Debian on Apple M1 hardware

[Pip Cet <pipcet@gmail.com>]

Hello everyone,

I hope this is the right list.  Sorry if it isn't.

This is mostly a success report: I'm running Debian sid on an M1
MacBook Pro and it's working very well. Many hardware features aren't
supported yet, but with one exception, it's kernel support that is
missing.

I'm using the kernel image provided at
https://downloads.corellium.info/linuxnvme.macho.

Unfortunately, so far, I haven't been able to recompile a working
kernel from the source tree at https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1
and the preloader at https://github.com/corellium/preloader-m1. I've
contacted the developer at Corellium about that and I think we're
working on a solution.

So far, I've only run into one Debian issue: Emacs doesn't work. It
works fine when compiled from the source tree (that's what I'm typing
this in), and the failure appears to be related to the page size in
use by the Corellium kernel (it's an unaligned mmap that fails).

So how do we proceed once a fully free kernel is available? As I said,
I think that's only a matter of time, apart from the non-free firmware
required for some of the hardware.

The one exception to hardware support being a kernel issue is that the
WiFi requires an extra dance to read ROM information before
generating, in userspace, the precise firmware that the module
requires.

Thanks for an OS that's already more usable than MacOS on this machine!

Pip