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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:

• Installer
• Kernel
• Mesa
• non-upstreamed patches for U-Boot

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:

• 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:
  • Multi-OS boot support
  • M2 keyboard support
  • ...

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.

• 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):

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

Installer

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

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