ARM virtualization company Corellium has managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on the next-generation Apple M1.

The news comes from Corellium CEO, Chris Wade, who mentioned on Twitter how "Linux is now completely usable on the Mac mini M1. Booting from USB a full Ubuntu desktop (rpi). Network works via a USB c dongle. Update includes support for USB, I2C, DART. We will push changes to our GitHub and a tutorial later today.".

Impressive speedy work, and a separate project to the recently revealed Asahi Linux which is also aiming to do the same thing. Two heads are better than one, as they say. The Corellium team mentioned on Twitter they full back the Asahi project too, so it's wonderful to see true cooperation.

Right now this effort doesn't appear to have full GPU acceleration so it's doing software rendering, making it less suitable for a daily driver but work is ongoing towards that. Eventually everything will be in place, and it's taking far less time than I personally expected to see it running on such brand new hardware from Apple.

Thing thing is, as we noted in our article about the Asahi project, even Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously said in 2020 "I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux" when talking about the new Apple M1 laptops.

You can see the code from Corellium up on GitHub .