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State of Linux on the MacBook Pro 2016

The following document provides an overview about Linux support for the Apple MacBook Pro 2016 line.

The MacBook Pro 2016 shares surprisingly many components with the Retina MacBook (e.g. keyboard and touchpad controller, Wi-Fi and bluetooth chipsets, ...), so figuring out how things work on one device should benefit both device families.

The checks if hardware work below were mostly done with Debian/unstable and Ubuntu 16.10 with Linux 4.8 to 4.10.

Contribution

If you want to contribute to get Linux running smoothly on the MacBook Pro 2016, report all findings how to get devices working as pull requests! All help is appreciated.

Current status

Device Status
Audio input & output ❌ not working
Battery ✔️ working
Bluetooth ❌ not working
FaceTime HD camera ❌ not working
Graphics card (Intel) ✔️ working
Graphics card (AMD) ✔️ working
Keyboard & Touchpad ✔️ working with out-of-tree driver
Keyboard backlight ❌ not working
NVMe (internal SSD) ✔️ working with out-of-tree patch
Screen ✔️ working
Suspend & Hibernation ❌ not working
Temperature & fan sensors ✔️ working
Thunderbolt untested, patch available
Touch Bar ❌ not working
Touch ID ❌ not working
USB ✔️ working
Wi-Fi ❌ not working

Booting

To boot Linux properly, it's necessary to set intremap=nosid as kernel boot parameter.

Audio input & output

Not working, neither the internal speakers/microphone nor the headphone jack.

See also:

Battery

Working fine, including the interface to get current capacity, temperature, etc.

Bluetooth

Not working.

Uses the same ACPI ID BCM2E7C as the Retina MacBooks, so certainly it's also a BCM43241.

See also:

FaceTime HD camera

Detected at boot, but not working:

[    4.455993] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.50 device iBridge (05ac:8600)
[    4.461559] uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround.
[    4.462403] uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC probe control : -32 (exp. 34).
[    4.464181] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[    4.466247] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[    4.466248] USB Video Class driver (1.1.1)

Uses a different USB product id (0x8600) than previous versions (0x8501). A naive patch to enable the usual Apple iSight quirks for this product id as well, didn't work so far.

Firmware extracting using isight-firmware-tools works as usual. Loading the firmware fails, maybe because one is already loaded.

Graphics card

Intel

Graphical output is working out of the box.

During boot screen becomes garbled once Linux does modeswitching, till Xorg finally starts. As a workaround disabling KMS (i915.modeset=0) helps.

Connecting external displays via USB-C-to-DisplayPort cables works fine, including connections with daisy-chaining/MST. An actual tested and working setup includes concurrent output on the internal display and two external displays daisy-chained together with Full HD each.

AMD

Working since Linux 4.9.

See also:

Keyboard & Touchpad

Basic keyboard and touchpad functionality is working with the out-of-tree driver developed for the Retina Macbook (https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver). As described on the Github page the DSDT has to be patched to get it working. Also ensure you have the PXA2XX SPI driver available:

CONFIG_SPI_PXA2XX=m
CONFIG_SPI_PXA2XX_PCI=m

After loading the driver the Touchpad isn't working from time to time. Reloading the driver multiple times seems to fix it.

To get proper size detection for the touchpad follow the instructions in https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6a92f9cd7#keyboardtouchpad

The Esc and function keys are part of the Touch Bar and therefore not working as of now! Also the Caps Lock LED isn't working.

Beside the actual keyboard the power button and the lid close event work out of the box.

See also:

Keyboard backlight

Not working, it's just powered off.

Probably the ambient light sensor used for the keyboard backlight isn't working either.

NVMe

Isn't detected automatically on MacBookPro 13,1 and MacBookPro 13,2, needs out-of-tree patch to work there: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-nvme/2016-May/004618.html

Alternative workaround:

modprobe nvme
echo 106b 2003 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/nvme/new_id

As the MacBookPro13,3 uses a different chipset for NVMe it works there out of the box.

See also:

Screen

Works out of the box including adjustable screen brightness.

The only oddity noticed so far, is that the EDID data for the 13" model describes two modes: 2560x1600 and 2880x1800. Xorg probes and sets the correct resolution of 2560x1600. For a detailed look into the EDID data, check out macbook13,2/card0-eDP-1.edid.

Suspend & Hibernation

Putting the MacBook Pro into suspend mode works, but it doesn't wake up again.

Temperature & fan sensors

Work out of the box.

Thunderbolt

Untested, but probably working with the following patch: https://gist.github.com/l1k/3ffbd63ac337fa85530f6db3e9ee77e9

See also:

Touch Bar

Not working out of the box, but initial success to get it working with basic functionality.

Booting a Windows VM with installed Boot Camp drivers and passed through iBridge USB device under Linux properly initializes the Touch Bar with its default layout featuring special functions like screen dimming and media control keys. These keys are then usable under Linux when the Windows VM isn't running anymore and are mapped to traditional function keys (which means that based on the layout KEY_F3 and KEY_F4 aren't accessible right now). So e.g. play/pause is mapped to KEY_F8 and increase volume to KEY_F12.

Another difference to macOS is that the Touch Bar isn't switching off after a minute, but instead after more than an hour. Probably the one minute switch-off is initiated by macOS, while the later one is initiated directly by iBridge.

touchbar-init.pcapng contains a capture of the USB packets Windows uses to initialize the Touch Bar (unclear if the first packet is even relevant). For somebody with some USB and Linux kernel knowledge it should be trivial to implement that as a Linux driver.

Touch ID

Not working.

USB

Works out of the box.

Wi-Fi

  • device (Broadcom Limited BCM43602 802.11ac Wireless LAN SoC (rev 02)) is supported by the brcmfmac driver
  • Only 2.4Ghz APs are shown
  • Connecting to an AP barely works or fails directly
  • Problem doesn't seem to be specific to the MacBook Pro 2016, probably firmware related

See also:

Misc

iBridge

There is one connected USB device, called iBridge (Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05ac:8600 Apple, Inc.). It's probably the interface to the chip running iOS and providing access to the FaceTime HD camera (that's why uvcvideo detects it), the Touch Bar (that's why it's shown as an additonal input device in the Xorg log) and the Touch ID button.

usb-devices shows that iBridge exposes four interfaces:

T:  Bus=01 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=02 Cnt=01 Dev#=  4 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=ef(misc ) Sub=02 Prot=01 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  3
P:  Vendor=05ac ProdID=8600 Rev=01.01
S:  Manufacturer=Apple Inc.
S:  Product=iBridge
S:  SerialNumber=nomac?123456
C:  #Ifs= 4 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=0mA
I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 0 Cls=0e(video) Sub=01 Prot=00 Driver=(none)
I:  If#= 1 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=0e(video) Sub=02 Prot=00 Driver=(none)
I:  If#= 2 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=03(HID  ) Sub=01 Prot=01 Driver=usbhid
I:  If#= 3 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=03(HID  ) Sub=00 Prot=01 Driver=usbhid

The two video interfaces could be the FaceTime HD camera and the Touch Bar, while the two HID interfaces could be the Touch Bar and the Touch ID button.

Links