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 .

Wine developer Zebediah Figura has sent in a proposal to work on a new Linux Kernel interface for Wine synchronization primitives, one that gets closer to performance and behaviour of Windows NT.

The basic idea is that the Wine team are "looking to introduce a kernel API that will allow us to implement Windows NT synchronization object API with at most one syscall per operation, and without managing object state in user managed shared memory, for the sake of performance". This might sound familiar if you follow Wine and Steam Play Proton closely, as it's part of what both esync and fsync were supposed to help with.

What's the deal? As Figura explained, modern games that need high performance make heavy use of multiple threads and synchronization primitives which Wine needs to work with in a way that's accurate and performs well. Both esync and fsync can give big boosts to performance of Windows games on Linux through Wine but it's mentioned that each also has big problems of their own.

Figura goes on to give a proposal of what the interface could look like, to gather feedback. Since this is in the very early stages, we're likely some time away from seeing it come to fruition.

The full post on the mailing list which goes into the deep details can be read here .

Asahi Linux is the name of a new project aiming to get Linux properly supported and working on Apple Silicon, the new ARM based chips designed by Apple like the Apple M1 found in their latest hardware.

This is being spearheaded by Hector Martin "marcan", who some will recognise due to their work involved in porting Linux to the Sony PlayStation 4. It's a crowdfunded effort, with Martin putting up a Patreon campaign which has now hit enough funding for the work to begin. Martin also has a GitHub Sponsor account, with plenty backing there too.

Their plan is to start with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro and they don't want to just get Linux running on them as they want to get it polished to a point where it can be used as your main daily operating system. It's a lot of work though, as they explained "this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform" and "we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it".

All their work will be up on GitHub .

You might not like Apple or macOS but there's no denying the hardware is nice. Even our own Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, said in 2020 "I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux".

Martin is of course not the only one involved. Alyssa Rosenzweig, who works with Collabora on the Panfrost driver for ARM Mali GPUs, seems to also be involved. Rosenzweig wrote on their blog about work towards an open source Mesa driver that's hit the first milestone of understanding enough of the instruction set "to disassemble simple shaders with a free and open-source tool chain" and this work lives on the Asahi Linux GitHub here .

Roderick Colenbrander of Sony Interactive Entertainment has sent in a brand new and official Linux driver for the PS5 DualSense for even better out of the box support.

With the newly proposed driver , it enabled the DualSense to function in both Bluetooth and USD modes along with most other features working including LEDs, Touchpad, Motion Sensors and Rumble. However, they make it clear that the Adaptive Triggers and VCM-based Haptics are not yet supported but they hope to "have a dialog on how to expose these over time in a generic way".

Here's how the describe it will work:

DualSense supported is implemented in a new 'hid-playstation' driver, which will be used for peripherals by 'Sony Interactive Entertainment' (PlayStation). Hid-sony will be used for devices for the larger Sony Group. We intend to migrate existing devices over time gradually to hid-playstation. We do not want to cause any regressions and maintain quality. As such moving forward, unit tests are important and we started by providing these through 'hid-tools' including DualSense.

The Linux driver exposes DualSense functionality as a 'compositive device' similar to DualShock 4 in hid-sony, spanning multiple frameworks. First, it exposes 3 evdev nodes for respectively the 'gamepad', 'touchpad' and 'motion sensors'. The FF framework is used to provide basic rumble features. The leds-class is used to implement the Player indicator LEDs below the DualSense's touchpad, while the new 'leds-class-multicolor' is used for the lightbars next to the touchpad.

This will be really nice to make it into the Linux Kernel, as the more we have working out of the box the better. While Steam and SDL2 can already work with it, not everything goes through them of course and it would open up the DualSense to all sorts of other possibilities.

I'll eventually be grabbing myself a DualSense, so I'm keen to see how it feels.

Hat tip to MrPenguin.

A brand new Long Term Support release is out now with the Linux Kernel 5.10, the very beating heart of the whole Linux system which brings plenty of new features and hardware support.

With it being a new LTS, it's going to get updates and bug fixes for a much longer time than usual providing a good solid base for at least two years for Linux distributions. Apart from that, here's some of the bigger changes:

• Ext4 fast commit support, for faster metadata performance
• Nintendo Switch controller support for both Joy-Cons and Pro controllers
• Support for the Mayflash Sega Saturn Adaptor
• Sound Blaster AE-7 is now supported
• XFS file system now won't crash and burn in the year 2038
• Raspberry Pi VC4 support pulled in
• Thunderbolt/USB4 supported on Intel Tiger Lake-H
• Working headphones with the ASUS TM420
• Thinkpad P1 Gen 3 and Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 3 get a working Headset Button
• More work done for new upcoming Intel chipsets for Rocket Lake and Alder Lake
• The k10temp temperature sensor driver now supports AMD Zen3 CPUs
• + a whole lot more

For a full rundown check out Kernel Newbies article .

In the announcement , Torvalds mentions about being more strict over the Kernel 5.11 development cycle due to the holidays coming up so ideally they only want what is actually ready to be pulled in. Fair enough at this time of year, there will be far less people around with time to spare for feedback on patches.

Upgrading will depend on your distribution. Ubuntu gets major Kernel upgrades through new releases of the distribution, while others like Arch will gradually pull them in for you to switch.