As is well known, Linus Torvalds does not hold back with his opinion and often participates in the forum of the Real World Technologies website. There he was asked for his opinion on the new MacBooks with “Apple Silicon”, ie with the new ARM processor M1. Torvalds “would love to” use such a notebook, but only if Linux runs on it. “I’ve been waiting for an ARM notebook with Linux for a long time,” he added.

Basically runs Linux problem-free on systems-on-chip (SoCs) with ARM processing cores such as Raspberry Pi, ARM Chromebooks and ARM servers. The iSH app allows the use of a Linux shell on iOS devices.

Linux hurdles with the M1 But some Special features of the new Apple M1 computers make starting Linux more difficult. So far there are no Linux drivers for Apple’s own graphics processors, which are also found in the M1. And the M1 Macs also lack Boot Camp (among other things), which means the parallel installation of alternative operating systems such as Windows or Linux on x 86 Macs

An answer to Torvalds’ forum post at realworldtech.com is exciting, because it comes from the hacking team that developed the iOS jailbreak “checkra1n”. Accordingly, the team is working on bringing Linux to Apple’s M1 systems and has identified other important hurdles.

Booting Linux should work in principle because there is a “Permissive” in Apple’s Secure Boot Mode in which you can integrate your own cryptographic signatures.

Apple Silicon: From ARM processors and the future of the Mac | Comment on the “One More Thing” keynote However, like Apple’s A processors, the M1 processors do not boot with EFI firmware, but with iBoot. According to the checkra1n team, however, it should be possible to reload a UEFI bootloader including ACPI tables in order to start Linux. For example, ARM servers also boot according to the SBSA specification.

Hypervisor solution One idea is a slim hypervisor that loads Linux into a VM and emulates certain functions. This is necessary because Apple has built in a special interrupt controller called the Advanced Interrupt Controller (AIC) and not the common ARM Generic Interrupt Controller (GIC).

Also for the power management of the SoC Forum participants can see open construction sites via the Power State Coordination Interface (PSCI) and the Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC). He estimates that it will take a long time before Linux will start on Apple M1 computers.

(ciw)