In December last year, adhering to the concept of Linux for everything, well-known developer Hector Martin is launching a crowdfunding Asahi Linux project, planning to transplant the Linux system for Apple Silicon Mac devices. In the initial comments for comments series of patches released today, Great God Martin successfully made the Broadcom BRCMFMAC driver support wireless LAN on the M1 SoC and Apple T2 platforms.
The goal of the Asahi Linux project is to support Apple Silicon ARM under Linux. He issued a set of 34 RFC patches to support the Apple T2 and M1 platforms and this upstream Broadcom open-source network driver. These patches have been used by Apple Broadcom FullMAC hardware T2/M1 platform, including BCM4355C1, BCM4364B2/B3, BCM4377B3, BCM4378B1 and BCM4387C2.
Martin pointed out in the patch cover letter: Like Apple, things on these machines are slightly different from every other Broadcom platform. In particular, in addition to the normal equipment/firmware support changes, the series is very large. Part of it involves selecting and loading the correct firmware. These platforms use multiple dimensions for firmware selection, and the values of these dimensions come from DT or OTP to varying degrees.
In order to enable the Apple M1/T2 platform to work with the existing Broadcom Linux kernel driver and support WiFi, he wrote more than one thousand lines of kernel code. If you are interested, please see all the details of the RFC patch series.
