Asahi Linux officially supports M3 Macs, minus GPU, sleep, and HDMI

September 6, 2026. Asahi Linux officially merged Apple M3 support into its installer, after years of work and crowdfunded hardware. The webcam, internal microphones, USB 3 at 10 Gb/s, hardware-accelerated video decoding — AV1 included — Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth all work; only the GPU, sleep, and HDMI remain missing. Why it matters: an Apple Silicon machine finally becomes a credible Linux target for everything except graphics acceleration.

Behind the scenes: a fully reverse-engineered platform

This milestone is not a routine driver update: Apple documents neither the hardware, nor the firmware, nor the DCP of its chips. All of Asahi Linux’s support — from booting on M1 to AV1 decoding on M3 — rests on reverse engineering, led by a community originally spearheaded by Hector Martin and funded partly through donations (OpenCollective, GitHub Sponsors). The project ships as the Fedora Asahi Remix, a Fedora variant that carries this work first.

The scale of the effort explains the pace. On M1, it took months to reach a stable boot, then to port each component one by one: USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, the webcam. The GPU was the longest haul — a driver written in Rust for Apple’s in-house graphics processor, maintained notably by Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina — and it remains, together with DCP, the last big piece to finish. Each chip generation (M1, M2, M3) adds another layer of work: the controllers change, the firmware changes, and nothing is ever documented.

That context is what makes the September 6, 2026 announcement remarkable: M3 support is not a promise, it is a reached milestone — almost everything works, and what is missing is clearly identified.

None of this is sponsored by Apple: it is a community effort funded through OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors, and the developers’ access to M3 hardware came largely from those donations. That funding model is part of the story — each chip generation is reverse-engineered on donated hardware, which is why support rolls out generation by generation rather than all at once.

What works now

James Calligeros’s announcement is explicit: support for the M3 SoCs — and the machines built on them — has reached a state where “almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 machines just works.” The list covers the webcam, internal microphones, USB up to the hardware limit of USB 3 at 10 Gb/s, hardware-accelerated video decoding — including AV1 — plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

That is not a trivial list. The webcam and microphones are among the last components to fall on Apple Silicon machines, because they sit behind proprietary controllers and firmware that resemble nothing the kernel knows on a regular PC. Hardware AV1 decoding is another strong signal: it means video playback — the most common use of a laptop — works without cooking the CPU cores. For a project that started from zero against a closed, undocumented platform, this is a major milestone.

The three missing pieces: GPU, sleep, HDMI — and the central role of DCP

Three limitations remain, and they share a common cause. Asahi Linux still lacks full support for DCP (Display Co-Processor), Apple’s proprietary display coprocessor through which the screen and graphics acceleration flow.

The consequences are direct. The GPU is not accelerated: “do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now,” the project writes, promising more news “in the coming months.” Sleep does not work, limited by the firmware-provided framebuffer, and will not until DCP support is wired up for M3. The HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is disabled for the same reason. Finally, while the MacBooks and iMacs (M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max) are supported, the Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) is not yet.

DCP is therefore the lock holding everything else together: external display, sleep, and above all the GPU, which is the last big missing piece for turning an M3 machine into a complete Linux laptop.

DCP is not a simple display controller either: it is a coprocessor that runs its own firmware and manages a complete display pipeline, from compositing to video output. Making it work without documentation means reconstructing a proprietary protocol between the CPU and this coprocessor — a long-haul effort that explains why graphics acceleration lands last on every chip generation. It is also why the team communicates in milestones: each validated component is a measurable fact, not an estimate.

Installing requires expert mode

Because the support is fresh, it is gated behind the installer’s expert mode. To try Asahi Linux on an M3 machine, run from a macOS terminal:

curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh

Then follow the prompts, and make sure to run a full upgrade after the install:

dnf upgrade --refresh

Once installed, a machine in this state is genuinely usable for headless work — build servers, ARM64 CI, kernel development — even before the GPU lands.

The team aims to drop the expert-mode requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta, a couple of weeks away, “barring any major regressions or other showstopping issues.” Asahi Linux is a Fedora-based distribution — the Fedora Asahi Remix — which is why dnf is involved: M3 support lands in that ecosystem first, before propagating to the other distributions that build on Asahi’s work.

What this means for the ARM64 Linux ecosystem

Beyond Apple’s own machines, Asahi Linux’s work feeds the whole desktop ARM64 ecosystem. Drivers and kernel fixes flow upstream to mainline: part of the Apple Silicon support is integrated into the Linux kernel itself, benefiting every distribution. The Rust-based GPU driver is also a technical showcase for memory-safe graphics driver development, a subject the kernel community has watched closely for years.

For a user, the effect is more concrete: a MacBook with an M3 becomes a plausible Linux development machine — light, silent, with real battery life — provided you accept the current limitations. That is a change in kind from the era when Apple Silicon was, in practice, a closed platform for anything that was not macOS.

The work also sets a template for other closed-hardware bring-up efforts: a funded, patient reverse-engineering project can turn undocumented silicon into a supported Linux platform, one component at a time.

Verdict

If you develop or test ARM64 Linux software and have an M3 machine to hand, install now in expert mode: you get a native Fedora environment on Apple Silicon with the essentials — networking, USB, camera, video — working, for the cost of one caveat about the GPU. If you want a daily driver for rendering, gaming, or anything that depends on 3D acceleration, wait: without the GPU, an M3 machine under Linux is still a desktop limited to software rendering. If sleep or external HDMI are non-negotiable for you, the Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) and external video output are out of scope for now.

The right indicator to watch is not a date but a component: DCP. When the display coprocessor support is complete, the GPU, sleep, and HDMI will follow in its wake — and at that point, Apple Silicon will have finished its transformation into a first-class Linux platform. Until then, Asahi Linux on M3 is a reverse-engineering triumph you visit in expert mode, not yet a complete work laptop.

References

• Asahi Linux — “M2: Episode 1 (or, Asahi Linux on M3)”, James Calligeros, September 6, 2026
• LWN.net — “Asahi Linux now supports M3-series Macs”, September 7, 2026