Getting started with m1n1 on M2?

Our Neighbors Asahi Linux Ask Asahi
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Yes, I know M2 is not fully supported yet. Feel free to tell me to go away and wait, I’m happy to do that.

That being said, I’m new to the platform, so wanted to use the Asahi installer to at least get myself situated quickly on my new Mac mini (j473ap) so I can at least mess around with m1n1.

I noticed a few things:

  • The installer had a few issues that seemed to have been resolved just recently, namely support for 13.5 in supported_fw in installer_data.json. Great, so I just enabled expert mode and installed the UEFI environment only (m1n1 + U-Boot + ESP) option okay,

  • M2 hardware support has been a problem due to HDMI port issues but it seems that this was resolved in pr 329

  • Indeed, the docs/wiki hardware support matrix says “HDMI Out” is “WIP (m1n1 ok)”, so I assume that m1n1 should be okay (though it says “Main display” is “WIP”, which is confusing, since the Mac Mini only has a HDMI-out port?)

  • I don’t get HDMI output after the installer runs and the system attempts to boot on the new volume. Okay, I guess that maybe the bundled version of m1n1 from the installer doesn’t contain the recent HDMI-out fixes, so I build m1n1 from source and stumble through the dance of installing the newly built m1n1 with kmutil, reboot, but still nothing. (No dice with make RELEASE=0 either)

If things are still WIP, that’s fine, but given the above, it suggests that I should be at least able to get to muck around with m1n1 or U-Boot or something here, right? Like I said, I’m new to the platform, so am I missing anything? Is there still more TBD to at least get HDMI-out?

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In short: it’s not fully supported for reasons.

Long version you’re of course free to play around with it but given the short version you can not expect that everything works.
The HDMI output on M2* desktop systems works on more than 1 device with more than 1 display. I however doubt either number is larger than 10 given its age. It’s only in the installer since Friday evening CEST (2023-10-13).

Since the HDMI output apparently doesn’t work for you it is a waste of time trying to install the same or very similar binaries. Have tried a different display if available? That’s however just short distraction from the real issue: We need more information why it doesn’t work.

m1n1 will provide logs over HW serial or USB-serial when running in proxy mode. Follow these instructions how to activate proxy mode. Ignore the sections about booting a kernel for now. tools/shell.py will output the history log m1n1’s log messages. Please attach those to and new issue in the m1n1 repo on github. That issue would be a better place to discuss this. AsahiLinux’ irc channels (or Fedora’s Asahi chat room) would be appropriate to discuss any issues with setting this up.

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Thanks. I mainly was a bit unsure whether I was doing things correctly and presumably overestimating where support was, so the clarification helps greatly. I’ll look into getting a proxy setup going and filing an Issue.