Asahi Linux brings first M4 Mac and MacBook Neo support to Linux 7.4, enough to boot and little elseAsahi Linux brings first M4 Mac and MacBook Neo support to Linux 7.4, enough to boot and little else

The Asahi Linux project has submitted the first support for Apple's M4 Macs and the MacBook Neo to the Linux kernel, for the Linux 7.4 release.

Phoronix reported on 2 October that Asahi developer Sven Peter had sent pull requests for the 7.4 merge window, which opens later this month. They add device trees, the files that tell the kernel what hardware a machine has and where it is, for six M4 models and for the MacBook Neo, which uses the A18 Pro chip from the iPhone. AppleInsider followed on 4 October with the same account.

Which Macs are covered?

Phoronix describes the M4 files as the minimal amount of hardware: the CPU cores, interrupt controller, power states, watchdog, serial port, pin controller, i2c bus and a basic frame buffer for the display. The MacBook Neo gets less, with no power states, pin controller or i2c. A second pull request adds GPIO support and handling for crash logs from Apple's RTKit co-processors. The M4 Pro and M4 Max machines are not in the list.

Neither report claims the result is usable. AppleInsider says it is good enough to install the kernel and little more. There is no GPU driver, so no accelerated graphics, and the lists name no keyboard, trackpad, Wi-Fi, audio or storage support.

Why M4 support has taken this long

Asahi's usable releases still run on M1 and M2 Macs. In April 2025 Sven Peter told followers that the M4 would be painful, and heise reported why: Apple's Secure Page Table Monitor now runs at a privilege level the kernel has to negotiate with, which broke both Linux's start-up and the hypervisor Asahi uses to study macOS on new hardware. Phoronix's summary of the project's end of 2025 talk said the M3, M4 and M5 changes had broken the existing reverse-engineering tools, and that M3 work was still experimental.

Apple does not help and does not block. Its Platform Security guide describes a Permissive Security setting on Apple silicon Macs that accepts a boot object the owner has signed locally, which is the route Asahi takes. The same page says Apple does not provide or support custom kernels, and that some decryption keys are withheld from an untrusted operating system so it cannot read data belonging to macOS.

Our take

This is a milestone for the kernel and not for anyone's laptop. A device tree is the map before the roads. It lets the kernel start, print to a screen and take an interrupt, and that is the precondition for every driver that follows, but it is not a driver itself. An M4 MacBook Air owner hoping to dual boot Linux this winter should read the merge as a sign of progress and keep macOS.

The detail worth noticing is that the M4 work and the MacBook Neo arrived in the same request. The Neo is the Mac most likely to end up in a school or a second-hand market, the kind of machine people want to keep running long after Apple stops updating it, so Linux on it matters more than on a Mac Studio. Its chip is also an iPhone chip, which means the work done for it overlaps with hardware Apple ships in far larger numbers.

APPDOOK's reading is that the honest timescale is years, as it was for the M1. The GPU was the long pole then and it will be again, because it is the part Apple documents least and changes most between generations. The question for 2027 is whether the people doing this unpaid work can keep pace with a chip a year, and nothing in this merge answers it. What it does show is that Apple's tighter boot security slowed the project rather than stopping it.