Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0

/ Blog / Progress Report: Linux 7.0 Progress Report: Linux 7.0 Previous After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 is finally here. That means it’s also time for another Asahi progress report!Automate EverythingUsers of alternate distros and keen-eyed individuals may have noticed some changes to the Asahi Installer. After almost two years, we finally got around to pushing an updated version of the installer to the CDN! Two years is a long time to go between updates, so what took so long?Our upstream installer package is a little bit of a Rube-Goldberg machine. The bulk of the installer is written in Python, with some small Bash scripts to bootstrap it. When you run curl | sh, you’re actually downloading the boostrap script, which then fetches the actual installer bundle from our CDN. This bundle consists of a Python interpreter and very stripped down standard library, a built m1n1 stage 1 binary, and the installer itself.Until recently, cutting an installer release meant: Tagging the installer repoDownloading a macOS Python buildBuilding m1n1 from a blessed commitBundling Python, m1n1 and the installerUploading the installer bundle to the CDNUpdating the CDN’s version flag fileThis process was time-consuming and required administrative access to the CDN. As a result, we neglected to push installer updated for quite some time; the previous installer tag was from June 2024! As upstreaming work has progressed and Devicetree bindings churned, this became rather problematic for our friends maintaining distros.The Asahi Installer offers a UEFI-only installation option. This option shrinks macOS and only installs what is necessary to boot a UEFI executable, meaning m1n1 stage 1, the Devicetrees, and U-Boot. This allows users to boot from live media with Asahi support, such as specialised Gentoo Asahi LiveCD images.Since the Devicetrees on a fresh UEFI-only install come from the installer bundle itself, a kernel will only successfully boot when the installer-bundled Devicetrees match what that kernel expects to see. The two have gotten rather out of sync as time has gone on due to Devicetree bindings changing as a result of the upstreaming process. This situation finally came to a head with kernel 6.18, which required numerous changes to both m1n1 and the Devicetree bindings for the Apple USB subsystem. This made booting kernel 6.18 and above from live media impossible. Oops.Rather than go through the trouble of manually pushing out another update, we took the opportunity to build some automation and solve this problem permanently.We moved the manifest of installable images into the asahi-installer-data repo, allowing us to update it independently of the installer codebase. On top of this, we also now deploy the installer using GitHub workflows. Going forward, every push to the main branch of asahi-installer will automatically build the installer and upload it to https://alx.sh/dev. Every tag pushed to GitHub will do the same for https://alx.sh.The latest version, 0.8.0, bumps the bundled m1n1 stage 1 binary to version 1.5.2, introduces installer support for the Mac Pro, and adds a firmware update mode which ties in nicely with…How do you overengineer a light sensor?Basically everything with a screen now comes with some sort of light sensor. This is usually to enable automatic brightness adjustment based on ambient conditions. It’s a very convenient feature in devices like smartphones, where a user may walk outside and find…

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