For nearly two years, a team of enthusiasts has been working on a very ambitious project: porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. In a recently published postthis team led by a renowned hacker, Hector “marcan” Martin, provides information on the progress of Asahi Linux.
USB… et USB
The first part looks at USB, more specifically its management in Thunderbolt sockets. To sum up, it was limited until now to the 2.0 standard (480 Mb/s) but thanks to reverse engineering on the Apple chip which takes care of the different possibilities, USB 3.0 (probably at 10 Gb/ s) is usable. The chip in question, which is called a PHY, is actually used to multiplex (combine, for simplicity) the Thunderbolt, USB and DisplayPort signals into the socket.
