Since the original August testing of Asahi Linux on the Apple M2 MacBook Air, the Arch Linux based Asahi Linux distribution carrying all of the latest patches have moved from Linux 5.19 Git to Linux 6.1 Git, KDE Plasma 5.25 to 5.26, Mesa 22.1 to Mesa 22.2, and many other package updates. The reverse engineering and driver writing efforts for Linux on both the Apple M1 and M2 remain very active. There also continues to be a great deal of work going into the in-development Apple Silicon graphics driver support both with the Rust-written DRM kernel driver and the AGX Gallium3D driver being developed and the experimental Vulkan code.

Since August there has been Asahi Linux work on USB3 functionality, continued progress on audio - getting speaker support safe and also getting the headphone jack support working, backlight progress, power management, and more. With months having passed since then and the Apple M1/M2 Linux support has continued to advance upstream as well as more work hitting the Asahi Linux tree, here is a fresh look at where the performance of the M2 is currently at compared to that initial at-launch support. Back during the summer once Asahi Linux introduced initial Apple M2 SoC support I ran many Apple M2 Linux benchmarks including a look at how the M2 competes with AMD and Intel laptop processors.

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