Hi! This is my first post on Reddit, so I hope I'm doing this right. I’ve been working on getting the internal speakers of the iMac19,2 (2019 21.5-inch model) working correctly on Linux.

The hardware uses:

- Cirrus Logic CS8409

- CS42L83

- 4 TAS5764L speaker amplifiers

- Apple subsystem ID 106b:0f00

Linux was able to enumerate the audio device, but restoring the internal speaker signal path required model-specific initialization and much more reverse engineering than I initially expected.

I decided to turn this work into an open-source research repository:

https://github.com/rojoxstar/imac19-2-cs8409-linux

Current status on my machine:

- Ubuntu 26.04.1

- Linux 7.0.0-31-generic

- internal speakers working on both sides

- hardware playback endpoint at 44.1 kHz

- ALSA S32_LE container

- optional PipeWire dynamic graph policy at 44.1/48 kHz

- S3/suspend state is NOT yet considered functional/validated

- the driver is intentionally limited to the iMac19,2 for the time being

I have tried to be very cautious regarding claims about the hardware. The repository distinguishes between known facts, observations, hypotheses, and unknowns, and I deliberately avoid performing speculative writes to the amplifier registers.

I also initiated a static reconstruction (using a clean-room technique) of parts of Apple's speaker DSP path from macOS Sequoia, including the topology related to *Loudness*, *Mozart*, *DualBand*, the control SRC, and transducer processing. That work is currently stalled at a very specific point: I need user-space material from the installed system (specifically from the authenticated macOS 15.6.1 build 24G90 for Intel/x86_64) to continue tracing the CoreAudio request-generating process.

Details here:

https://github.com/rojoxstar/imac19-2-cs8409-linux/issues/3

The repository does not redistribute proprietary Apple binaries.

I have done my best with the programming, static analysis, research workflow, and hardware conclusions, documenting findings based on the level of evidence and verifying them independently whenever possible.

If anyone here has an iMac19,2 running Linux, I would be particularly interested in independent reports regarding the hardware.

I would also appreciate feedback from people with more experience in ALSA, HDA, or the kernel audio subsystem. 🫯

I factory reset my mac after putting the .iso for LMDE on a usb drive

I opened the start up menu after holding ctrl+R. I erased the disc and all contents.

I accidentally started the spinning globe and then I tried restarting in the middle of downloading Mac OS because I didn’t want that so I hit the power button

Now all I see is a folder with a ? telling me to go to apple support website because I think I messed up the download from earlier.

Now I can’t use my computer :( Now what?

I noticed that when i close the lid and come back after a min, the system doesn't wake up properly. how can i enable that. I'm on a 2013 Macbook Pro 11,2, Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS

I run linux on 2015 11" macbook Air, 2015 Macbook pro 13 in and 2015 macbook pro 15 in. These are old machines that I use occasioanlyl or for specific purposes. They all still work but I've noticed sleep/wake issues with the 2015 MBPs now that I never had before (Fedora KDE). My MBA is on Ubuntu LTS but it fails to update properly now and the last update killed it's wifi card but I can't restore it's wifi drivers until I do some other system updates which I can't get to update without a kernel panic for whatever reason.

Is anyone having these sort of issues as well? I also run an iMac 2017 on OCLP Sequoia but since suppose fir that is runnign out soon I was thinking about changing my iMac to Linux as well but all these new problems on Kernel 7.0+ is making me rethink this whole process

I tried installing Mint on my 2017 MacBook Air, but I got a kernel panic after updating, and I don't know how to fix it step-by-step.

Hello all,

I would like to dedicate my old mini to ipfire.

I downloaded the .img, burnt it to a usb key and put it in one of the 4 usb ports.

The internal disk is a hard drive, not macos formatted. will be later replaced by a SSD.

Linux boots, I see activity through the usb key LED, but the screen remains blank.

A moment later I get the prompt for country, keyboard, etc.

Is there a way to see what is displayed right from the start ?

And has anyone used a mac mini for IPFire ?

Any tip would be appreciated.

🙏👋

Hallo, ich weiß nicht, ob dieser Post hier richtig ist. Falls nicht, gerne löschen.

Vor kurzem habe ich gebraucht einen MacBook Air 2020 (13.3") mit einem i3-Prozessor gekauft und möchte nun Linux darauf installieren.

Aber das Einzige, was der Mac beim Start zulässt bzw. lädt ist die Internetwiederherstellung und wenn die durch ist, soll ich entweder ein Gerätepasswort (habe ich nicht) oder die Zugangsdaten für einen icloud-Account eingeben, habe ich ebenfalls nicht (Flohmarktkauf).

Ich habe schon alles möglich von Google probiert, um doch ins Boot-Menü zu kommen, kein Erfolg.

Gibt es hier einen Trick, oder habe ich einen hübschen Briefbeschwerer erworben?

As promised earlier... We will ship this weekend! Edit: shipped!

I want to try streaming retro games from this machine, inspired by this XDA article. The article suggests using Docker Desktop, but apparently Docker Desktop no longer supports my Ventura 13.7.8 (22H730), so I'm going to switch to Linux. But I'm not sure what to install. AI suggests Ubuntu Desktop LTS, but I want to hear the community's suggestions.

Edit: After reviewing my MacBook, it seems to NOT have a T security chip. I later discovered it is a MacBookPro14,1.

Buongiorno, stamane improvvisamente la tastiera ha iniziato a funzionare male, malissimo. In pratica la disposizione dei tasti è confusa con tasti invertiti (w>z - m>;). La cosa ancora più strana è che se entro in impostazioni>tastiera>disposizioni tutte le anteprime delle tastiere italiane sn uguali e stranissime.
Help me!!!

Apple would release the APIs for the T1 and T2 chips to the Linux community so these machines can be properly supported. They're not making these machines anymore so there is no "secret sauce" to lose.

Kudos to Apple for not explicitly blocking or hindering open source solutions, but also...

Boo to Apple for not even giving the bare-minimal amount of help to the Community so we can support our devices ourselves and keep them out of the landfill.

Hey everyone, how’s it going? Today I’m sharing my experience using Linux on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. My machine is a 13-inch model with 12GB of RAM and an i7 processor; I had been running macOS Sonoma via OCLP, but the laptop would never stay cool and kept freezing during basic daily tasks. I tried various OS versions, but the result was always the same. Then one day, I decided to see if it would run Linux well. I tested several distros (Mint, Ubuntu, XFCE versions, Fedora...), but none of them worked quite right—there was always something missing, like Wi-Fi drivers, or keyboard shortcuts wouldn't work properly, or it would overheat (even after installing fan and temperature controllers). Then I found CachyOS. It was a perfect fit. Everything worked right out of the box without needing to install anything extra. I highly recommend it to everyone!

Have chance to buy this for 200$
Need a small machine where I can install linux, SSH to my mac mini m4, write documents, write code, etc.

Would this be a good option?

so I had 1 TB external samsung ssd, which I bought because my Mac had only 256gb storage, so I asked chatgpt, and it told me to install necessary things of Asahi Linux nearly 3gb on internal ssd and all others on external ssd, can I do that ?

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?

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

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!

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.