Linux can now be run on the Mac Mini with Apple Silicon

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Since Apple launched its new Macs with the company’s new high-performance ARM chips, third-party software developers have been working hard to implement alternate operating systems on the new hardware. At the start of last month, a few developers booted Windows 10 and Fedora Linux on a Mac M1 via virtualization, but the biggest breakthrough in developing alternative operating systems for Mac M1s came from the team at Corellium, a company specializing in the virtualization of ARM devices. The team managed to port Linux and make it “fully usable” on the M1 Mac Mini.

In a blog post, Corellium explains how they ported Linux to the new Macs. The company leveraged its experience by developing the Sandcastle Project – which allowed Android booting on older iPhones susceptible to the checkm8 exploit – to write Linux drivers for newer Apple SoCs. Fortunately, Apple officially allows custom kernels to be started on Apple Silicon Macs, so you don’t have to take advantage of an exploit to start an unsigned kernel. Without going into detail – the Corellium blog post does a great job – Apple Silicon’s firmware interfaces and boot process are very different from other 64-bit ARM SoCs. With a little work, the Corellium team managed to add support for enough hardware interfaces to boot Ubuntu Linux on the M1 Mac Mini.

The fixes needed to boot Linux on M1 Macs are documented here, while the source code for the preloader needed to boot the processor cores can be found here. The changes were pushed upstream, but it will take a lot more work before the code is merged. Other members of the Linux community are working to support Linux on M1 Macs, thankfully. Most notably, the team behind the crowd-funded Asahi Linux project – which aims to port Arch Linux to Apple Silicon Macs – is working on reverse engineering the GPU architecture to enable hardware acceleration. In order to boot Linux directly on M1 Macs, work is underway to use PongoOS as a boot loader.

If you want to try Linux on your own Mac Mini M1, Corellium has shared instructions on how to boot Ubuntu. You can find the full instructions here, but in summary you will need to download their live image (which is slightly modified from the ARM64 Ubuntu version for the Raspberry Pi), copy the image to an external USB drive (which must be at least 16 GB in capacity), connect your USB drive to the Mac Mini’s USB-C port, boot into the recovery operating system, install the custom kernel (Corellium provided a setup script), then log in using the default credentials.

As you can see, the installation process is not very user-friendly, so beginners are not recommended to get by with Linux on their Mac Mini. Plus, there’s no GPU acceleration or support for the M1’s machine learning cores, so don’t expect playing games or performing ML tasks. Still, this is exciting news for anyone interested in PC and Linux hardware. The performance and battery life offered by Apple Silicon MacBooks is second to none, so these machines will be perfect for programming on the go. Even Linus Torvalds agrees.



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