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points by alentred 22 hours ago | 0 comments

The only blocking point for me before I would use Asahi Linux is the support of the USB-C displays. I was considering and reconsidering to install Asahi so many times, but I just cannot give up the ability to plug an external display into my MacBook Air.

I am just surprised that other features like support of the newer CPUs still get a higher priority than this one. I am not complaining or anything, I am not even related to the project in any way, so not in the right place to ask for anything, but I really am surprised that this seems to not to bother most of the users?

[–] pja 19 hours ago

I believe the blocker here is that USBC display support requires getting full Thunderbolt support working. Apple built their own Thunderbolt chips, which diverge from the Intel hardware that everyone else has used & that the Linux kernel drivers are written against enough to make support much harder than you'd expect.

IIRC Asahi has finally acquired Thunderbolt support but that support still doesn't have the pieces needed for external displays.

[–] alsetmusic 8 hours ago

The entire section "Kept you waiting, huh?" is about this and some of the background is really interesting explaining why things are as they are. Here's just the last bit:

> Luckily for us, Sven was up to the task of dealing with all this nonsense. It just took slightly longer than expected! While the patchset to enable Thunderbolt was sent upstream first (another massive win for us!), we have also pulled it into our downstream kernel and are now shipping it to users!

> But there is a catch. Currently, only USB3, XDomain and Thunderbolt Networking are supported. You can plug in USB devices or connect two Thunderbolt computers together and make them ping each other, but that’s about it. PCIe and DisplayPort tunnelling — required for most Thunderbolt docks — are not supported. Yet. Watch this space.

> An enormous amount of gratitude is owed to Sven, who has stuck with this thankless chore for nearly 5 years in between all of his other incredible work.

Thank you, Sven!

[–] Nux 21 hours ago

This works, tried last night in my M1, you need to install the fairydust kernel and reboot. https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/lacamar/fairydust-ke...

My Dell external monitor (+builtin usb/ethernet hub) connected via usb-c thunderbolt started working right away.

My problem is I can't use my 2nd external monitor. :)

Also no luks fde support which is a big deal, basically I can't take it anywhere.

[–] vlz 17 hours ago

> no luks fde support

You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.

https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...

Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?

[–] Nux 16 hours ago

Thanks for sharing, I'll try that.

[–] vlz 15 hours ago

Oh wait, there is also this tool which automates some of that. I think I used that tool instead of the blog article itself. It's the same idea though.

https://github.com/osx-tools/asahi-encrypt

[–] alentred 21 hours ago

Huh. Thank you for the info!

I am always looking at this "Device Support" page [1] and it's still red there. I even have a calendar reminder to check it out every once in a while, but if it's not being updated I might drop my calendar reminder then :)

[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

[–] cavoirom 20 hours ago

I developed the habit that letting AI assistant look up information like this for me. It might be hidden in the docs I usually over-look.

[–] simonh 19 hours ago

Sometimes this can be because the people working on one aspect of the project are not the same as the people working on another, or the same number of people, and also maybe supporting later chips is less problematic than supporting external displays. The project as a whole doesn’t just work on one problem at a time in priority order.