09/03/2026
Linux on Apple Silicon takes another major step forward with Thunderbolt support
Linux support for Apple Silicon Macs continues to mature, and the Asahi Linux project has now reached another significant milestone: working USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support across Apple’s M3 family.
The achievement is particularly impressive because Apple does not provide Linux developers with the documentation or engineering support normally available for officially supported operating systems. Much of the work required to run Linux on Apple Silicon has therefore involved painstaking reverse engineering, hardware analysis and the development of open-source drivers from scratch.
For M3 Pro and M3 Max systems, developers had an additional challenge.
Apple moved from its earlier CD3217/ACE2 USB Type-C controller to a newer ACE3 controller using the SPMI bus. Asahi Linux contributors reverse engineered the changes and discovered that ACE3 retained much of the earlier controller’s register architecture behind the new interface.
The result: USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt are now working across M3-series Apple Silicon devices in Asahi Linux.
There is also important progress towards bringing the technology into upstream Linux.
On 30 August, developer Sven Peter submitted a 19-patch series providing initial USB4/Thunderbolt support for Apple M1, M2 and M3 SoCs to the Linux kernel mailing lists.
That distinction matters: Thunderbolt is not yet universally available through an ordinary upstream Linux kernel on every Apple Silicon Mac. Asahi’s official M1 and M2 support tables still list Thunderbolt as work in progress, while the newly submitted upstream patch series is undergoing the normal Linux kernel review process.
Meanwhile, Linux 7.3 development has begun
Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.3-rc1 on 30 August 2026, closing the latest merge window and beginning the testing phase for the next kernel release.
Torvalds described the release candidate as unusually large in terms of commits, although a substantial part of the overall diff comes from new AMD DCN6 GPU register headers.
The Thunderbolt patch submission and Linux 7.3-rc1 happened at roughly the same time, but they should not be confused: the Apple Silicon Thunderbolt work is a separate upstreaming effort and is not evidence that Thunderbolt support is already part of Linux 7.3-rc1.
From graphics and audio to webcams, power management, USB and now increasingly Thunderbolt, the progress made by the Asahi Linux community demonstrates just how far Linux on Apple Silicon has come since the first M1 Macs appeared.
And development is not stopping with M3: work on M4 and even M5 support is already under way.
Would you consider running Linux as your primary operating system on an Apple Silicon Mac once hardware support becomes comparable to macOS?
