I’ve been going through the process of dual booting kali on a 2017 macbook pro. It is the one with the touchbar but not the t2 chip. This weird in between model causes some weird issues and not much support for it. I tried the latest release of kali 2025.2 and it appears the driver for keyboard and touchpad functionality are incompatible with the kernel 6.12.25 or 6.12.33. Eventually I used kali 2024.3 with the 6.8.11 kernel and the driver “applespi” came pre-installed on this version and keyboard and trackpad both work out the box. Although for some reason I had to do a minimal install and install everything after (could be unrelated problem that caused this). I wanted to make a post on this niche topic in case anyone else has issues. Next on my to do list is restoring touchbar functionality. If anyone knows anything about this it would be helpful. The applespi driver that I have doesn’t seem to work for it and I have been having issues installing forks of the repo due to kernel header issues and kernel compatibility issues. Any thoughts or comments are appreciated, although I hear these drivers are going to be included in the 6.15 kernel so fingers crossed that works when kali gets that update.
EDIT: typo in title Non T2 (2016-2017) Macbook Pro Touchbar driver functionality
Non-T2 MacBook Pros (2016–2017) do not have the T2 chip so features like secure boot Touch ID security and hardware encryption are handled differently or not available. No T2 drivers are needed for these models.
I’ve used various Intel based Macs with Linux over the years and the touchbar models have no drivers for the touchbar that work
Hi Fred, thanks for that link I’ve been doing some research on this and it seems to be a very complex issue because of all the different models. I have a MacbookPro 14,2, according to the link you showed me the touchbar is supposed to have basic function. I don’t quite understand what is meant on that page by
" Not working out of the box, but thanks to @roadrunner2 basic functionality is working using the apple-ib-tb kernel module you can find in the following git repository: GitHub - roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver: Input driver for the SPI touchpad / keyboard found in the 12" MacBook (MacBook8,1 + MacBook9,1) and 2016 through 2018 Macbook Pro's (MacBookPro13,* and 14,*); a Touch Bar driver is also available.
Starting with Linux 5.9 a forked version of the driver is necessary, which is available at https://github.com/PatrickVerner/macbook12-spi-driver "
According to this command └─$ lsmod | grep -i apple
applesmc 32768 0
apple_mfi_fastcharge 16384 0
usbcore 409600 6 xhci_hcd,usbhid,apple_mfi_fastcharge,uvcvideo,brcmfmac,xhci_pci
applespi 53248 0
crc16 12288 3 bluetooth,ext4,applespi
I do have the applespi driver that is required but it seems to imply I need a fork of that version that I cannot find? Do you know what I would need to get this to work? I would pretty much be happy if I could get F# keys to show up. Sorry I don’t know much about this topic and am a little lost on what I should be doing.
Also since the current kali kernel doesn’t work with apple spi, I manually compiled the latest stable kernel 6.15.6 on the kali 2024.3 image and am now running that kernel which didn’t seem to have any effect on increasing driver functionality. I still have both kernels available to use through GRUB so I can switch back to 6.8.11 if its better to use for these drivers. Any advice is appreciated and I thank you for your insight!
There are several forked copies of that repo on github about the spi drivers, though I’m not sure they are still needed?
To be fair, it looks like more works than not now, especially since I last looked into this (no longer own any intel Macs), earlier physical keyboard versions were easier, touchbar always problematic, mainly because its a touchscreen interface really and not a keyboard at all in the physical sense.
The only distro that always kinda ‘just worked’ out of the box for my Macbooks was Fedora, so it might be worth trying a recent version of that for comparison. If it doesn’t work on Fedora, it likely won’t work with any Linux distro…
Thanks for the reply, soon I will try Fedora and see if it works. If it does I will try to get it working on kali and report back.