Initial Support For The Apple M4 Apple A18 Pro Make It Into Linux 7.4
Curated from Phoronix
Apple’s silicon has long been a closed ecosystem, but the recent influx of M4 and A18 Pro drivers into the mainline kernel signals a tangible shift. For SREs and platform engineers, this is more than a curiosity; it expands the hardware pool for development and edge computing. Running production workloads on ARM-based Macs or Apple silicon devices becomes a viable strategy for testing heterogeneous environments without the usual licensing friction. The mainlining of these SoCs means you get upstream support, security patches, and community scrutiny, reducing the risk of vendor lock-in or stale driver maintenance. As the Linux ecosystem matures on non-x86 hardware, understanding these architectural differences is no longer optional for modern infrastructure teams. Takeaway: Evaluate Apple silicon devices for your development and CI pipelines now, as the mainline kernel support significantly lowers the barrier to entry for ARM-based testing environments.
The many SoC patches have landed within the Linux 7.4 kernel providing support for dozens of new boards as well as a number of new SoCs like the Apple M4 and the A18 Pro as found in the MacBook Neo. The Google Tensor 5 was also finally mainlined along with Pixel 10 devices.
— Phoronix