Wiki

• FrontPage
• RecentChanges
• FindPage
• HelpContents
• Teams/Bananas

Intro and Mission Statement

The Debian Bananas Team works on getting official Debian supported on Apple Silicon (arm64) Macs, maintains the packages needed to run Debian on them and provides software not yet in Debian via the Bananas Archive.

IRC: #debian-bananas (also reachable via Matrix)

Mailing list: debian-arm-apple@lists.debian.org

Salsa: https://salsa.debian.org/bananas-team

Porter box

If you are a DD, or Free Software developer, please get in touch to get access to the non-DSA managed machine. You will need to provide full name, email address, and login name, ssh public key. http://bananas.debian.net or ssh you@bananas.debian.net

Current status (overall)

Note: Only M1 and M2 machines are even considered. See upstream Asahi Linux for status updates on >= M3.

Since Debian Trixie (13), many of the Asahi Linux components have been introduced in the official Debian archive. We are however still lacking some core components:

• Installer
• Kernel
• Mesa (introduced in testing/forky, backported to trixie-backports)
• non-upstreamed patches for U-Boot

As an example, this is the U-Boot situation in Debian Trixie:

• Most of the asahi support is upstreamed into mainline U-Boot
• The mainline U-Boot is provided from src:u-boot as u-boot-asahi
• Main features that are lacking in this binary are:
  • Multiple linux installation support
  • M2 built-in keyboard support at early boot time
  • M2 USB-A support at early boot time

To be able to actually run Debian on Apple Silicon, you thus currently need a third party provider of these components. (Hopefully some of these can be resolved in Debian Forky and we then might be able to provide backported packages via trixie-backports as provided by the Debian Backports initiative.)

Usable third parties

The Bananas Team provides a port of Debian to Apple Silicon, see Installing Debian On ARM Macs for more info.

Thomas Renard provides a fork of the original Glanzmann installer and Apple Silicon packages updated for Trixie at https://git.g3la.de/repos/m1-debian/

Note from Renard: I am building for personal stuff and do not have the capacities to take over Glanzmann's stuff. And he is still packaging. [...]. You can use my stuff (https://git.g3la.de/repos/-/packages/debian/linux-image-asahi or https://git.g3la.de/repos/-/packages/debian/linux-image-asahi-headless (without audio) use testing! - https://git.g3la.de/repos/m1-debian) but I must say that I cannot give any ... warranty that it works. And I do not have the capacities for support - and this is the main job for officially publish packages.

For the time being, Thomas Renard's packages need apple_dcp and mux_apple_display_crossbar added to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules.

We will try our best to make it possible to smoothly upgrade from these efforts onto official Debian packages when/if possible.

Status

Debian provides most of the Asahi software in the official archive since Trixie, with the notable exception of the kernel and mesa drivers -- i.e. of those components which are not fully upstreamed yet. Below we track the status of the components and where they live.

Packages

See also lzfse, dependency of asahi-fwextract.

Metapackages

Debian also provides metapackages to install the required dependencies (see meta-asahi-platform):

Backports

Since Debian stable (currently, Trixie) only accepts updates that address security and high-severity bugs, more recent updates of some of our packages are maintained as backports. At this time, these are:

For instructions on how to use backports, see here.

Integration notes

• Upstream only offers limited support for X11: you are advised to use Wayland on desktop installations. Native X11 applications can still run under Xwayland.

• A known bug prevents Xorg from working properly on Apple Silicon in the absence of an X11 quirk. This bug may also make SDDM and LightDM crash when starting (both X11 and Wayland) desktop sessions. We got this patched in Debian in November 2024 (xserver-xorg-core >= 2:21.1.13-3, see #1080099), but older installations may still be affected. Should you need a fix, drop this file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. Note that most ready-to-use installations of Debian for Apple Silicon already included this file (perhaps under a different name, sometimes in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/) well before the fix landed in Debian.

• If you use the asahi audio stack, make sure to have lsp-plugins-lv2 >= 1.2.14-1 installed. This is needed to prevent damage to the speakers. If you installed an up-to-date version of Debian >= Trixie (13) you should be good to go. See also #1058672 and https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111577610063142370.

• https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW:Speakers#distro-integration-notes

Other resources

ALARM packaging:

• https://github.com/AsahiLinux/PKGBUILDs

Fedora packaging:

• https://copr-dist-git.fedorainfracloud.org/cgit/@asahi/

• https://packages.fedoraproject.org/search?query=asahi