Re: grub-efi x86_64 on macbook air?

["Javier Martín" <lordhabbit@gmail.com>]

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El mié, 28-01-2009 a las 17:42 +0100, step21 escribió:
> Hey, while investigating possibilities on how it might be possible to
> install/run something "wubi" like on macs (without having windows
> installed) I ran into a couple of issues. I post here mainly in hope
> that one of the folks that actually wrote the code for this or at
> least have experience with it read this, cause most ppl on irc (while
> being very helpful) seem to know more about the pure x86/bios/linux
> side of things.
> 
> Besides some (minor?) issues like that the command line
> freezes/becomes unresponsive after a (relatively short) amount of time
> and the fact that booting back to OS X (which everyone says should
> work 100%) does not work at all (it complains that it can't find the
> specified os x *efi, but it is there, and search correctly finds the
> right drive) my biggest problem right now is the following:
> 
> I got some kerne/initrd combo to boot (2.6.26 from debian lenny
> netinstall iirc) but it gets to the language selection screen, first
> thing you notice, the keyboard is dead. I supplied "init=/bin/sh" to
> be able to read at least the last of the error messages. As it turns
> out to me it seems that seemingly everything pci-related is
> unavailable. Error messages are as follows:
> 
> [time after boot]PCI No IRQ known for interrup pin C of device
> 0000:00:1a.7. Please Try using pci=biosirq
> [time after boot]ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7 Found HC with no IRQ. Check
> BIOS/PCI 0000:00:1a.7 setup!
> [time after boot]ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7 fail, -19
> (of course time/device ids and pins (A-D) changed, but otherwise they
> were the same I think)
> I tried supplying pci=biosirq although I didn't think it would work,
> and it didn't, or some solution for a similiar issue from the debian
> wiki for the macbook (using a usb keyboard) which didn't work either.
> The usb keyboard works for refit and grub, but not once booted into
> linux. On some other wiki page it was suggested to supply "noapic
> acpi=force" and maybe "irqpoll" which I tried in various combinations
> without a change.
> 
> The machine I use for testing this is a first generation macbook air.
> Now while there are numerous reports about people running linux on it
> (pretty well actually) by providing it with a legacy bios environment,
> I didn't find a report about one running grub-efi on it successfully
> to boot linux. The most relevant posts my searches come up with are my
> own posts on the ubunutu forums.
> 
> So, I'm not sure who is to blame here, or if it's maybe just my own
> fault, but I decided that it would be nice to get the
> opinion/solutions? of some ppl who might be more intimately familiar
> with the workings of the mac boot firmware etc. and maybe know if this
> actually has been tested and should work, or not.
> 
> Thanks for an help in advance.

Are you sure that Debian lenny supports booting from EFI? I'm quite
literally talking out of my ass here, so I don't have a clue, but it
seems that the kernel you're trying to boot is trying to use BIOS
functionality. GRUB does _not_ include BIOS emulation, so that will
certainly not work. In order for a Linux kernel to boot from EFI, you
have to enable the switch in the pre-build kernel configuration.

From my past knowledge (on my brother's Macbook), at least Ubuntu/x86
kernels _do_ have the EFI switch enabled, so you might give it a try and
check if that's what's going wrong.

On the OS X and keyboard issues, I'm afraid I cannot help you. Perhaps
our elders would be wiser?

PS: you could try, however, to enable debug output when compiling your
GRUB so that you could see if there was anything wrong when loading the
file, like a hypothetical hfs.mod error (again, talking out of my
non-talking orifices)

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