The Asahi Linux project published its Linux 7.0 progress report on April 26, 2026, marking one of the most substantial updates the project has released in recent memory.
The report covers major ground across M3 hardware enablement, display improvements, power management, audio, and installer automation. There is a lot to unpack. M3 support is the headline development for a lot of waiting Mac owners.
Hardware patches for M3 machines have landed in the Asahi kernel tree, covering PCIe, MacBook keyboards and trackpads, the SMC-based real-time clock and reboot controller, and the NVMe storage controller.
Contributors Alyssa Milburn and Michael Reeves are credited with most of this work. According to the team, M3 Linux support now sits at roughly the same level as the original Asahi Linux alpha for M1. That means basic day-to-day hardware works, but GPU acceleration remains absent, and a general release through the Asahi Installer is not yet available.
GPU support on M3 is the remaining wall to climb.
Apple’s M3 GPU introduces hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and a memory management scheme called Dynamic Caching, all of which represent a meaningful departure from the M1 and M2 GPU architecture that Asahi’s graphics work is built around.
Reverse engineering is underway, but the team has been clear that no timeline will be given. When M3 graphics are ready, they will ship.
On the display side, Variable Refresh Rate support has arrived for Apple Silicon machines through an interesting piece of detective work. Developer James Calligeros discovered that a DCP firmware parameter the Linux driver had been setting since early bringup, assumed to be a power-on sequencing step, was actually the VRR minimum refresh rate toggle.
Setting it to zero disabled VRR. Setting it to the correct fixed-point value unlocks adaptive sync on connected displays that support it. The same mechanism works on MacBook Pro’s ProMotion internal panel.
A kernel module parameter, appledrm.force_vrr, will let users enable it manually once the pull request merges. It is worth knowing that this is technically a workaround; VRR currently requires a modeset to toggle, which is outside the VESA spec. Discussions are ongoing upstream about how to formalize this properly.
Power consumption improvements in this cycle are significant. Developer chaos_princess wrote a driver stack supporting the Power Management Processor, a coprocessor that coordinates power state reporting across various SoC blocks.
Enabling PMP shaves around half a Watt from idle power draw on a 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro. That translates to roughly a 20 percent reduction in idle consumption. Base M1 machines use an older PMP variant not yet covered by this driver, but work is in progress. PMP support is not enabled by default pending upstream merge.
Bluetooth audio dropouts are now fixed, and the solution gets into some genuinely interesting territory.
WiFi and Bluetooth both operate around 2.4 GHz, and managing their coexistence requires vendor-specific HCI commands that were previously unsupported in the upstream Linux kernel. chaos_princess added support for these commands, which allows the Bluetooth stack to flag audio streams as high priority.
The result is that audio connections are protected from scan interference, and playback no longer stutters when KDE Connect or similar tools trigger a Bluetooth discovery sweep.
Audio hardware support also pushed past a limitation inherited from macOS tracing. The headphone jack chip used on Apple Silicon machines, the CS42L84, was previously limited to 48 and 96 kHz because those were the only sampling rates Apple’s macOS software ever supported.
By cross-referencing register values with the publicly documented CS42L42 datasheet, the team determined that 44.1, 88.2, 176.4, and 192 kHz should work as well, and they do. The patch has already been merged for Linux 7.1 and backported to the Asahi 6.19 kernel.
The Asahi Installer also received attention. Version 0.8.0 bumps the bundled m1n1 stage 1 binary to version 1.5.2, adds Mac Pro installation support, and introduces a firmware update mode.
A fully automated build and deployment pipeline now pushes installer updates to the CDN on every tagged release, eliminating a process that had left the installer stale for nearly two years.
On the distribution side, Fedora Asahi Remix 44 is on track for release alongside Fedora Linux 44 on April 28. New KDE Plasma installs will use Plasma Setup in place of the previous Calamares-based wizard, and Plasma Login Manager replaces SDDM as the default greeter.
Vendored Mesa and virglrenderer packages are being retired in favour of upstream Fedora versions, which now carry the necessary support for Apple Silicon.
Full details on every item covered in this cycle are available in the official Asahi Linux 7.0 progress report.
