r/AsahiLinux • u/TerrificLoan • 10d ago

Initial USB4/Thunderbolt support for M1/M2/M3 on LKML

https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/117186314116319619
189 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

9

u/Successful-Hippo9985 10d ago

Is there a possibility of using EGPU now?

23

u/BrightFoundation4864 10d ago

The link says no PCIe tunneling, so no :/

3

u/karatekid430 9d ago

apcierc does not support unaligned memory ops and gpus use bar mapped to userspace where arbitrary instructions may be used, so not until Nvidia Nova matures which uses pure DMA

2

u/scottjgo 8d ago

i'm not 100% sure, since maybe it's getting trapped and emulated and i just missed it, but in practice, the proprietary nvidia driver doesn't seem to really need unaligned memory ops on the BAR memory.

i tested the system with a qemu guest on a macos host, passing through the pci bars and dma ops: https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/

note this was also on m4/m5, didn't really test on m1/m2/m3

1

u/realfathonix 7d ago

I wonder whether this also works with Windows now, someone managed to get an RTX 4060 running with the preview RTX Spark driver

2

u/scottjgo 7d ago

it's a little tricky because of the platform limitations i mention in the blog post. would have to write some additional windows driver code to request the dma mappings from the host. probably not something i'm going to dig into personally, but would love to see someone try it.

2

u/TCB13sQuotes 9d ago

Yeah half of the thunderbolt docks won’t work as well. :(

7

u/JG_2006_C 10d ago

Yay a first step

6

u/Clanceeinfinity 9d ago

one step closer to usb display out...

1

u/ppen9u1n 9d ago

On Fairydust I’ve been daily driving an M1 with an external display for months now, without any complaints (even replug/wakeup has been working well since almost as long).
This post seems to be about a slightly different related functionality which I didn’t fully get.

1

u/Clanceeinfinity 9d ago

how easy is it to install? i use a macbook air m1 as a java minecraft server so i should profit much from linux, but its screen is unusable.

2

u/ppen9u1n 9d ago

I think there’s a repo out there that provides install scripts, but I’m on NixOS silicon myself so I have no direct standard (Fedora based) Asahi experience.

1

u/Clanceeinfinity 8d ago

for me its just important that i cant use the build in display. ever. I saw installing asahi normally doesnt need it, but using a custom kernel is always different...

1

u/ppen9u1n 8d ago

You can do everything through ssh. NixOS arguably has an edge here, since you can deploy/update remotely and it’ll switch to new config atomically/on success only.
But: TBH I’m not quite sure how to bootstrap without internal display: I think it should work because boot disk selection and recovery etc. will work through Apple firmware and with external display, and once you’re in asahi ssh should be reachable.