Linux Patches Posted For Initial Enablement Of The Apple A18 Pro + MacBook Neo

In addition to Linux developers focused on Apple Silicon being busy enabling functionality for the M3 and newer SoCs under the Linux kernel, there are also developers working on enabling the A18 Pro SoC used by the new, budget-friendly MacBook Neo laptop. Patches were posted this week for initial enablement of the A18 Pro and the MacBook Neo Device Tree... But even with these patches, the Linux support is still severely limited for now.

Open-source developer Yureka Lilian posted the initial Linux patches on Friday for laying out the Device Trees and bindings for the Apple A18 Pro SoC and the recently-launched MacBook Neo low-cost laptop. But similar to the current Apple M3 Linux support at the moment, it's severely limited. In fact, all the more limited right now for the A18 Pro with currently just being able to successfully run on a single CPU core. The current single core restriction is due to WFI and WFIT instructions. This is just the start of the long process for getting the MacBook Neo to ultimately run nice on Linux.

Beyond the Linux kernel changes for being able to boot on the MacBook Neo, there are also changes needed to the Asahi Linux project's m1n1 bootloader.

"Added a device tree for the MacBook Neo, which uses the t8140 SoC (A18 Pro) also found in the iPhone 16 Pro.

The device tree has a minimal set of devices limited to CPU cores, interrupt controller, watchdog, serial and framebuffer."

It will likely be quite some months before the MacBook Neo is working nicely on Linux with GPU acceleration and all the functionality expected out of a modern laptop for daily use, but this is the first step being achieved now.

The initial patches are out for review on the Linux kernel mailing list.