Hi all!This email is a call for testers for Debian on Apple machines with M1/M2 chips. The Bananas Team [1] has set up an installer at [2] with images for GNOME, KDE and console installations. While we'd like to build an actual Debian installer sooner or later (we may need a heads-up from the Debian Images team for that), at this time we only provide an asahi-type installer, which installs both the "bootloader" and the OS partitions to disk from the network (as opposed to only installing the bootloader and then letting you install Debian using a d-i USB stick). We haven't forked Trixie from Testing yet, so what you'll get is Debian Testing quite deep into the freeze. For device support, please check [3]. Ping us on IRC/Matrix at #debian-bananas if you're interested/willing to help!
As for the current status of Apple Silicon in Debian, the most up-to-date information is at [1]. We plan to do a write-up to replace the very outdated [4] with fresh information after the release of Trixie. In short, what's missing in Debian are the kernel bits, some u-boot patches and the mesa drivers (Trixie only). To be more specific, 1. the upstreaming of the kernel bits is not complete yet albeit progressing at a steady pace [5], 2. downstream u-boot carries some not-yet-upstreamed patches which are especially important for developers and M2 owners, which we weren't able to include in the Debian package [6], 3. the asahi mesa drivers were upstreamed in 25.1, which Trixie missed by a few days; they're already in experimental and tested to be in a working state, so they're ready for Forky.
A few months ago the Bananas Team set up its own repository at bananas-archive.debian.net to distribute the downstream asahi kernel [7], u-boot [8] and mesa [9] forks (we'll drop the latter from our testing/unstable suite as soon as 25.1 lands in Debian's testing/unstable). These packages are forks of the corresponding Debian packages with modified sources and minimal packaging changes. We commit to keep them buildable in Debian with no external dependencies. In fact, we are currently building them using mostly default Salsa CI pipelines on an M1 MacBook Pro runner, and deploying them directly from Salsa. The images installed via [2] have bananas-archive.debian.net added to the sources and give priority to its packages using a preference file. They are built using [10]. Our intention is to drop these packages and the repository as a whole as soon as everything is upstream, at which point it will be tested enough (with real packaging) to be immediately included in Debian. This approach already worked out well for mesa [11].
Feel free to reach us at #debian-bananas for more info. As always, help and suggestions are very much appreciated.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Thomas Glanzmann and Thomas Renard (cy8aer) for their multi-year effort in maintaining Debian for Apple Silicon. Glanzmann is also currently providing part of the infrastructure for the Bananas Archive, so thanks for that too!
Cheers! [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Bananas [2] https://bananas-archive.debian.net/install [3] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support [4] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1 [5] https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/ [6] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/u-boot/-/merge_requests/49 [7] https://salsa.debian.org/bananas-team/wip/linux-asahi/ [8] https://salsa.debian.org/bananas-team/wip/u-boot-asahi/ [9] https://salsa.debian.org/bananas-team/wip/mesa-asahi/ [10] https://salsa.debian.org/bananas-team/wip/debian-asahi-image/ [11] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1102725
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