Linux on MacBook Pro Late 2016 and Mid 2017 (with Touchbar)

This article documents the process of installing Linux on 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar, focusing on Fedora 27 with kernel 4.14.x. It provides detailed instructions for partitioning, booting, and driver support, noting that an external USB keyboard is required for initial setup since the internal keyboard and touchpad need custom drivers. The guide also lists which hardware components are functional (such as USB, Thunderbolt, and HiDPI detection) and which are not fully supported (including WiFi on certain models, suspend/resume, and audio).

Introduction This is about documenting getting Linux running on the late 2016 and mid 2017 MPB's; the focus is mostly on the MacBookPro13,3 and MacBookPro14,3 15inch models , but I try to make it relevant and provide information for MacBookPro13,1, MacBookPro13,2, MacBookPro14,1, and MacBookPro14,2 13inch models too. I'm currently using Fedora 27, but most the things should be valid for other recent distros even if the details differ. The kernel version is 4.14.x after latest update . The state of linux on the MBP with particular focus on MacBookPro13,2 is also being tracked on https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux . And for Ubuntu users there are a couple tutorials here https://github.com/chisNaN/ubuntu-on-macbook12 and here https://nixaid.com/linux-on-macbookpro/ focused on that distro and the MacBook. Note : For those who have followed these instructions ealier, and in particular for those who have had problems with the custom DSDT, modifying the DSDT is not necessary anymore - see the updated instructions below and make sure to update your clone of the roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver repo to get the latest drivers. Summary Of Current State What works Booting i.e Grub etc Recognizes disk on all models older kernels may need patch for some models, though Keyboard, touchpad, and basic touchbar functionality HiDPI detection Accelerated video Screen brightness control Keyboard backlight USB Sensors install lm sensors package Camera Bluetooth older kernels need patches WiFi on MBP13,1 and MBP14,1 Thunderbolt DisplayPort What doesn't work WiFi on ,2 and ,3 models though some folks have had success with some of the workarounds Suspend/Resume works partially on 13,3 models Audio two cards show up, and intel driver is loaded, but no sound Details Partitioning If you want to keep your MacOS installation generally a good idea if you can afford the disk space, because that's the only way to get/install firmware updates , then first boot into MacOS and resize the partition there, creating a new partition for the Linux installation. If you also want to have a Windows partition, see this comment gistcomment-2164350 below. Warning : If you're not going to keep MacOS, either back up the EFI System Partition and restore its contents to the new ESP after installation or leave it intact i.e. don't do a full disk install, but just use the space after the ESP . This partition it's the first one contains drivers/firmware/etc needed by Apple's EFI loader during boot, in particular to initialize the Touchbar. Initial Installation Since the internal keyboard and touchpad won't work until you have built and loaded the drivers, you'll need to plug in an external USB keyboard to do the initial setup and installation. Booting If you're booting a 4.11 or later kernel, no special params or patches are needed. If you're booting a kernel < 4.11 and have a MacBookPro13,1, MacBookPro13,2, MacBookPro14,1 or MacBookPro14,2 13inch models , which have the Apple NVMe controller, you'll need the kernel-nvme-controller.patch file-kernel-nvme-controller-patch from this gist in order for the disk to be correctly recognized MacBookPro13,3 uses a Samsung NVMe controller which is automatically detected correctly . Alternatively, instead of patching you can also do the following for distros using something other than dracut to create the initrd you'll need to adjust the 2nd and 3rd lines appropriately : echo 'install nvme /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install nvme $CMDLINE OPTS; echo 106b 2003 /sys/bus/pci/drivers/nvme/new id' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/nvme.conf echo 'force drivers+="nvme"' | sudo tee /etc/dracut.conf.d/disk.conf sudo dracut --force --kver <kernel-version If you're booting a kernel < 4.10 then you'll need the following kernel param to boot properly: intremap=nosid . E.g. sudo sed -i 's/\ GRUB CMDLINE LINUX=. \ "/\1 intremap=nosid"/' /etc/default/grub sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg Lastly, if you are booting a live CD or similar with a kernel < 4.9 then you will also need to add the nomodeset kernel parameter to your kernel line; you will then not have proper HiDPI detection or accelerated graphics. Keyboard/Touchpad/Touchbar For this we need the drivers from https://github.com/roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver.git a clone of https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver which includes a preliminary touchbar driver and keyboard fixes . The following commands set this up. First some extra packages: sudo dnf install git kernel-devel dkms Next we need to prepare for the modules to be included in the ramdisk so they are loaded early during boot : cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/dracut.conf.d/keyboard.conf load all drivers needed for the keyboard+touchpad add drivers+="applespi intel lpss pci spi pxa2xx platform apple-ib-tb" EOF On distros using mkinitramfs instead of dracut you'll want to do the following instead: cat <<EOF | sudo tee -a /etc/initramfs-tools/modules drivers for keyboard+touchpad applespi apple-ib-tb intel lpss pci spi pxa2xx platform EOF Now get and build the drivers: git clone https://github.com/roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver.git pushd macbook12-spi-driver git checkout touchbar-driver-hid-driver sudo ln -s pwd /usr/src/applespi-0.1 sudo dkms install applespi/0.1 popd Next we need to set the proper dpi for the touchpad and adjust the sensitivity download the 61-evdev-local.hwdb file-61-evdev-local-hwdb , 61-libinput-local.hwdb file-61-libinput-local-hwdb , and local-overrides.quirks file-local-overrides-quirks from this gist - the 61-evdev-local.hwdb is only needed for udev < 242, the 61-libinput-local.hwdb is needed for libinput versions < 1.12, the local-overrides.quirks for libinput versions = 1.12 : if 'udevadm --version' less than 242: sudo cp ...the-downloaded-61-evdev-local.hwdb... /etc/udev/hwdb.d/61-evdev-local.hwdb if 'libinput --version' less than 1.12: sudo cp ...the-downloaded-61-libinput-local.hwdb... /etc/udev/hwdb.d/61-libinput-local.hwdb if 'libinput --version' 1.12 or later: sudo cp ...the-downloaded-local-overrides.quirks... /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks sudo systemd-hwdb update You can test the drivers by loading them and their dependencies: sudo modprobe intel lpss pci spi pxa2xx platform applespi apple-ib-tb Finally, reboot to make sure it all works correctly: sudo reboot Screen Brightness Control Screen brightness control works out of the box on MacBookPro13,1 and MacBookPro13,2 all kernels , and MacBookPro13,3 with recent kernels, but requires a kernel patch on MacBookPro13,3 with older kernels see also https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/issues/2 . Specifically, if you have any of these kernels you need to patch: < 4.14, 4.14 - 4.14.21, 4.15 - v4.15.5 i.e. the issue was fixed in 4.14.21, 4.15.5, and 4.16 . The following will create and install the patched apple-gmux : mkdir apple-gmux pushd apple-gmux curl -o apple-gmux.patch 'https://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=192601' curl -o apple-gmux.c 'https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/plain/drivers/platform/x86/apple-gmux.c?id=refs/tags/v4.9.11' patch < apple-gmux.patch echo -e ' obj-m += apple-gmux.o all: \tmake -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd modules ' Makefile make mod=$ ls /lib/modules/ uname -r /kernel/drivers/platform/x86/apple-gmux.ko sudo mv $mod{,.orig} sudo cp apple-gmux.ko /lib/modules/ uname -r /kernel/drivers/platform/x86/ sudo depmod popd sudo reboot Other The touchpad defaults to using the bottom-left corner for right-clicks - to get 2-finger right click, install the Gnome tweak tool and change it in there. WiFi WiFi works fine on MBP13,1 and MBP14,1. But the other models use a different chipset, and while on those the brcmfmac driver is automatically loaded, there are a number of issues with it, making it for all practical purposes unusable: it only does 2.4GHz - no 5GHz channels are visible it has an extremely low sensitivity - you must be within a few feet of the base station, and even at 5 feet distance it shows a weak signal. it stops working after 10 or 15 or so minutes; turning WiFi off, waiting a several minutes, and then turning it back on generally gets it working again. Maybe a thermal issue? Bug report: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show bug.cgi?id=193121 In the mean time some folks have that one or both of the following hacks make the WiFi work well enough them personally, while they do improve the situation, I have not found them to be sufficient enough for actual work, i.e. I still see many packet drops and connection failures - YMMV : reduce the transmit power: sudo iwconfig wlp3s0 txpower 10 edit the firmware blob /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.bin and modify the regrev and ccode values see the above bugreport for details Display The amdgpu driver works well and is automatically loaded on MacBookPro13,3. On the 13 inch models the use of the intel Xorg driver may need to be forced see first comment below . Using the iGPU \ ,3 models only The \ ,3 models have both an iGPU intel as well as a dGPU amd . By default the dGPU is used. While this works well, it does use a lot more power than the iGPU. The following will set things up so the machine uses the iGPU upon boot but see the caveats below : sh mkdir gpu-switch cd gpu-switch Enable the iGPU at boot curl -O -L https://github.com/0xbb/apple set os.efi/releases/download/v1/apple set os.efi sudo mkdir /boot/efi/EFI/custom sudo cp apple set os.efi /boot/efi/EFI/custom config dir=$ dirname $ sudo find /boot -name grub.cfg cat <<"EOF" | sudo tee "$config dir"/custom.cfg /dev/null insmod chain search --no-floppy --set=cuspart --file /EFI/custom/apple set os.efi chainloader ${cuspart} /EFI/custom/apple set os.efi boot EOF Switch the default gpu on boot to iGPU curl -O -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xbb/gpu-switch/master/gpu-switch chmod +x gpu-switch ./gpu-switch -i Service to disable the dGPU cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/disable-dgpu.service /dev/null Unit Description=Disable the dGPU Service Type=oneshot ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'echo OFF /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch' ExecStop=/bin/sh -c 'echo ON /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch' RemainAfterExit=yes Install WantedBy=multi-user.target EOF sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/disable-dgpu.service cd - Once you then disable the dGPU this will save save you about 5W - 6W, or ⅓ of the power. However, there are several caveats to aware of: The dGPU needs to be manually disabled after each boot and first login with sudo systemctl start disable-dgpu - trying to have it run automatically at boot via systemctl enable disable-gpu leads to hangs. In order to use an external display via Thunderbolt/DisplayPort the dGPU needs to be enabled again the iGPU is not wired up for that : sudo systemctl disable disable-dgpu The amd driver does not handle disabling and re-enabling the of the dGPU very well. In particular system shutdown may hang or just take several minutes, and you may see various errors in the kernel logs when disabling and re-enabling. If you boot into MacOS, then when booting back into Linux you'll need to change the default gpu back to the iGPU again: boot, run gpu-switch/gpu-switch -i , and reboot. Camera MacBookPro13,3/14,3: works out of the box on kernels 4.13 and later; on earlier kernels you need the following: echo "options uvcvideo quirks=0x100" /etc/modprobe.d/uvcvideo.conf For MacBookPro 13,14 , 12 you need the bcwc pcie https://github.com/patjak/bcwc pcie driver mainline branch - see also https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/issues/15. Bluetooth As of kernel 4.16 bluetooth works out of the box; older kernels need patches - see https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/issues/29 issuecomment-331693489 and following discussion for details. But in short you'll need to: Ensure your kernel is configured with CONFIG BT HCIUART BCM=y apply the patches from hci bcm-4.13 https://github.com/roadrunner2/linux/tree/hci bcm-4.13 , hci bcm-4.14 https://github.com/roadrunner2/linux/tree/hci bcm-4.14 , or hci bcm-4.15 https://github.com/roadrunner2/linux/tree/hci bcm-4.15 , depending on whether you have a 4.13 or earlier, 4.14, or 4.15 kernel. build and reboot on 4.14 and earlier apply the service patch from the above comment and start the service as described there not necessary on 4.15 and later . Note that as of 4.16 there are still issues on MacBookPro13,1 and MacBookPro14,1 - see the above bug for details on what additional patches are needed.