Asahi Linux Moves From MIT to GPLv2 After Copied Code, and Drops the M3 Installer Flag

Asahi Linux is relicensing every repository from MIT to GPLv2 or later, the project said in its Linux 7.3 progress report on Nov. 7. The report, written by James Calligeros, says bad-faith actors copied unreleased feature code from personal forks without attribution, sometimes rewriting it with LLM assistance to hide where it came from.

All future code will carry a strong copyleft licence. The report cites WINE's 2002 move to LGPL as the precedent. It gives no date by which every repository will have switched, so for now the question for anyone shipping Asahi code in a closed product is which repositories flip first. The same fight over who may reuse code is playing out elsewhere: Rune, a pre-release Rust UI framework, takes no pull requests at all.

What M3 owners get on Nov. 7

The Asahi report says the installer no longer requires the EXPERT flag for M3 machines, following almost no issues from early adopters. DCP, the display coprocessor driver, is now enabled, with performance and battery gains. Sleep works on M3 devices, and the area around the notch on MacBooks is usable.

The graphics stack is the missing piece. A team of Alyssa Millburn, Anna Maniscalco and TellowKrinkle presented their M3 GPU reverse engineering at XDC, and m1n1, Asahi's bootloader, can now initialise the GPU and draw a triangle. The report says the M3 GPU differs from the M1 and M2 designs and that bringing it into upstream Mesa needs a lot of engineering work.

Fedora reaches the same conclusion from the distribution side. Fedora Magazine's announcement of Fedora Asahi Remix 45, by Davide Cavalca and Neal Gompa, says the release includes "out of the box initial support for Apple M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max" but that "The GPU drivers enabling performant 3D acceleration on the M3 systems are not included at this point." They are expected through a later Mesa update.

The two sources disagree by a day on the release date. Fedora Magazine's post is dated Nov. 2; the Asahi report says Fedora Linux 45 and the Remix shipped Nov. 3.

Thunderbolt works, but not for your dock

The project promised Thunderbolt support within 2024 and missed it. The patches, led for nearly five years by a developer the report calls Sven, are on the kernel mailing list in a second version posted Sept. 6, 2026, and already ship in the downstream kernel.

USB3, XDomain and Thunderbolt networking work. PCIe tunnelling and DisplayPort tunnelling do not, and the report says most Thunderbolt docks need them. The practical result: a cable between two Macs works, a monitor dock does not.

Feature	Status in the 7.3 report
USB3 over Thunderbolt	Works
Thunderbolt networking	Works
PCIe tunnelling	Not supported
DisplayPort tunnelling	Not supported

Upstreaming: 3,100 lines of audio, 13,000 of video

The macaudio audio driver, about 3,100 lines with its Devicetree changes, is ready to submit after core ALSA changes and heavy modification of the Apple speaker and headset amplifier drivers. The AVD video decode driver, about 13,000 lines, is already on the mailing list after roughly three months downstream, which the report calls the shortest turnaround yet for a major SoC component.

Minimal Devicetrees for the M4 Pro, M4 Max and M5 exist, contributed in the M5 case by Yureka. They boot only to a TTY.

Gaming without the 20 percent VM penalty

Today's Windows-game stack runs FEX for x86 translation, WINE, and muvm, a thin VM that supplies 4 KiB pages on Apple's 16 KiB-page hardware. The report puts muvm's cost at about 20 percent depending on workload, with no Wayland support, slow I/O and input problems.

The workaround is P3S, per-process page size, by Google engineers Kalesh Singh and Frederick Mayle, which switches the TCR register on context switch. With it, Wolfenstein: The New Order reached more than 144 frames a second on an M2 Max Mac Studio, according to the report. Grand Theft Auto IV ran with performance the report calls "not fantastic". The patch is hard-coded for 16 KiB hosts and 4 KiB processes, so the project will not ship it downstream until Google's plans are clearer.

The M3 3D path waits on a Mesa update with no date attached. Unlike the ASN Bank case, where a bank decides which devices may run its app, the blocker here is reverse engineering the report says is still under way.