OMNUX

Install in one line

Run this from macOS on any M1 or M2 Mac today. M3 machines take the experimental track — see the truth table below.

Release notes →

The truth table

We don't do vaporware and we don't hide asterisks in footnotes. Here is every blocker, by silicon generation, as of August 2026:

• M1 / M2 series — shipping
  • Nothing blocking. Upstream Asahi baseline: full display, GPU acceleration, sleep, Thunderbolt, audio, TouchID (auth via PAM). This is the daily-driver track.
• M3 series — experimental, installs today
  • Working now: NVMe storage, WiFi, Bluetooth, keyboard & trackpad, CPU frequency scaling with big.LITTLE scheduling, speaker & headphone-jack audio, PCIe.
  • GPU driver — the big one. M3's GPU is a new architecture: Dynamic Caching, mesh shaders, hardware ray tracing, changed instruction encoding. Driver work is actively reverse-engineered but not finished. Until it lands, the desktop runs on software rendering — slow, hot, battery-hungry.
  • Display (DCP) driver. M3 machines can't run macOS 13.5, and Apple changed the DCP firmware interface for macOS 14. We currently inherit a framebuffer initialized by iBoot: no mode setting, no backlight control, inefficient scanout. New firmware ABI needs tracing against real hardware.
  • Brightness, display hotplug, HDMI out — all downstream of proper DCP bring-up.
  • Thunderbolt & USB3 on TB ports, DP alt mode — controller support WIP; USB-C data works on some ports.
  • Sleep/suspend and power-domain validation — unproven; expect to shut down instead of sleeping for now.
  • Webcam, microphones — not yet enabled on base M3.
  • Installer GA — upstream still marks the M3 installer WIP. Our experimental track bypasses that gate with explicit warnings; it is not a supported install.
  • M3 Ultra (T6032) — nearly everything above is TBA including DCP and USB; treat as unsupported even experimentally.
  • TouchID, Secure Enclave — TBA across all M3 variants.
• M4 series — not bootable yet, bring-up underway
  • Already merged ahead of upstream (in Omnux): m1n1 memory-controller + SART v4 + NVMe boot support for T8132, SMP reservation for M4, PCIe groundwork for T8140 (Pro/Max), kernel driver for M4's ANS2 NVMe variant, SMC/keyboard devicetrees for j604 desktops.
  • Devicetrees are the hard wall. Register bases, interrupt numbers and power domains for NVMe, SART, mailboxes and PCIe can only come from ADT dumps of physical M4 hardware. Without those dumps, nodes cannot be written — guessing would produce dead code. If you own an M4 Mac, you are the missing contributor.
  • Display path: zero. No DCP bring-up has started publicly for M4; even the iBoot-framebuffer trick is unproven on this silicon.
  • GPU: zero public reverse engineering. Presumed another ISA delta on top of M3's.
  • Power management unknown — PMP/pmgr offsets undocumented; cpufreq unproven.
  • Firmware risk: M4 machines ship with macOS versions whose firmware interfaces haven't been traced at all.
  • Installer: no entries yet. The chip IDs are known to our messaging layer only so we can tell M4 owners the truth instead of failing cryptically.
• M5 series — nothing exists anywhere on Earth yet
  • No public reverse engineering has begun. No ADT analysis, no m1n1 support, no devicetrees, no drivers, no installer knowledge. Announced March 2026 ("Fusion Architecture" Pro/Max); nobody outside Apple has booted Linux on one, not even to a serial console.
  • Boot protocol itself unknown — whether the existing iBoot → m1n1 chain loads at all, what changed in boot security, how the new architecture affects low-level init.
  • Prerequisite work already landing: better handling of Apple's non-macOS boot mode and new power-domain metadata (built for M4/A18-Pro bring-up) directly de-risks day one on M5.
  • The realistic sequence once hardware exists: ADT dump → serial bring-up → core SoC blocks → storage/input → display → GPU. That's a multi-quarter effort starting from the day someone puts a machine on a lab bench. We will integrate every scrap of it the moment it becomes public.

Why we exist

Asahi Linux performed one of the greatest reverse-engineering feats in the history of free software. Then upstream moved at the speed of caution. Omnux is what happens when you refuse to wait.

Every public patch that makes an Apple Silicon machine more of a computer — the M4 NVMe driver, M3 power management, the DCP display ABI, USB-C PHY fixes — lands in Omnux within days, build-validated, packaged, and shipped through a release pipeline that runs on our own hardware. No third-party CI gatekeeper. No waiting.

And the piece upstream hasn't finished? The M3 GPU driver is being built by us, under the MIT license. When it's done, upstream can have it — and so can everyone else, forever, no strings attached.

Built on giants

Omnux stands on the shoulders of the Asahi Linux team — Hector Martin, the GPU reverse-engineering crew, and every contributor who proved locked silicon isn't impossible silicon. Everything we produce flows back upstream first. Our forks carry only what hasn't merged yet.

Asahi Linux · Arch Linux ARM · Omarchy · the Linux kernel community.

Go deeper