Initial Patches Posted For Booting The Apple M4 On Linux

With the Linux 7.2 kernel there is initial support for booting the Apple M3 SoC on Linux but it's not yet functional for end users with just booting to a simple console. There are now Device Tree files posted for booting the Apple M4 on Linux but also not yet useful for any typical Apple Mac/MacBook usage on Linux.

Open-source developer Yureka Lilian posted the patches this week for the initial Device Trees and bindings for the Apple Silicon M4 SoC on Linux. With not too many changes from the M3, the M4 bring-up was more straight-forward than from M2 to M3. But the caveat applies that this is simply for booting the M4 Apple Silicon on Linux and not yet having all peripherals working or providing any usable desktop. It will take more time before that happens especially when it comes to GPU acceleration and other features.

With the Apple M4 on Linux there are also reported stability issues booting. Lilian commented with the patch series:

"This series adds initial device trees and dt-bindings for the Apple Silicon devices using the M4 (t8132) SoC. For the most part it mirrors Janne's M3 (t8122) bringup series as it was merged in the 7.2 cycle.

This series covers only a minimal amount of hardware, which is useful as a basis for future developments. The hardware added here has remained largely unchanged between the M3 and M4 generations.

Most of the changes for bringing these M4 devices into a bootable state have been happening in the m1n1 bootloader, which is no longer responsible for setting the configuration bits (🐔-bits) of the CPU, since these are now set and locked by iBoot.

Additionally, SMP boot depends on the idle=nop patches I sent out earlier today, and is still unstable, even with those."

Those interested can find the Apple M4 DT patches on the kernel mailing list for review and serving for further Apple M4 enablement moving forward.