Following Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project that he founded for bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, Asahi Lina announced today that she is pausing work on all of the Apple GPU driver development she had been pursuing for Asahi Linux with the open-source DRM kernel driver as well as Mesa contributions.
Asahi Lina posted to Bluesky today:
“For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. I’ve paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely.
I can’t share any more information at this time, so please don’t ask for more details. Thank you.”
Asahi Lina had been leading the effort working on a Rust-written Apple DRM kernel graphics driver that has yet to be mainlined to the Linux kernel. Plus contributions to the Asahi AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa too. As part of that, Asahi Lina was also involved in reverse-engineering the Apple M1/M2 GPU. Asahi Lina had been one of the most prominent Asahi Linux developers working on the Apple Linux GPU graphics stack along with Alyssa Rosenzweig.
This is a hit to the Linux graphics support for the Apple Silicon GPU especially with the DRM kernel driver not yet being finished and upstreamed as well as still targeting the older M1/M2 hardware generations. Short of new open-source community developers stepping up to work on the Apple Silicon support, it will remain a rather difficult uphill battle to pull off for those wanting a Linux laptop experience as nice as what’s available from the likes of Intel and AMD.
