Intro

This cooperative unit is still working hard. As of right now, the Debian Bananas Team has no end-user ready offering. This might change in a not too distant future. See current status below for third party offerings and interim solutions.

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

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

Mission statement

The Debian Bananas Team works on getting official Debian supported on Apple Silicon (arm64).

Secondarily we might also offer some parts that we are not able to currently introduce in the official debian archive from a third party repository as a stop-gap while things are being worked out so that we can introduce a proper solution in the official Debian archive.

We need your help!

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:

To be able to actually run "debian", 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.)

We are thus currently not fully compliant to the Asahi Linux Distro Guidelines. Specifically we don't see a path to introducing downstream forks of U-Boot, Linux, etc into the official Debian archive - so we are stuck with third party offerings for those while waiting for upstreaming efforts so that we can run mainline Linux, etc and provide that support via the official Debian packages. In other words: Our main mission is not compatible with Asahi Linux Distro Guidelines, our secondary mission has the potential to become with more work. Help welcome!

As an example, we can discuss the U-Boot situation in Debian Trixie:

If you need any of these features, you are recommended to get a third party provider of u-boot-asahi. (Hopefully the remaining u-boot patches can be upstreamed during the Debian Forky (14) release cycle so the asahi linux fork of u-boot is no longer needed. However who knows what happens once >= M3 support materializes.)

Usable third parties

The once "goto" solution for those wanting to run "debian" was to use Thomas Glanzmanns efforts based on Debian Bookworm (12). These are however currently no longer maintained and you are recommended to upgrade to Trixie. Possibly this can still serve as a path to install and then upgrade:

Based on Debian Bookworm by Thomas Glanzmann, see: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1 (No longer maintained. Do not use!)

Thomas Renard's fork (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 Glanzmanns 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.

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

component

status

comment

m1n1

Trixie

bootloader (only stage2 currently built)

u-boot-asahi

Trixie (mainline, unpatched)

m1n1 payload / EFI, the debian binary package is mainline u-boot - currently not including patches from the asahi fork of u-boot, only what has already been upstreamed

linux-asahi

unofficial package, not distributed yet

use third-party kernel for now, or download last build artifacts from Salsa

mesa-asahi

unofficial package, not distributed yet

use third-party mesa packages for now, or download last build artifacts from Salsa. Kernel ABI not yet stable so must be kept in sync with kernel

asahi-scripts

Trixie

initramfs and hardware-specific configuration files, essential for the system to work properly

asahi-nvram

Trixie (asahi-nvram, asahi-bless, asahi-wifisync, asahi-btsync)

utilities for syncing macOS information found in NVRAM

asahi-fwextract

Trixie

asahi firmware utilities

asahi-audio

Trixie

audio processing to make speakers and mics sound good

speakersafetyd

Trixie

speaker protection daemon

bankstown-lv2

Trixie

LV2 speaker bass enhancement plugin - used by asahi-audio

triforce-lv2

Trixie

LV2 mic beamformer plugin - used by asahi-audio

alsa-ucm-conf-asahi

Trixie

alsa use case manager configuration for asahi

tiny-dfr

Trixie

touchbar (only on some models)

See also lzfse, dependency of asahi-fwextract.

Metapackages

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

metapackage

dependencies

asahi-platform

core, audio and nvram: everything except for the kernel and mesa drivers

asahi-platform-core

core dependencies, required to boot; also suggests tiny-dfr

asahi-platform-audio

audio support (internal speakers and mic)

asahi-platform-nvram

nvram manipulation (see the asahi-nvram packages above)

Integration notes

Installer

No installer work has yet started. Use glanzmanns installer (m1n1 stage1 needed for installer).

Other resources

ALARM packaging:

Fedora packaging: