The Goal
Have Obarun boot and run X on my old late 2006 MacBook Pro. (Anybody else thinks this is a waste of time?)
I
had already installed Artix before on this machine with a custom patched and compiled Kernel and Grub as bootloader.
This machine consists of the following components
important to the installation (some details are a note to myself):
- Core 2 Duo Intel CPU 2.16Ghz
- Model T7400; Codename Merom-2M; 2 cores; x64; 4MiB L2 Cache; 34W TDP; Clock multiplier 13x; 667 MT/s FSB; Stepping B2 CPUID 06F6
- Support for VT-x, EIST
- No support for C-States, Intel Hyper-Threading or Intel Turbo-Boost
- 32 bit EFI v1.10
- This was the last version of the so called EFI spec updated by Intel in July 2005 (This original EFI spec is still owned by Intel. After this version Intel contributed all further efforts and existing knowledge to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum; This is where todays UEFI firmwares get their name from and they are owned by this forum which is basically "[...]an alliance between several leading technology companies"
- Support for boot from HFS+ formatted ESP or from 6X DL optical drive
- No support for USB during boot
- Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU 470 MHz
- Model M56; Codename RV530; 256MB GDDR3 Memory [Wiki says 256 - Apple specs say 128?!]; 128 bit Memory Bus
- Support for Direct3D 9.0c, OpenGL 2.0
- Support for 16:10 Resolutions: [1440x900] (native), [1280x800], [1152x720], [1024x640], [800x500]
- 120GB HDD 5400 RPM
Not without Issues
- The firmware will only boot from internal or optical media. (Firmware does not support USB by itself)
- So there's two very uncomfortable options here: There's a site dedicated to create ISOs for major distros with cross architecture support and a script to make your own ISO. Those images boot from the BIOS emulation of the firmware though which can not access any EFI variables and is rather (or like seriously hell) slow. The other way is to install directly to a hard drive which then gets installed into the machine. The latter has been and will be my way.
- Due to # 1 there's no access to the NVRAM before having anything to boot from hard disk.
- This machine doesn't save NVRAM entries between boots to begin with. I'm not sure if this is unique to my machine or common with these models.
- Some Apple and other firmwares of this type are known to not load any video bios at all or a garbage file. This makes the radeon module KMS not work and will fail to render Grub by default.
Plan of Attack
Appearing in order of difficulties.
- Pull the disk and put it into my main rig.
- Format the disk and set up a dedicated ESP formatted as HFS+.
- Copy the Obarun ISO to the disk root partition.
- Compile custom LTS kernel and install it to the disk.
- # 2 doesn't concern me as I shouldn't rely on NVRAM in such an unstable system anyways.
- Therefore have the boot loader or manager being found at EFI spec fallback path /boot/efi/bootia32.efi
- There's several ways to tackle the issue with the video bios:
- Boot a console only system with kernel option nomodeset to disable KMS
- Build a hacky workaround for Grub to load a video bios from a file which needs to get extracted from the firmware (boot into BIOS compatibility mode and extract). This is how I installed and used Artix on this machine before.
- Instead of using Grub try other bootloaders like Clover
- Instead of a bootloader use a bootmanager like rEFInd which was basically made for these machines
Call to Action
I'm thinking right now that actually using rEFInd I might even use a stable kernel without patches. There's been positive reports on using rEFInd instead of a bootloader. I'll see where I go from here.
@ eric Do you use any custom kernel options for Obarun or is it upstream Arch kernel?
@ anybody I'm open for ideas, comments, questions and any kind of input.
This might be a while or not before I get this project started as I'm currently working on my 1997 Ford Ranger engine.