A Fresh Look At The Asahi Linux Performance On Apple's M2

Going into this testing I was assuming the latest Asahi Linux would be faster than the state this summer given that the various Apple driver code has had time to mature, there has been work on power management, etc. But surprisingly, this didn't turn out to be the case. Overall the earlier Asahi Linux state was yielding noticeably better performance than where it is today with its latest Linux 6.1-rc6-based state as of testing.

Here is a side-by-side with Asahi Linux then and now:

Some of the most significant slowdowns were observed with the OpenJDK Java benchmarks from Renaissance and the NCNN neural network benchmarks from Tencent. At times NCNN can be a bit noisy but these AArch64 runs were stable both in August and now. Aside from those workloads showing the most significant slowdowns, the August state of Asahi Linux was near consistently faster than it is today on the same Apple M2 MacBook Air. For many workloads the state of Asahi Linux in August was 5~20% faster than it is now. Seldom were there performance wins on this latest Asahi Linux state.

The August state of Asahi Linux was faster 83% of the time than it is today, with many of "today's" wins being by slim margins.

If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks conducted then and now, Asahi Linux now is running 95% the speed of where it was when the support premiered this summer.

One of the possible explanations is more power management work happening that is leading to better power efficiency for the Apple Silicon on Linux, albeit at the cost of performance. However, back in August and still now with this Linux 6.1-derived kernel in Asahi Linux isn't any PowerCap/RAPL driver or other similar means of readily and accurately exposing the SoC power consumption for evaluating any power differences.

Those wanting to go through all the individual benchmark results in full can do so via this page.

In any event this is just a current snapshot of where things stand right now and will be more interesting to see the Apple M1/M2 Linux performance once all/most of the work has been upstreamed and arguably most interesting once there is working mainline graphics acceleration support, which otherwise is a blocker for many considering any modern Apple hardware for Linux desktop/laptop use. At that point it will also be interesting to re-visit the Apple vs. AMD vs. Intel Linux laptop performance.