Re: Why it's so difficult to fix PowerMac booting for good
Hello,
On May 30, 2023 6:45:03 AM EDT, Linux User #330250 <linuxuser330250@gmx.net> wrote:
> > The last time I installed Debian SID with GRUB on a PowerBook Pismo, the
> > Apple_Bootstrap partition was mounted as /boot/grub (it might have been
> > /boot, I don't remember now). But it was a persistent mount. Everything
> > worked, except Mac OS and Mac OS X volumes could not be boot from the
> > menu (booting Mac OS X also doesn't work on an Intel Core 2 Duo system).
>
> Actually, I was able to boot Mac OS X from GRUB. But if I remember
> correctly, I had to play with it a bit as it isn't intuitive...
> os-prober might be helpful as a starting point.
The GRUB Manual [1] says that the PPC port of GRUB only supports booting Linux at the moment. AFAIK booting macOS with GRUB on x86 machines works by just chainloading macOS' UEFI bootloader. I assume this is what yaboot does as well, telling Open Firmware to load OS X's blessed binary instead of the second stage of yaboot and Linux from there. All we need to do is find a way to support Open Firmware chainloading from within GRUB.
--
Ben Westover
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/grub.html#Supported-kernels
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