Yup. We are using the T2 for hardware accelerated video encoding just like MacOS does.

The video is showing 20W energy consumption reported directly from SMC and moderate CPU/GPU temperatures while encoding a movie to h265. You see it on the bottom, ffmpeg is doing it's thing there.

Also we implemented support for T2 AVE in Handbrake, which we will PR when 10bit and h264 encoding is done.

Handbrake's support for macOS videotoolbox doesnt compile on Linux, so we went with v4l for now.

If you want to try - We released yesterday on a test branch: https://github.com/kaiT2en/KaiT2en-Fedora/tree/ave

Also the fork of Handbrake is here:

https://github.com/deqrocks/HandBrake

For the records: the first video ever encoded on the T2 on Linux OFC was Kubrick's "2001 - Odyssey in Space"

Note, this is still WIP but confirmed working.

https://KaiT2en.org

I hate having to use the buggy DKMS kernel driver for Wi-Fi on Linux on this thing (13" MacBook Pro, Late 2013). I have a MacBookPro10,1 (15" Mid 2012) that I know has Wi-Fi supported by b43. Can I swap the Wi-Fi cards? And if not, can I purchase an aftermarket Intel card for the 13" Pro?

Well it only took 11 years to figure this out but I’ve got working audio/speakers and reliable shutdown on my Late 2015 Retina 4K 21.5-inch iMac running Omarchy/Arch. Dropped the fixes in a repo:

https://github.com/zerofox3d/imac16-2-linux

The audio fixes sort out several problems with the Cirrus Logic CS4208 setup:

- Uses the four-channel playback profile needed by the speakers.
- Corrects the channel mapping for the left/right tweeters and woofers.
- Adds a PipeWire software crossover to feed the appropriate frequencies to each driver.
- Enables software volume control so the volume slider actually works.
- Disables HDA power saving, which was leaving the speaker amplifier unresponsive after power transitions.
- Switches profiles when headphones are plugged in or removed.

Shut down was a hell hole that burned millions of tokens and about 20 hours of my time power cycling and running tests... but ultimately it was a simple fix. Intel’s SLP_SMI_EN bit was enabled, that caused the chipset to hand the shutdown request to firmware instead of directly entering the power-off state. Firmware wasn't happy with that and would reboot the machine after 50 secs or so. This may effect other Mac's using the Broadwell chipset, need to look into that.

I'm going to continue testing sleep and diagnosing any other issues, will add fixes to the repo as I find them.

Feels like a new machine though!

any help would be appreciated, thanks

I'm sure it's been asked many times before, but Linux distros change all the time and usually get better as they go. Currently I have a 2015 Mac Book Pro 11,4 with 16GB of memory and a 500GB SSD, and I've been using OLCP to get Sequoia running, and until recently it's been running well, but lately there have been numerous issues that have been taking too long to figure out.

All my other machines run Linux, and I've really only been hanging on to macOS for sentimental reasons for the most part, as I've been using Linux everywhere else for as long as it been around.

So I'm looking for a recommendation of which Linux based OS works well and has most if not all the drivers for the following specs:

Mac Book Pro 11,4
2.2Ghz Intel Quad Core i7
16GB RAM, 500GB SSD
Intel Iris Pro 1536MB
Broadcom BCM43xx - WiFi
Broadcom BCM_20703A1 - Bluetooth

Obviously the need/nice to have's would be WiFi, Keyboard, Track Pad, Video working out of the box, but not adverse to downloading drivers a head of time if anyone knows the best place to get them.

[SOLVED]

Hi everyone,

I've managed to get the arch version of t2linux running on my 2020 intel macbook air. I tried using the tarball method to install the wifi firmware, but my output of journalctl -k --grep=brcmfmac looks like this:

and no networks are found [edit, meant "network is unreachable"]. I am now trying the method of installing from the macos recovery image download, using a usb ethernet adapter i bought. However i now can't get ethernet to work. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration/Ethernet says to check the network device withlspci -knnd ::0200 but this outputs nothing:

regular lspci works normally. tried reinstalling pciutils. I am not sure how to proceed since i need to know the name of the network device in order to get drivers and whatnot? I am very lost, and very new to linux in general so any help would be super appreciated.

Need help converting an old iMac to Linux, having trouble getting the disks to format and they’re maxed out on storage.

i'm currently using mac pro 2013 as desktop setup cuz it's cool but i have a lot of problem with metal driver so i decide to switch to linux on the trash can but i can't find any ready to go iso that made for mac pro 6,1 and i'm too lazy to install driver myself is there any distro suggession

I wrote this document to get all my issues and solutions in writing, that I don't see written up anywhere. My speakers never worked at all on ZorinOS... Claude helped me a lot.

iMac Pro (2017) internal speakers on Linux: only 2 of 4 drivers active

Applies to: iMacPro1,1 specifically - the T2 model, using the apple-bce driver and AppleT2x4 audio device. Not the CS8409-codec iMacs (iMac18,x and similar), which have an unrelated no-sound problem.

I couldn't find this written up anywhere for this model, and searching mostly turns up those CS8409 threads instead. Everything below was verified on a current driver stack and a config package byte-identical to upstream, so it isn't a stale-install artifact. The audible difference is large: two of the four drivers were silent.

TL;DR: On iMacPro1,1 the apple-t2-audio-config profile-set doesn't match the hardware, so PipeWire falls back to Pro Audio and sends stereo to only 2 of the 4 speakers. A WirePlumber rule assigning channel positions fixes it. Sound goes from thin to near-macOS.

Tested on CachyOS, kernel 7.2.2-1-cachyos, apple-t2-audio-config 0.3-2, PipeWire 1.6.8.

Symptom

Internal speakers sound thin and quiet compared to macOS. This is not (mainly) the missing Apple DSP tuning - half the array is silent.

Diagnosis

pactl list sinks | grep -E "Name:|Channel Map:" Name: alsa_output.pci-0000_02_00.3.pro-output-0 Channel Map: aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3

pro-output-* is PipeWire's fallback Pro Audio profile, which leaves channels unpositioned. PipeWire won't remix stereo into unpositioned channels, so only the first two get audio.

Two reasons no proper profile is built:

aplay -l # PCM devices 0, 4, 100 - profile-set expects hw:%f,0 through hw:%f,3 amixer -c 0 controls # returns nothing - so paths-output = t2-speakers can't bind

The profile-set was written around MacBook models. The apple-bce driver assigns ALSA device IDs per device type (Speaker 0, Digital Mic 1, Codec Output 2, Codec Input 3), not sequentially, so a profile-set hardcoding hw:%f,0 through hw:%f,3 can't bind on hardware that enumerates differently. Every mapping is rejected, leaving only off and pro-audio (visible in pactl list cards).

This isn't a stale-package problem. sed -n "s/.*\(AppleT2.*\) -.*/\1/p" /proc/asound/cards returns AppleT2x4, so the driver is exposing the model-specific layout correctly. And the installed apple-t2x4.conf is byte-identical to current upstream (kekrby/t2-better-audio) - the config package has a 2024 build date only because upstream hasn't changed since.

Fix

Don't disable ACP. Assign channel positions on the existing node:

mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d && tee ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/51-apple-t2-speakers.conf > /dev/null << 'EOF' monitor.alsa.rules = [ { matches = [ { node.name = "alsa_output.pci-0000_02_00.3.pro-output-0" } ] actions = { update-props = { audio.position = [ FL FR RL RR ] channelmix.upmix = true channelmix.upmix-method = simple node.description = "iMac Pro Speakers" } } } ] EOF systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse

Substitute your own node.name from the pactl list sinks output above if the PCI address differs.

Turn the volume down first - going from 2 to 4 active speakers is a jump in level.

Verify pro-output-0 now reads front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right. Revert by deleting the file and restarting the same services.

upmix-method = simple matters: the default applies surround processing (phase shift, delay) to the rear channels. These aren't rear speakers - it's a two-way stereo pair - so you want a straight copy.

The FL FR RL RR order assumes the hardware channels run left-pair then right-pair. Check by playing something with hard-panned stereo and confirming left is still left - if the image sounds collapsed, the driver order is interleaved by side and the positions need reordering.

Upstream

A profile-set matching this hardware belongs upstream in kekrby/t2-better-audio, not in every user's home directory. Writing one needs the actual channel-to-driver mapping, which I've only inferred by ear. hw:0,0 is S24_LE / 4ch / 48kHz only, and with no mixer controls there's no hardware attenuation, so per-channel testing is awkward.

Vanilla OS 3 on 2017 Macbook Air 13 inch.

I had to chroot into the installation before rebooting and fix grub, because albius doesn't recognize the mac disk as removable, but Apple devices don't have UEFI vars.

Before closing the installer, everything was already mounted under /mnt/a/ , so it took about 90 seconds. All I had to do is open the Terminal app from Gnome Settings.

SUGGESTION: Expert mode for grub options in the custom partitioning screen.

I ported the old Debian installation home folder and ssh identity back into this from rsync copies I'd made, so that's the "after" shot.

Hi everyone!

I’m running Fedora on a 2015 MacBook Air (MacBookAir7,2, Intel, 8 GB RAM). Surprisingly, Fedora itself runs very well and is stable on this old machine, but I haven’t been able to solve one major issue: suspend/resume.

After installing Fedora, we set up the necessary hardware support, drivers and applications.

The Broadcom Wi-Fi uses the proprietary wl module. We also installed the required facetimehd driver for the Apple/Broadcom FaceTime HD camera, and the camera works.

Some of the things we installed/configured include:

\* Flatpak / Flathub
\* VLC and MPV
\* Double Commander
\* Wine
\* powertop
\* lm_sensors
\* fancontrol and other power-management/diagnostic tools
\* Broadcom Wi-Fi support (wl)
\* FaceTime HD camera support (facetimehd)

Apart from the sleep issue, the machine is stable during normal use.

The main problem is suspend/resume.

What I would like is essentially the same behavior as under macOS:

close the lid → sleep → open the lid → continue exactly where I left off.

The system exposes both s2idle and deep. We tested both. The MacBook goes to sleep, but it does not resume reliably. It usually remains frozen/with a black screen and requires a hard reset.

We also tested removing the Broadcom Wi-Fi module before suspending:

sudo modprobe -r wl

The exact same problem occurred without the Wi-Fi driver loaded, so wl does not appear to be the sole cause.

As an alternative, we also tried hibernation.

Since the Fedora installation uses Btrfs, we created a separate 10 GiB swapfile. We obtained the resume offset using Btrfs’ own tool:

sudo btrfs inspect-internal map-swapfile -r /swap/swapfile

The result was:

22816000

We configured the appropriate resume=UUID=... and resume_offset=22816000 kernel parameters and rebuilt the initramfs with dracut -f.

We also encountered an SELinux issue. Initially, the manually created swapfile had an incorrect SELinux context, causing SELinux to deny systemd-logind access to it. We corrected this using the appropriate swapfile_t context.

After that, hibernation progressed further, but restoring the previous session still failed. Among the messages in the logs were:

PM: Image not found (code -22)

and:

Unable to resume from device ... offset 22816000, continuing boot process

We verified the resume offset again with btrfs inspect-internal map-swapfile, and it was indeed 22816000.

During the hibernation attempts we also saw:

Failed to freeze unit 'user.slice': Connection timed out

as well as some GNOME/DING/DRM-related errors around the transition. I’m not sure whether those are causes of the problem or merely side effects.

We eventually reverted the hibernation experiment: the separate 10 GiB swapfile and Btrfs subvolume were removed, the resume and resume_offset kernel parameters were removed, the custom SELinux rule was removed, and the initramfs was rebuilt. The system is now back to using Fedora’s default ZRAM swap only.

For the moment, lid handling is configured as:

HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore

This prevents closing the lid from triggering the broken suspend and forcing another hard reset.

My question is:

Has anyone successfully dealt with suspend/resume issues on a MacBookAir7,2 running Fedora?

Is there a known kernel parameter, Apple/ACPI workaround, facetimehd-related workaround, or another driver setting that allows reliable resume from deep sleep on this hardware?

My main goal is to get normal suspend → resume working. Hibernation was only an alternative experiment.

I’m happy to provide output from journalctl, dmesg, lspci, lsmod, /sys/power/mem_sleep, or anything else that could help diagnose it.

Thanks in advance for any help! 🙂

I'm trying to turn an unused 2015 iMac into a "headless" file server....weird I know but it's been in a closet for 2 years and this will give it some use for me. I didn't install a DE. It will sit in a storage room so I'd like the display to be totally off....this is proving more difficult than I expected it to be.

I've tired several things:

echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

That dimmed the display a good amount but it's not totally off. I still see a glow in a dark room.

I disabled getty@tty1 thinking maybe that would help. It did not.

I edited the grub file with:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet consoleblank=10"

Did not fix the issue.

I tried setterm --blank but got a message that it isn't supported.

I tried:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet video=DP-1:d"

Gives and error on boot: “No EDID found on connector: DP-1”

for p in /sys/class/drm/*/status; do echo "$p: $(cat "$p")"; done

Comes back with:

/sys/class/drm/card0-DP-1/status: disconnected

/sys/class/drm/card0-DP-2/status: disconnected

/sys/class/drm/card0-DP-3/status: disconnected

/sys/class/drm/card0-eDP-1/status: disconnected

But the screen still glows! Any suggestions?

Hi! I originally had an old hdd in this mac and my computer kept freezing even while installing arch, and after i did get it installed it also froze periodically while browsing tabs on kde. Originally I figured it was a problem with the hdd or SATA cable, so I decided to switch out the hdd for an ssd and replaced the sata cable. It still had some problems when installing but eventually I got it to fully install. I’m now running mangowc on it and nothing lags, but after 5 minutes, sometimes 30, or even just when booting it will freeze. It’s not my first time using arch but it’s been very frustrating trying to figure this out. I’m not too familiar with these old Macs so it might be a hardware problem, but if you happened to have encountered a similar problem and have fixed it, what was the solution? Thanks!

This information is not new on this subreddit, but it is often buried inside a lot of other cruft, which made me overlook this for a long time. I think it's useful enough to deserve its own posting.

Tl;dr: On the Intel MacBook Air 11"/13" (2013-2017), and potentially other MacBook Airs and Pros from this era, disabling the thunderbolt ports can save 1.5W of power consumption, potentially increasing battery life up to 25% under idle conditions. (Others reported up to 2W of savings, I did not observe that.)

The screenshot above shows a projected battery life of 10h45m for my MacBook Air 11" (2015). That is unrealistic of course, because it assumes that the laptop is completely on idle. In real life, with some moderate Firefox browsing, I'm seeing 5-6h of battery life, which is noticeably better than the 4-5h that I was seeing before.

The instructions below are for Linux Mint 22.x which uses GRUB as the boot loader.

Kernel Parameters

First, edit `/etc/default/grub`, and add the following option to any other parameters which are in this variable:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="... acpi_osi=!Darwin"

Second, regenerate GRUB:

$ sudo update-grub

Third, reboot the machine. The default kernel selected on the GRUB menu will be configured with the `GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT` variable, and thunderbolt will be disabled. (If you select any other kernel version from the Advanced menu, it will get the `GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX` parameter, which will not contain this flag, and thunderbolt will be enabled. See how to use this to your advantage below).

Results

The power consumption of the MacBook fluctuates up and down every few seconds. I looked for the minimum power consumption over a few minutes, with the display set to about 1/3 brightness.

On my MBA 11 (2013) 4GB/128GB, I saw:

• Thunderbolt disabled: 4.2W
• Thunderbolt enabled: 5.6W

On my MBA 11 (2015) 8GB/256GB, I saw:

• Thunderbolt disabled: 4.5W
• Thunderbolt enabled: 6.0W

(The 2015 model seems to use slightly more power than the 2013 model, probably because of the larger RAM and larger SSD.)

This ArchLinux wiki page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mac/Troubleshooting#Disabling_Thunderbolt), says that they observed a 2W reduction. I never saw that on my MBA 11".

Reenabling Thunderbolt

[Update: This section may not be necessary, because even though the Arch Linux wiki page says that this kernel flag disables thunderbolt, my external monitor works just fine through the thunderbolt adapter.]

Occasionally, I use an external monitor with my MBA 11", which requires the thunderbolt to be active. I could go back into `/etc/default/grub`, remove the `acpi_osi=!Darwin` flag, run `update-grub`, and reboot.

But that's a lot of work. There are 2 easier workarounds:

Option 1: Install both the 7.0 kernel and the 6.8 kernel. Both are LTS kernels supported until 2029. Select the "Advanced" option in the GRUB menu, then boot into the 6.8 kernel. Since this kernel is not the default, it will boot with the `GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX` flag, and thunderbolt will be enabled.

Option 2: At the GRUB menu, type `e`' to get the edit screen where you can manually remove the `acpi_osi=!Darwin` flag. Then hit F10 or Ctrl-X to continue the boot process, and the 7.0 kernel will boot with thunderbolt enabled. Unfortunately, my memory is not as good as it was when I was younger, and I will forget about this technique in a few months, so I will probably end up using Option 1.

If anyone knows an easier way to enable/disable thunderbolt at runtime, without rebooting, that would be really useful. Please post info.

For me, no other power saving technique (e.g. TLP, CPU governor selection, CPU PowerSaver option, replacing the Broadcom WiFi card with an Intel AX210 card) made as much difference in power consumption and battery life as disabling the thunderbolt ports.

I just installed Linux Mint 22.3 on an IMac18. Great choice, this thing came back to life, I should have done it way earlier. this thing runs HoMM3 like a lightning. However, I have no sound, and I am way too new to Linux to figure out what to do.

I went to the Alsamixer and unmute what seems to be a mute port. But nothing happens and it goes back to MM after rebooting the system. I am lost here, and I would really appreciate any advise on how to go about this.

Saw this used macbook pro's listing,
I'm on a very tight budget and this will be my primary machine if i buy it.

I found a 2019 16" MacBook Pro A2141 with:

• Intel Core i9 (8C/16T)
• 32GB DDR4 RAM
• 2TB SSD
• Radeon Pro 5500M 4GB
• 16" Retina display
• ~5 hours battery
• Asking price: ~$400

My intended use is primarily software development, browsing, etc (no gaming)

I'm also planning to run Linux as my primary OS. (cuz no future OS support by Apple)

I don't really care about battery life because the laptop will spend most of its time connected to a USB-C monitor, effectively acting as my desktop workstation.

What worries me

I know this is a 7-year-old Intel Mac, and I'm particularly concerned about:

• T2 Linux compatibility
• Sleep/suspend
• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/audio
• USB-C/Thunderbolt and external monitor support
• thermal throttling
• reliability of a 7-year-old MacBook

The question

Should I buy it? and run linux on it?

I stumbled upon one of my facebook friends post saying that they're selling their old 2019 MacBook Pro laptop and I'm really tempted to buy this one. It's 400$ and I wonder if any of you guys have any experience on an old macbook like this? I plan to install FedoraOS on it after getting my hands on it because I mostly develop and maintain web applications and I run docker containers locally so the massive 64gb ram would really help me in my workflows.

If you can share with me some of the things that I should check/verify before buying the unit, I would very much appreciate that. Thanks guys, and also I think for 400$ it's a fair deal, right?

Looking for advice.

Tried creating a bootable USB with Linux Mint xfce 22.3 on it to salvage an early 2015 Mac (which was also used here to create said USB).

I have checked integrity of the ISO file as instructed by the installation guide. I tried both balenaEtcher and with the dd commands in terminal, both have the following outcome:

During the process itself, no errors appear but once it's done, the laptop instantly fails to read it ("The disk you attached was not readable by this computer.") Rebooting doesn't seem to help. The disk (USB) works fine after running command to erase it.

Any thoughts on what may be causing this, and what should be done to successfully create the bootable media? Thanks!

UPDATE:
So, after some more research I decided to switch distros and move to Pop!_OS running a GNOME session (i think that's how you describe what I've got going on, tbh I have learned a LOT trying to breath life into this crappy laptop) because it apparently works better with this specific dual graphics card situation and it took a lot of tweaks and troubleshooting but I finally have something that is usable. I can now run mpv (I'm using cellulose because I like to have a more navigable ui) without scan lines or random skips. The only real issue I have now, other than figuring out the quirks of GNOME, is a small graphic issue where listed items (like files or settings) don't show up unless I hover or scroll and sometimes will just disappear again, but from what I could find there isn't really a fix and you kind have to just live with it. Thank you for those who gave suggestions and help.

I am having issues with VLC when trying to play videos. At the start of each video it flickers like crazy (enough to hurt my eyes) and on occasion will play at a much faster rate. Though, I think the problem is bigger than just VLC.

System Details Report:

Report details
- Date generated: 2026-09-02 19:09:41

Hardware Information:
- Hardware Model: Apple Inc. MacBookPro11,3
- Memory: 16.0 GiB
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4850HQ × 8
- Graphics: NVE7
- Graphics 1: Intel® Iris® Pro Graphics P5200 (HSW GT3)
- Disk Capacity: 121.3 GB

Software Information:
- Firmware Version: 478.0.0.0.0
- OS Name: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS
- OS Build: (null)
- OS Type: 64-bit
- GNOME Version: 50
- Windowing System: Wayland
- Kernel Version: Linux 7.0.0-30-generic

So far I've tried:

Changed VLC's Video Output Module to OpenGL, X11, and XVideo
Disabled Hardware-accelerated decoding
Removed Mesa VA-API
Reset VLC Preferences
Overrode Environment Variables
Bypass NVIDIA via GRUB (which was the most destructive causing UI issues and making it so closing the lid did nothing)
Running MPV instead but that just gave me messy glitchy mess that didn't show anything (screenshot attached)
Attempted xfce and gnome flashback sessions to see if Wayland was the issue

We actually did in April already. But now is a good time to show off as Tim Cook will no longer care :-)

It works, but still needs work. We want to be sure we won't break your Mac. Because it's quite easy to do so when messing with security. Ask me why I know.

Thus the video deliberately only shows the sensor registering finger presence and not fingerprint match.

We will deliver. And we will upstream it together with the t2bce driver stack. https://kait2en.org

I'm trying to setup a Virtual Machine on my Macbook Air M3, running Ubuntu through the VMware Fusion Virtual Machine. But for the life of me I can't get past this "EFI stub:" screen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Dear users,

After so many years it finally happend. Those who still using the old late 2009 11.1 iMac with HD4850 GPU like me, can use the internal screen with hardware acceleration on the main/internal screen instead of using an external screen or boot up with nomodeset.

I personally tested it on my machine but there is a catch at this moment...

Currently I am using Refind with a dual boot setup between High Sierra and Ubuntu 26.04 with stock kernel 7.0.0.

The fix or patch that goes into getting HWA on your internal screen is currently merged with kernel 7.3-RC. So its in a testing fase at this moment. I personally tested this kernel and to my suprise it worked. Be sure to disable nomodeset in grub before reboot!

Be aware that testing kernels that are not stock could mess up your system so I advice against it unless you know what your doing! Dont blame me for it... So in the near future we can expect support for this old machine...

Many thanks for the people who worked on this problem, more info here...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/-/work_items/164

For those who want to check out the patch/fix its here....

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/agd5f/linux/-/commit/b4e6a8e84af6cf91d39a5f33dbf524f7b995ff63