A few years ago, Linus Torvalds stated that he had been long waiting for an ARM laptop that could run Linux, but after the release of Apple devices on the M1 chip, he did not want to bother with it and “fight with companies that do not intend to help.” Now, Torvalds says he’s running Asahi Linux on a MacBook Air with an M2 processor.
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Linus Torvalds
Let me remind you that interest in the type of the machine that Torvalds works on arose back in 2022, after the release of Apple laptops on the M1 chip, when he was asked what he thought of them. Then Torvalds replied that “I would very much like to have such a [laptop] if it worked on Linux.”
Then many did not understand what exactly Torvalds sees as a problem, and the creator of Linux explained:
I’ve been waiting a long time for an ARM laptop that can run Linux. The new Air will be almost perfect except for the OS. I don’t have time to mess around with it, and I don’t tend to fight companies that aren’t in the mood to help.says Torvalds.
Two years have passed since then, and recently in the Linux 5.19 release notes, Torvalds mentioned that he was working on this release on an ARM device, namely a MacBook Air with an M2 processor.
We’ve had arm64 hardware running Linux for a long time, but so far it hasn’t been used as a development platform. This is the third time I’ve used Apple hardware for Linux development. I did this many years ago during powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. Then, more than a decade ago, when the Macbook Air was the only truly thin and light, and now the arm64 platform.writes Torvalds.
Thus, now Torvalds uses a MacBook with Asahi Linux on board. This distribution is built on Apple’s hardware reverse engineering, and the main goal of the Asahi team is to bring all their developments into the main Linux kernel so that other distributions can also take advantage of it.
Recently, Asahi developers have been pretty quick to add support for new Apple processors like the M2 or M1 Ultra almost as soon as they were released.
At first glance, it may seem that it does not matter what exactly Torvalds works on, and Asahi Linux is still in the early stages of development, and many things are half-working or not working at all. But as Asahi contributor Hector Martin notes, if real people use Linux on a real, modern ARM64 platform, with an up-to-date version of the ARM instruction set and an almost upstream kernel, it will cause a domino effect and benefit the entire ecosystem.
Martin and other enthusiasts say that the more people use ARM versions of Linux, the more ARM-related bugs will be fixed, which will benefit all distributions, and more people will be able to identify and fix ARM-specific problems in their own software. Ultimately, the experience of using Linux on ARM hardware should improve for everyone, although this may take years.
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