[ipxe-devel] Load via EFI on Macs

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi,

I'm attempting to netboot Linux on my Macs. I don't want to mess around with 
boot cds, so I have to maket his work with the Macs EFI firmware.

The first problem I encountered with iPXE is that I don't see any output on 
the screen. That's because Macs start in graphic mode. The attached 
hack(inspired by Refit's textmode.efi) puts the firmware into text mode, so I 
actually see something.

The next problem(for debugging purposes), is that Ctrl-B does not work. I 
replaced the key with 'a', which allows me to bring up the iPXE shell.

The next issue is that iPXE doesn't find my network card. This seems to be a 
regression, because it works fine with gPXE(I just filed to gPXE bugs before I 
noticed that iPXE exists now). I tried the following builds:

make bin-i386-efi/ipxe.efi
make bin-i386-efi/sky2.efi
make bin-i386-efi/sky2.efi DEBUG=sky2

None of them works. If I don't open the console, I see "o more network 
devices" (with an o, not a 0).

Currently I've netboot working by loading a grub2 .efi file with a memdisk 
image that contains a config file and kernel. I hope to replace this with a 
solution that allows me to separate the boot loader, kernel and configuration.

Best regards,
Stefan
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0001-Hack-to-load-on-Macs-via-EFI.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 6141 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/attachments/20120216/acb55ec8/attachment.bin>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/attachments/20120216/acb55ec8/attachment.sig>