built-in mics now work.
• USB and Thunderbolt: M3 Pro and Max switched from the CD3217 (ACE2) USB port controller on the I2C bus to ACE3 on the SPMI bus. Mildsunrise and chaos_princess found that ACE3 has nearly the same register set, and USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt now work on all M3 devices. The ATCPHY block also needed new tunables because of TSMC’s N3 process.
• Display firmware: M3 machines target the firmware interface in macOS 14.8.3, and support for the DCP display controller is now nearly on par with the macOS 13.5 interface used for M1 and M2.

Power management and the hypervisor

Upstream arm64 maintainers require power management to go through PSCI, but Apple’s cores have no EL3 exception level for the usual firmware calls. Sven Peter is working on a PSCI conduit built on UEFI Runtime Services, with m1n1 leaving behind a resident PSCI implementation, and the kernel patches are on the mailing list as an RFC. Starting with M4, Apple locks the registers that control core state retention, so WFI makes cores lose their state and crash. Yureka added a kernel parameter for idle-loop behavior that prevents crashes during early boot, and those patches are in linux-next.

On M4 and later, macOS requires Apple’s Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM), which had left m1n1’s hypervisor unusable for tracing. Sven taught the hypervisor to emulate Apple’s SPRR and GXF mechanisms, so it can load SPTM, run XNU and trace hardware access again, though tracing is slower.

M4, M5 and video decoding

Yureka and Sven got NVMe working on M4 and M5, and PCIe devices can now be enumerated. Little else works on those chips yet, so they aren’t in the installer. Separately, the Apple Video Decoder driver now handles H.264, HEVC and VP9 mostly reliably on all supported machines. A VA-API translation layer lets desktop apps use it, but it doesn’t ship by default in Fedora Asahi Remix yet.