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Yaks in need of shaving

This page is a list of miscellaneous tasks that need to be done, but may have been de-prioritised in order to focus on frying bigger fish. Most of these tasks will be low stakes and low effort, making them good places to start for newcomers to kernel development or Free Software in general.

If you decide to take up any of these tasks, please update the task’s status to avoid duplicate work. Reach out on #asahi-dev if you have any questions or are in need of assistance.

Task Status Description Contact
libgnome-volume-control fixes Unclaimed GNOME’s volume mixer is implemented in the libgnome-volume-control plugin. Unfortunately, this interacts poorly with WirePlumber/Pipewire and does not seem to respect node graph permissions. This leads to the default sink being the “raw” hardware device on GNOME, bypassing our DSP, which is completely unsupported. libgnome-volume-control needs to be fixed so that it hides the raw hardware sink and selects the correct default sink. chadmed
Bankstown enhancements Unclaimed Our psychoacoustic bass enhancer needs some work to clean up the output. There are some filtering tricks that can be done to make it sound better, however someone with more experience in DSP for audio applications should probably handle this. All PRs will be tested by ear on J314, J475, and J415. chadmed
Extend tipd driver Unclaimed Add support to reset other Apple Silicon machines, and to enable serial, to tipd. On the Macs, some parts of the USB specification are implemented by (undocumented) CD321x chips, similar to TPS65982. Apple added some debugging features to their Type-C ports, and if we want to make use of those when running Linux on an M1/M2 host for development (connected to another M1/M2 machine being the target of experimentation), we need to extend the tipd driver. suggested by sven
Bluetooth suspend Unclaimed Currently, when suspending and then resuming Bluetooth breaks. This is either an issue with the way hci_bcm4377 uses the bluetooth suspend API or we are missing some special vendor-specific commands before suspend or after resume. It’s probably possible to figure this out without making the hypervisor survive a full suspend/resume cycle by using Apple’s PacketLogger which is part of the “Additional Tools for XCode” to look for additional commands. It’s probably also a good idea to compare how hci_bcm4377 suspend works to other Bluetooth drivers since it’s also possible that it’s just misusing some API that gets the device stuck in a wrong state. sven
Keyboard layout cleanup (XKB/hid_apple) Unclaimed Apple keyboard support across the Linux desktop stack has been hit-and-miss, across layouts and hardware keyboards. Since our keyboard drivers are not upstream yet, we have the chance to do some major cleanup. In particular, the keyboards on these machines have a soft Fn key that is handled entirely in software. The hid_apple driver currently does this in the kernel, but this is the wrong approach. This key should be handled in userspace in XKB/Wayland (Xorg cannot do it, but it’s deprecated), so that we can have more comprehensive Fn key mappings including letting users customize the key bindings like they would any other modifier key, or offer special symbols like macOS does. This should probably be done by introducing new XKB keyboard models, which do this mapping in userspace. To test this, use the fnmode=0 module parameter for hid_apple to disable all Fn key processing. We will later want to introduce a new fnmode that only does Fn key combination emulation for the edit keys (insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdown), which is the minimum required for a usable TTY and Xorg, and leave the rest to XKB, defaulting to this mode on Apple Silicon machines. Besides the Fn story, there are also many regional Mac layouts that need to be fixed in XKB configuration, and everyone with a non-English keyboard is welcome to help out with that effort. Relevant xkeyboard-config issue marcan
Various unexplained errors Unclaimed As of asahi-6.8.10-4, there continue to be a variety of low-severity messages logged in the dmesg. They don’t appear to prevent proper functioning, but someone with kernel debugging experience should track them down and submit fixes for them. Here are some examples from a M1 MacBook Air, found by running sudo dmesg: https://gist.github.com/zzywysm/d4f1669ff3b7454e2821a65e31c511e1 ?