kernel-packages team mailing list archive

[Michael Titke <michael.tiedtke@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13/06/2015 18:50, Christopher M. Penalver wrote:
> Michael Titke, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu
> better. Just to clarify, are you able to take your MacBook4,1 when it
> had OSX on it, download a Ubuntu live environment, and install without
> any manual modifications (for example as outlined in
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro9-2/Utopic)?

- It's referred as a MacBook4,2 (like in 2.4GHz which is scaled 2.6GHz)
;-)

- Mac OS X Snow Leopard was victim of an experiment: copied the 
/Developer/.../usr/lib/ files to /usr/lib

- I had to visit four stores in Munich to finally find a magazine with 
Debian, Ubuntu and other distros on two double sided DVDs (Linux User)

- I was able to completely install Ubuntu from the Live environment 
without any manual modification: it left me with a completely unbootable 
setup (well, perhaps I even could have used that kernel on DVD / root on 
hd trick but that came only later on and was my only working setup for 
some days)

- I decided to follow the Ubuntu EFI how to (How to boot Ubuntu from EF...
http://askubuntu.com/questions/91484/how-to-boo... [Firefox didn't print 
the last part of the URL - sorry]) but I was not able to make the 
firmware boot directly from the hd until I renamed grub.efi to boot.efi 
and moved it into the root folder of the EFI partition.


Please note that this MacBook is a bit picky about what boot from an 
external drive - the internal hd has been completely unusable for a long 
time but before that it was flaky: sometimes gone, sometimes there - 
makes sometimes the system hang. No matter how often you selected the 
external drive as a boot volume whenever the internal hard disk decided 
to come back to life again it tried to boot off it.

During the recent installation of Ubuntu I experienced another 
interesting behavior of the Super Drive: after that and that many tries 
or changes it would just lock itself: no way to insert any DVD anymore. 
Some hours later I could try again. But it locked right before inserting 
the DVD for the first time and not only after that and that many tries - 
and it was just about finding the right moment when that locking bar 
retreated in the drive: it just makes you go nuts. But now things have 
returned back to normality.

BTW on a third thought about EFI variables: I checked the manual pages 
of Darwin's nvram(8) and bless(8) and now I think there are a lot of 
misconceptions about the Mac booting process out there on the WWW

As far as I can tell my current setup with the "boot.efi" file reflects 
the EFI standard and should work for a lot of systems out of the box? 
GPT partition tables are far more flexible and have less restrictions 
than MBR partition tables. This is why I propose to use it as the 
default for future releases.

-- 
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1464831

Title:
  Ubuntu should default to an EFI compatible install

Status in linux package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Please make Ubuntu Install default to using sane EFI compatible
  partitioning scheme and boot loader installation.

  Full Install

  Partition Table: GPT

  First Partition: Boot / ESP Label: EFI (VFAT/FAT32 with GPT boot flag enabled - see Mange Flags in gparted)
   On my Mac which has never seen BIOS and never will I need a EFI compliant boot setup for the firmware to recognize for example an external hard drive as a boot option: put the corresponding boot image (probably grub.efi) into the root of this boot partition with the name "boot.efi" or it won't show up on startup (using the alt key on a Mac)

  Swap: I still prefer to use two times the size of the RAM for this.
  Root: I prefer to limit this to 150GB and leave some 300GB for further experimenting but it really should be as big as possible.

  
  Please check the grub setup: the current configuration file as created by the installation is too complicated / Debian's handling of the Grub configuration is not user friendly because this. My simple counter example:

  grub.cfg

  # Boot automatically after 30 secs.
  set timeout=3

  # By default, boot the GNU/Linux
  set default=ubuntu

  # Fallback to GNU/Hurd.
  #set fallback=gnuhurd

  # For booting GNU/Linux
  menuentry "Ubuntu (EFI)" --id ubuntu {
          set root=(hd0,gpt3)
          linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 splash quiet
          initrd /initrd.img
  }

  ...


  (The next one is just a guess as I yet have to recompile the kernel myself to check it myself)
  Please check the EFI kernel support configuration (with correctly configured EFI support it might even be possible to distinguish EFI and non-EFI systems during install)

  efivars is built-in to the kernel image but it depends on efi-pstore
  which is to be built as a module??? That misconfiguration of the
  kernel sources might be the reason for the missing EFI support.
  Someone "over at Debian" made that change a long time ago for no good
  reason.

  Perhaps I will add additional information regarding this issue in a
  comment.

  With working EFI support you could as well add a new boot entry in the
  firmware for the Ubuntu Installation during install.

  Thank you!

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.04
  Package: linux-image-3.19.0-15-generic 3.19.0-15.15 [modified: boot/vmlinuz-3.19.0-15-generic]
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.19.0-15.15-generic 3.19.3
  Uname: Linux 3.19.0-15-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: wl
  ApportVersion: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: amd64
  AudioDevicesInUse:
   USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
   /dev/snd/controlC0:  mt         1448 F.... pulseaudio
  CurrentDesktop: Unity
  Date: Sat Jun 13 07:53:30 2015
  HibernationDevice: RESUME=UUID=df8c609c-a8cf-4e53-ae6d-c754aa1ead9b
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-06-08 (4 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" - Release amd64 (20150422)
  MachineType: Apple Inc. MacBook4,1
  ProcFB: 0 inteldrmfb
  ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 splash quiet
  RelatedPackageVersions:
   linux-restricted-modules-3.19.0-15-generic N/A
   linux-backports-modules-3.19.0-15-generic  N/A
   linux-firmware                             1.143
  SourcePackage: linux
  UdevLog: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/log/udev'
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
  dmi.bios.date: 02/09/08
  dmi.bios.vendor: Apple Inc.
  dmi.bios.version: MB41.88Z.00C1.B00.0802091535
  dmi.board.asset.tag: Base Board Asset Tag
  dmi.board.name: Mac-F22788A9
  dmi.board.vendor: Apple Inc.
  dmi.board.version: PVT
  dmi.chassis.asset.tag: Asset Tag#
  dmi.chassis.type: 2
  dmi.chassis.vendor: Apple Inc.
  dmi.chassis.version: Mac-F22788A9
  dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAppleInc.:bvrMB41.88Z.00C1.B00.0802091535:bd02/09/08:svnAppleInc.:pnMacBook4,1:pvr1.0:rvnAppleInc.:rnMac-F22788A9:rvrPVT:cvnAppleInc.:ct2:cvrMac-F22788A9:
  dmi.product.name: MacBook4,1
  dmi.product.version: 1.0
  dmi.sys.vendor: Apple Inc.

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