[ipxe-devel] Apple iMac's

[Brandon Penglase]

For what it's worth at this point, there is this little gem from 4.5
years ago (oh god...):
https://git.ipxe.org/people/mcb30/ipxe.git/commit/5de37e124fd21c8f918f3fe26fc33a764709ead4

Basically it would allow you to reference the fat ipxe efi binary as
the Booter file from the DHCP server, and boot ipxe directly.

I can't say if it currently works or not (I could spin it up and try
against an old Mac Mini). Does still build and combine though:
1.8M Feb 21 21:06 fat-ipxe.efi

The sad part is that any of the new machines won't work with this, or
USB, unless you boot it up and disable SecureBoot. I find it really sad
they effectively got rid of Netbooting.. but that's Apple.

Brandon Penglase


On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:20:20 +0100
Sebastian Roth <sebaroth at gmx.de> wrote:

> On 2/20/19 11:26 PM, Andreas Fink wrote:
> > Macs don't netboot in the usual PXE fashion (dhcp to get a local IP
> > + tftp to load a image of a tftp server).
> > They have another mechanism called Boot Server Discovery Protocol
> > (BSDP). That mechanism can then be used to then load ipxe.  
> 
> While you are right about it being a bit different to PXE boot and
> called BSDP in the Apple world I wouldn't say "Macs don't netboot in
> the usual PXE fashion". The base of BSDP is not far from PXE netboot
> I find.
> 
> 
> >> On 20 Feb 2019, at 17:27, Matthew Turner <supra_matt at yahoo.com
> >> <mailto:supra_matt at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> We have a number of Apple iMac's 14,2 & 17,1 machines.  
> 
> You might want to read through those posts as well as we had people
> with particular iMacs (depends on the NIC model) that couldn't be
> made to boot from network using iPXE:
> https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10615/ipxe-booting-possibly-broken-on-os-x-sierra-update
> (see the topics on iMacs linked there too)
> 
> Keeping my fingers crossed that you have other NICs in your iMacs!
> 
> Sebastian
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