Linux Distros that run on ARM (and Apple Silicon) hardware

[the8thark]

I do have a few questions about Linux and M1. Thank you in advance.

1. Is there any Linux distress that run natively on ARM?
By extension would they run natively on M1?

2. How is everyone's experience of running your favourite Linux bistro on a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac?
I ask this, not only if Question 1 is a no, but also because testing things out on a Linux VM can be rather useful at times.

3. What is your favourite Linux Distro that runs on ARM?
Be it natively or within a VM.
And why?

 

[Gnattu]

For question 1, most of the mainstream Linux distros runs natively on ARM. This inlucdes debian, ubuntu, RHEL, fedora, etc. The problem on M1 mainly does not come from arm ISA, it comes from all the hardware around the CPU in the system.

This means two things:
1. VMs will just work because the Linux kernel will see a machine with all the hardware it supports with an armv8 compliant CPU.
2. We have to wait (perhaps a long time) before all the drivers landed in the mainline kernel so that we can boot Linux directly in a useful state. You can refer to Asahi Linux's report to see what is currently supported and what is not.

For question 2, the CPU performance is quite good and even outperforms macOS bare metal in some workloads. However, you do have some constraints, mainly from the networking. Current networking options does not work well beyond Gigabit Ethernet (capped around 2Gbps on a 10G ethernet link from my testing). Software support is great thanks to the wide adoption of Linux on arm64 systems. It is actually quite hard to find something that does not run on arm64 Linux.

For question 3, I'm using ArchLinux ARM in my VMs and quite love it. Great documentation, close to upsteam and light-weight base structure makes it stand out.

 

[Nermal]

You can refer to Asahi Linux's report to see what is currently supported and what is not.

The reports are here.

 

[Rastafabi]

Concerning your Question regarding VM (and their performance), quiet noticeable achievements have been made as well. While the commercial Parallels Desktop virtualization product was an early adopter. The also commercial, but free for private use VMWare fusion isn’t quiet ready yet, though a beta is available to test with. On the open-source end QEMU performs very well and is even better when using the open-source UTM front-end, which recently even enabled Graphics acceleration for macOS as well as Linux guest systems, and also provides prebuilt VMs for ease of use.

 

[throAU]

Manjaro has an ARM version, running it on my Pi400.

I've also run FreeBSD-Arm on my M1-Pro using UTM (which uses QEMU and provides virtualised hardware - GPU, disks, etc.).

As above you should be able to run pretty much any ARM OS.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

@the8thark If you need Linux for running headless applications, you can also choose Canonical Multipass and Docker.

 

[satcomer]

Wow the resurrection of YellowDog Linux! it could even run on the first generation of Sony Playstation!