Running Linux on a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip stopped being a lab experiment a long time ago — and it has just taken another leap: the Asahi Linux project got USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt working across the entire M3 family, and USB4/Thunderbolt support has started making its way toward the official kernel. All of this in the same week that Linus Torvalds opened testing for Linux 7.3.
The achievement: Thunderbolt without any help from Apple
What makes this achievement impressive is the context: Apple provides neither documentation nor engineering support for developers building alternative operating systems for its chips. Every Asahi Linux driver starts with reverse engineering — hardware analysis, observation of macOS behavior, and open-source code written from scratch.
On the M3 Pro and M3 Max there was an extra hurdle: Apple replaced the previous generations' USB Type-C controller (CD3217/ACE2) with a new ACE3, accessed over the SPMI bus. Asahi contributors unraveled the change and discovered that, behind the new interface, ACE3 retains much of the old controller's register architecture — which allowed them to adapt existing work. The result: USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt working on all M3-series devices on Asahi Linux.
One architectural detail reveals the complexity: each Type-C port with USB4 on Apple chips has a block called ACIO (Apple Converged I/O), which embeds its own ARM Cortex-M3 coprocessor, the USB4 router, an NHI controller, and an IOMMU. Each port on your Mac literally hides a little computer inside.
Toward the official kernel: the 19 patches
On 30 August, developer Sven Peter submitted to the kernel mailing lists a series of 19 patches with initial USB4/Thunderbolt support for the M1, M2, and M3 SoCs. Until then, this code lived only in Asahi's downstream tree.
It is a beginning, not the finish line. For now, the patches enable XDomain connections and USB3 tunnels over USB4; PCIe and DisplayPort tunnels do not work yet (they require more reverse engineering), and suspend has been disabled with active connections to prevent errors on resume. Asahi's official tables for M1 and M2 still list Thunderbolt as “in progress”.
And an important clarification to avoid confusing the news: these patches are not part of Linux 7.3-rc1. Both events happened almost on the same day, but the Thunderbolt series is undergoing normal review on the kernel mailing list — the upstream process has its own pace.
Meanwhile: Linux 7.3-rc1 is out
On that same 30 August, Torvalds released Linux 7.3-rc1, closing one of the largest merge windows in kernel history: more than 15 thousand commits and a tree approaching 41 million lines. Torvalds himself noted the unusual size — with the caveat that about a third of the diff comes from the arrival of AMD DCN6 GPU register headers. The release also includes groundwork for AMD Zen 6 and Btrfs performance improvements. If the release candidate schedule follows the usual pattern, the final Linux 7.3 release will arrive in the second half of October.
The state of Asahi on M3 today
Official Asahi Linux support for the M3 family was announced on 6 September 2026, with Fedora Asahi Remix (with KDE Plasma) as the reference distribution. What already works well: webcam, microphones, audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, accelerated AV1 video decoding, frequency scaling, and thermal management — a solid development workstation for those who live in the terminal.
What is still missing on M3: GPU 3D acceleration, suspend (closing the lid shuts down rather than sleeping, pending the display controller driver) and HDMI output. In other words: excellent for a stationary development machine; for full portable use, the M1 and M2 — which already have GPU acceleration — remain the more mature experience.
And the future: M4 and M5
Work has not stopped at M3: efforts are already targeting the M4 and M5 chips. M4, however, introduces new architectural barriers (such as SPTM, Apple's memory protection monitor), so the road promises to be longer. From graphics and audio to webcam, power, USB, and now Thunderbolt, Asahi's progress shows how far Linux on Apple Silicon has come since the first M1 Macs — through reverse engineering and open source.
Conclusion
The question remains: once hardware support reaches macOS levels, would it be worth running Linux as the main operating system on an Apple Silicon Mac? The hardware is exceptional, and free software is getting ever closer to making full use of it. Linux has just turned 35 years old while conquering practically every kind of machine — Macs, apparently, are just another matter of time.
Sources: Phoronix (USB4 patches) · Phoronix (7.3-rc1) · Asahi Linux · byteiota (M3 status)