Linux 5.19 is out, and Linus Torvalds did the release on an “arm64 laptop” from Apple.
On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It’s something I’ve been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it’s finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We’ve had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.
It’s the third time I’m using Apple hardware for Linux development – I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.
Not that I’ve used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I’m trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too
Although Torvalds doesn’t mention the model, the Asahi Linux team says it’s an M2 MacBook Air. But I’ve seen some saying it could be an M1 model. And it could even be a MacBook Pro – which would be a surprise, since he seems to value portability.
So I asked Torvalds, and he confirmed: it’s a MacBook Air with M2 chip, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD, “Space Gray”.