Initial Support For The Apple M4 & Apple A18 Pro Make It Into Linux 7.4

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. Plus some unreleased Qualcomm SoC support rounds out the bunch.

Qualcomm support alone for Linux 7.4 includes two new SoCs and enabling 22 boards. The new SoCs are codenamed Hawi and Nord and make use of custom Oryon cores. Product names for Hawi and Nord are not yet announced - great to see early upstream support!

Among the new board coverage for Qualcomm hardware include seven handheld gaming devices using the Qualcomm Dragonwing SoC.

Arguably most notable is finally having basic Apple M4 support in the kernel along with the A18 Pro. But like the recent Apple M3 enablement in the mainline kernel, it's enough to boot the kernel and get a console displayed, but beyond that your mileage will vary with most features/functionality not yet supported by the mainline kernel. The M4 Device Trees are for the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4, 2024), iMac (24-inch, 2x USB-C, M4, 2024), iMac (24-inch, 4x USB-C, M4, 2024), MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025), MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025), and Mac Mini (M4, 2024).

!Image 5: MacBook Neo

The Google Tensor G5 "Laguna" used by last year's Pixel 10 smartphones is also finally supported in the mainline kernel.

And another very exciting addition with the SoC pulls for Linux 7.4 is mainline support for the Steam Frame VR headset.

For Linux 7.4 there is just one new RISC-V board added and that's the Milk-V Meles SBC with a T-Head TH1520 SoC.

There were also plans to remove a lot of 32-bit ARM code with Linux 7.4. But as it's not yet definitive whether Linux 7.3 or 7.4 will be this year's LTS kernel (hopefully v7.4!), that was deferred until at least Linux 7.5.

More details on the many SoC changes for Linux 7.4 via this set of pull requests.

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