Fedora Approves Exception for macOS Binaries in Asahi-Installer
Quoting: Fedora Approves Exception for macOS Binaries in Asahi-Installer —
The Asahi Remix project is crucial for Fedora as it helps spread the operating system more broadly, allowing anyone with an Apple Silicon device to install Fedora Linux on it.
In light of this, the asahi-installer is essential for allowing this to happen. It is divided into two segments: a macOS tool that facilitates the actual installation and a Python module responsible for extracting and correctly placing firmware.
However, due to technical constraints, the macOS tool requires prebuilt binaries of Python and libffi, both of which are available as prebuilt binaries outside the Fedora ecosystem.
Update
In LWN outside paywall today:
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Fedora approves shipping pre-built macOS binaries
The Asahi Linux project works to support Linux on Apple Silicon hardware. The project's flagship distribution is the Fedora Asahi Remix, which has its own installer (rather than Anaconda) to accommodate the unique requirements of installing on Apple's hardware. Previously the installer was built by the Asahi project, but it has asked for (and received) an exception from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) to include two binaries from upstream open-source projects so that the installer can be built on Fedora infrastructure.
Apple Silicon does not support something as simple as plugging a USB stick in and rebooting into a Linux installer. Users who want to install Linux on an M1 or later Mac have to start the installation in macOS, resize the disk so there's room for Asahi, and then reboot into macOS Recovery (recoveryOS) to finish the installation. Asahi Linux is typically installed alongside macOS, so users can choose to boot into either operating system though users can get rid of the macOS partition entirely. As part of the process, Asahi replaces the macOS kernel used for system recovery with Asahi's m1n1 bootloader for Apple hardware. The entire boot process for Apple Silicon is well-described in the Asahi January/February 2021 progress report.