Asahi Linux is a project that aims to port Linux to Apple Silicon chips, which use a custom arm-based architecture.

The project is fundamentally important given the popularity of Apple Silicon Max, and it's also a heroic effort because Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform.

Alyssa Rosenzweig is a well-known computer scientist who describes herself as a graphics

developer passionate about software freedom. She is currently a contractor at Valve where she develops

open source software to improve Linux gaming. Alyssa is also a contributor to Asahi Linux and works

on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU among other contributions to the project.

Alyssa joins the podcast to talk about reverse engineering hardware, Asahi Linux, new advances in

gaming on Asahi, and more. This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer. Check the show notes for more

information on Sean's work and where to find him.

Alyssa, welcome the show. Hi, it's great to be here. Yeah, thanks so much for being here.

I'm very excited to talk to this project.

I talked to lots of people.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting things that I've got to talk about in a while.

But before we get into that, I thought it might be helpful for listeners to cover a little bit of the history of Apple and chip designs and set the sage, so to speak. So feel free to jump in if you have something to add or additional context.

I'm sure you know way more about the space than I do.

But essentially, the X-86, which was created by Intel back in 1978, is the most popular

and widely used chip architecture in the world.

Intel, AMD chips are based on this,

and Apple's been using the X86 chips since 2006. Because Apple was using X86 chips for their

Mac computers, those computers could of course run OSX, but they could also run things like

Windows and Linux on them because the CPU instruction set was known.

The ARM chip architecture, Acorn Risk Machine was created in 1985.

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