Gravity Linux 是一个新公布的发行版，旨在面向较新的 Apple Silicon Mac，其首个实验性 Alpha 版本已经能够在 M4 Mac mini 上引导出一个具备加速功能的桌面。项目的官网上写道：“Gravity Linux 是一个 Fedora 衍生版，为 Apple Silicon 带来了快速、现代的 Linux 桌面——由像你这样的人公开构建。”如果这听起来似曾相识，关于页面中解释道：“Gravity Linux 最初是从 Asahi Linux 分叉出来的，原因是政策上的分歧，特别是在使用大语言模型（LLM）方面。我们对 Asahi Linux 项目怀有极大的敬意，并强调我们在 Apple Silicon 上运行 Linux 的共同目标。”该项目已经针对 M4 Mac mini 发布了一个早期 Alpha 版本，该机型于 2024 年 10 月发布，就在该公司宣布 M4 iMac 的几天后。它包含支持 OpenGL ES 3.0 和 OpenGL 3.3 的 GPU 加速功能，但其明确面向开发者而非日常使用。HDMI 输出可以使用，但 USB-C 显示器、USB4、雷电（Thunderbolt）和睡眠功能尚不可用，电源管理也尚未完善。就硬件代际而言，这使得 Gravity 领先于 Asahi Linux。正如 The 媒体本月早些时候报道的那样，Asahi 最近才刚刚添加了初步的 M3 支持，目前尚无图形加速功能。不过，这种比较并不完全对等：Gravity 的 M4 版本是一个面向开发者的早期 Alpha 版本，而 Asahi 则是一个成立时间更长、支持更广泛硬件的项目。与此同时，苹果已经向前迈进：The Reg 上个月报道了首批基于 M6 的 Mac，距离该公司推出“恐怖地快（scary fast）”的 M3 系统已经过去了近三年。The Reg 在 2022 年 3 月报道了新的 Asahi Linux 项目，并在同月晚些时候进行了试用。然而，Asahi 此后失去了几位杰出的贡献者。项目负责人 Hector Martin 于 2025 年 2 月辞职。一周后，被称为“Asahi Lina”的 GPU 工作负责人也离职了。正如我们在当年晚些时候（即 2025 年 8 月）所提到的那样，GPU 驱动程序开发的负责人 Alyssa Rosenzweig 离开了该项目。
Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon." There's already an early alpha release for the M4 Mac mini, a model launched in October 2024 just days after the company announced the M4 iMac. It includes GPU acceleration with OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3 support, but is explicitly aimed at developers rather than daily use. HDMI output works, but USB-C displays, USB4, Thunderbolt, and suspend do not, while power management remains incomplete. In terms of hardware generations, this puts Gravity ahead of Asahi Linux. As The reported earlier this month, Asahi has only recently added preliminary M3 support, for now without graphics acceleration. The comparison is not exact, however: Gravity's M4 release is an early developer alpha, while Asahi is a longer-established project supporting a much broader range of hardware. Apple, meanwhile, has already moved on: The Reg reported on the first M6-based Macs last month, nearly three years after the company launched its "scary fast" M3 systems. The Reg reported on the new Asahi Linux project in March 2022, and tried it out later the same month. However, Asahi has since lost several prominent contributors. Project lead Hector Martin resigned in February 2025. A week later, the leader of the GPU effort, known only as "Asahi Lina," also quit. As we mentioned later that year, in August 2025, the leader of the GPU driver effort, Alyssa Rosenzweig, left the project. She had already, in her own words, passed the reins on to her other Arm GPU drivers that April. As her resume [PDF] shows, she's been working for Intel since then. Gravity attributes much of its rapid progress to a development method that Asahi explicitly prohibits. Project lead Cody Ho previously worked at both Apple and OpenAI, and has published a two-part account of using coding agents for Apple Silicon reverse engineering. On August 3, Ho published the first part of "I Came, I Prompted, I Left," describing the construction of a custom hypervisor for newer Apple Silicon. The second part, published on September 15, explains how he and co-developer Niklas Sheth built an M4 GPU driver in about a month. Ho says much of the work was performed through largely unattended LLM loops. This is one of the sharpest differences between Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux. Ho and Sheth are reverse-engineering Apple's hardware with the assistance of AI tools, while the Asahi project has a Generative AI (LLM) Policy that says "we broadly forbid the use of generative AI tooling for material contributions to Asahi Linux." Gravity's LLM Use and Clean-Room Policy permits such tools but attempts to contain the legal risks through separation. It states: "If in any session your LLM has looked at any disassembly, decompilation, or other protected implementation details of an Apple component, you must consider yourself tainted with respect to that component." This does not mean nobody involved looks at Apple binaries. Ho says that while developing the hypervisor, he used an LLM to disassemble Apple's proprietary SPTM component. That made him ineligible to write the corresponding clean-room implementation, so the knowledge had to be documented and handed to someone who had not seen the protected material. Ho and Sheth say the GPU work followed a stricter route, using hardware traces, live probing and self-written shaders without inspecting Apple binaries. They also acknowledge benefiting from Asahi's earlier M1 and M2 work and using its existing userspace API. The result is nevertheless striking: Gravity's first alpha brings an accelerated Linux desktop to an M4 Mac mini, and Ho credits LLMs with helping the pair achieve in weeks work that would ordinarily take far longer. But the code still requires extensive testing, human review, and refactoring before it can be upstreamed. Gravity's developers warn that its kernel driver may have to wait for Asahi's M1 and M2 driver to land upstream first. Gravity has therefore produced an intriguing demonstration of what AI-assisted reverse engineering can do, rather than a controlled experiment proving that Asahi's policy is what held it back. ®
用她自己的话来说，早在那年四月，她就已经将项目管理的职责交给了其他团队成员（即那些负责开发 Arm GPU 驱动程序的团队）。从她的简历（PDF 文件）可以看出，从那时起她一直在英特尔公司工作。Gravity Linux 操作系统的快速发展在很大程度上要归功于一种开发方法——不过这种方法被 Asahi Linux 明确禁止使用。该项目负责人 Cody Ho 曾在苹果公司和 OpenAI 工作过，并发表过两篇关于如何利用编码工具进行苹果硅芯片逆向工程的文章。8 月 3 日，Ho 发表了第一篇论文《I Came, I Prompted, I Left》的第一部分，其中详细描述了他们为新款苹果硅芯片开发自定义虚拟机管理程序（hypervisor）的过程；第二部分于 9 月 15 日发布，介绍了他和合作者 Niklas Sheth 如何在大约一个月的时间内成功开发出 M4 GPU 驱动程序。他们表示，大部分开发工作都是通过人工智能（AI）工具自动完成的。这正是 Gravity Linux 与 Asahi Linux 之间的一个显著区别：Cody Ho 和 Niklas Sheth 是利用 AI 工具进行苹果硬件的逆向工程，而 Asahi Linux 项目的开发准则明确禁止使用任何生成式 AI 工具来参与项目的核心开发工作。相比之下，Gravity Linux 的开发政策允许使用 AI 工具，但会通过严格的管理措施来控制相关风险。该政策规定：“如果在开发过程中 AI 工具接触到了苹果组件的任何反汇编代码、反编译结果或其他受保护的实现细节，那么相关开发人员将被视为‘污染’了该组件的相关信息。”尽管如此，这并不意味着所有参与开发的人员都不会查看苹果公司的二进制文件。Cody Ho 表示，在开发虚拟机管理程序时，他确实使用了 AI 工具来反汇编苹果公司的 SPTM 组件；由于这一行为使他不符合编写该组件对应驱动程序的资格，因此相关技术细节必须被记录下来，并交给未接触过这些受保护信息的人员处理。Cody Ho 和 Niklas Sheth 表示，在开发 GPU 驱动程序的过程中，他们严格遵循了更严格的原则：仅通过硬件数据、实时测试以及自行编写的着色器（shaders）来进行开发，而完全不直接查看苹果公司的二进制文件。
Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon." There's already an early alpha release for the M4 Mac mini, a model launched in October 2024 just days after the company announced the M4 iMac. It includes GPU acceleration with OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3 support, but is explicitly aimed at developers rather than daily use. HDMI output works, but USB-C displays, USB4, Thunderbolt, and suspend do not, while power management remains incomplete. In terms of hardware generations, this puts Gravity ahead of Asahi Linux. As The reported earlier this month, Asahi has only recently added preliminary M3 support, for now without graphics acceleration. The comparison is not exact, however: Gravity's M4 release is an early developer alpha, while Asahi is a longer-established project supporting a much broader range of hardware. Apple, meanwhile, has already moved on: The Reg reported on the first M6-based Macs last month, nearly three years after the company launched its "scary fast" M3 systems. The Reg reported on the new Asahi Linux project in March 2022, and tried it out later the same month. However, Asahi has since lost several prominent contributors. Project lead Hector Martin resigned in February 2025. A week later, the leader of the GPU effort, known only as "Asahi Lina," also quit. As we mentioned later that year, in August 2025, the leader of the GPU driver effort, Alyssa Rosenzweig, left the project. She had already, in her own words, passed the reins on to her other Arm GPU drivers that April. As her resume [PDF] shows, she's been working for Intel since then. Gravity attributes much of its rapid progress to a development method that Asahi explicitly prohibits. Project lead Cody Ho previously worked at both Apple and OpenAI, and has published a two-part account of using coding agents for Apple Silicon reverse engineering. On August 3, Ho published the first part of "I Came, I Prompted, I Left," describing the construction of a custom hypervisor for newer Apple Silicon. The second part, published on September 15, explains how he and co-developer Niklas Sheth built an M4 GPU driver in about a month. Ho says much of the work was performed through largely unattended LLM loops. This is one of the sharpest differences between Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux. Ho and Sheth are reverse-engineering Apple's hardware with the assistance of AI tools, while the Asahi project has a Generative AI (LLM) Policy that says "we broadly forbid the use of generative AI tooling for material contributions to Asahi Linux." Gravity's LLM Use and Clean-Room Policy permits such tools but attempts to contain the legal risks through separation. It states: "If in any session your LLM has looked at any disassembly, decompilation, or other protected implementation details of an Apple component, you must consider yourself tainted with respect to that component." This does not mean nobody involved looks at Apple binaries. Ho says that while developing the hypervisor, he used an LLM to disassemble Apple's proprietary SPTM component. That made him ineligible to write the corresponding clean-room implementation, so the knowledge had to be documented and handed to someone who had not seen the protected material. Ho and Sheth say the GPU work followed a stricter route, using hardware traces, live probing and self-written shaders without inspecting Apple binaries. They also acknowledge benefiting from Asahi's earlier M1 and M2 work and using its existing userspace API. The result is nevertheless striking: Gravity's first alpha brings an accelerated Linux desktop to an M4 Mac mini, and Ho credits LLMs with helping the pair achieve in weeks work that would ordinarily take far longer. But the code still requires extensive testing, human review, and refactoring before it can be upstreamed. Gravity's developers warn that its kernel driver may have to wait for Asahi's M1 and M2 driver to land upstream first. Gravity has therefore produced an intriguing demonstration of what AI-assisted reverse engineering can do, rather than a controlled experiment proving that Asahi's policy is what held it back. ®
他们也承认受益于 Asahi 早期在 M1 和 M2 上的工作，并使用了其现有的用户空间 API。结果依然令人瞩目：Gravity 的首个 alpha 版将加速的 Linux 桌面带到了 M4 Mac mini 上，Ho 将功劳归功于 LLMs，帮助两人在几周内完成了原本需要更长时间的工作。但该代码在能够上游合并之前，仍需要大量测试、人工审查和重构。Gravity 的开发者警告称，其内核驱动可能不得不等待 Asahi 的 M1 和 M2 驱动先上游合并。因此，Gravity 呈现了一个引人入胜的演示，展示了 AI 辅助逆向工程能做什么，而不是一个证明 Asahi 的政策阻碍了它的对照实验。®
Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon." There's already an early alpha release for the M4 Mac mini, a model launched in October 2024 just days after the company announced the M4 iMac. It includes GPU acceleration with OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3 support, but is explicitly aimed at developers rather than daily use. HDMI output works, but USB-C displays, USB4, Thunderbolt, and suspend do not, while power management remains incomplete. In terms of hardware generations, this puts Gravity ahead of Asahi Linux. As The reported earlier this month, Asahi has only recently added preliminary M3 support, for now without graphics acceleration. The comparison is not exact, however: Gravity's M4 release is an early developer alpha, while Asahi is a longer-established project supporting a much broader range of hardware. Apple, meanwhile, has already moved on: The Reg reported on the first M6-based Macs last month, nearly three years after the company launched its "scary fast" M3 systems. The Reg reported on the new Asahi Linux project in March 2022, and tried it out later the same month. However, Asahi has since lost several prominent contributors. Project lead Hector Martin resigned in February 2025. A week later, the leader of the GPU effort, known only as "Asahi Lina," also quit. As we mentioned later that year, in August 2025, the leader of the GPU driver effort, Alyssa Rosenzweig, left the project. She had already, in her own words, passed the reins on to her other Arm GPU drivers that April. As her resume [PDF] shows, she's been working for Intel since then. Gravity attributes much of its rapid progress to a development method that Asahi explicitly prohibits. Project lead Cody Ho previously worked at both Apple and OpenAI, and has published a two-part account of using coding agents for Apple Silicon reverse engineering. On August 3, Ho published the first part of "I Came, I Prompted, I Left," describing the construction of a custom hypervisor for newer Apple Silicon. The second part, published on September 15, explains how he and co-developer Niklas Sheth built an M4 GPU driver in about a month. Ho says much of the work was performed through largely unattended LLM loops. This is one of the sharpest differences between Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux. Ho and Sheth are reverse-engineering Apple's hardware with the assistance of AI tools, while the Asahi project has a Generative AI (LLM) Policy that says "we broadly forbid the use of generative AI tooling for material contributions to Asahi Linux." Gravity's LLM Use and Clean-Room Policy permits such tools but attempts to contain the legal risks through separation. It states: "If in any session your LLM has looked at any disassembly, decompilation, or other protected implementation details of an Apple component, you must consider yourself tainted with respect to that component." This does not mean nobody involved looks at Apple binaries. Ho says that while developing the hypervisor, he used an LLM to disassemble Apple's proprietary SPTM component. That made him ineligible to write the corresponding clean-room implementation, so the knowledge had to be documented and handed to someone who had not seen the protected material. Ho and Sheth say the GPU work followed a stricter route, using hardware traces, live probing and self-written shaders without inspecting Apple binaries. They also acknowledge benefiting from Asahi's earlier M1 and M2 work and using its existing userspace API. The result is nevertheless striking: Gravity's first alpha brings an accelerated Linux desktop to an M4 Mac mini, and Ho credits LLMs with helping the pair achieve in weeks work that would ordinarily take far longer. But the code still requires extensive testing, human review, and refactoring before it can be upstreamed. Gravity's developers warn that its kernel driver may have to wait for Asahi's M1 and M2 driver to land upstream first. Gravity has therefore produced an intriguing demonstration of what AI-assisted reverse engineering can do, rather than a controlled experiment proving that Asahi's policy is what held it back. ®