Booting Fedora (any) on a Macbook Pro 8,2

[RodMacKenzie]

Hi All,
I installed the propitiatory binary radeon driver by following the instructions on http://www.fedorafaq.org/. This boosted the battery life from about an hour to about 3hrs.45 mins.
Rod

---------- Post added at 09:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:34 PM ----------

btw that was in bios mode.

[chrismurphy]

My best guess is the proprietary driver is probably taking advantage of whatever power savings might be available in discrete graphics, as this battery life is still 1/2 that when booted from Mac OS X when automatic graphics switching is enabled.

My limited understanding of the problem at this point (i.e. this is a speculative comment as it's sourced in what other have said elsewhere) is that Intel integrated graphics aren't available in CSM-BIOS mode, just AMD discrete graphics. To get better battery life, EFI mode booting needs a manual or automatic way to negotiate Intel integrated and AMD discrete graphics.

[RodMacKenzie]

What you say makes sense. on my 7,1 macbook i've also got a power saving script which kicks in, in battery mode. I expect this will help a bit once i've ported it to the new machine. I'll post it once I've done it.

[SwissalpS]

I was able to boot from LiveCD on MBP 8,2 so I tried the arguments used on there.

my grub.cfg now contains an entry:

fakebios

linux (hd0,4)/vmlinuz-3.1.0......x86_64 root=/dev/sda10 rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0

initrd (hd0,4)/initramfs-........x86_64.img

I'm not sure if it's any help to include a separate line after fakebios: root=(hd0,10)

replace the ....... with the actual numbers!

The idea came from here but it would not launch X with the arguments

video=efifb agp=off

so I replaced them with those on the live-CD (probably those are Gentoo specific)

Yay! Keyboard backlighting and screen brightness controlls on the F-keys work perfectly. (unlike Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, which, in it's defense, does install the bootloader correctly.)

Now it's only a matter of nuances, such as sound that I need to get working.

[chrismurphy]

SwissalpS, I'm not at all understanding exactly what you have done.

fakebios is a GRUB2 incantation, as is video=efifb. But Fedora 16 does not use GRUB2 EFI, it uses GRUB Legacy EFI by default. So it's unclear how you've actually booted this Macbook Pro, EFI or CSM/BIOS.

Your link goes to instructions on using ELILO and I'm not seeing fakebios or really anything related.

[SwissalpS]

Well the problem was, that Fedora failed to install Grub in the first place so I installed Grub2 as described by the "how-to" the link points to.
The same "how-to" has both ELILO and Grub2 information along with rEFIt and a lot of other interesting information. It has an index at the top for quick access.

[chrismurphy]

It's still unclear because the how-to does not distinguish between GRUB2 and GRUB2-EFI. It only mentioned GRUB2. So I can't tell which you have installed, or how you're booting.

Do you know for sure that your hardware is booting with EFI? Or is it booting CSM/BIOS? What does this command return:

efibootmgr -v

I have Fedora 16 on a MBP 8,2 booting with CSM/BIOS just fine. The problem is EFI mode booting.

[SwissalpS]

efibootmgr -v

returns nothing

I did not compile Grub2, downloaded it.

[chrismurphy]

Returns nothing at all? Not even command not found? This makes no sense.

---------- Post added at 11:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:51 AM ----------

If efibootmgr is not installed, it's definitely not booting in EFI mode. For example:

[chris@f16v ~]$ efibootmgr
bash: efibootmgr: command not found...

If efibootmgr is installed, but you're not booting EFI mode, you get:

[chris@f16v proc]$ sudo efibootmgr -v
Fatal: Couldn't open either sysfs or procfs directories for accessing EFI variables.

You should get one of these two results. Or if you are booted EFI mode, you'll get a string of text that contains boot sequence information.

[SwissalpS]

I get neither. Simply goes to next prompt without any output.

This link holds info that also helped out and the link to the pre-compiled file I downloaded.

I trashed the BOOTIA32.efi file.


Edit: overlooked the sudo... with sudo I do get:

BootCurrent: 0080
Timeout: 5 seconds
BootOrder: 0080
Boot0080* Mac OS X ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(5,2 2b75f8,ee6b280,ab5b90a8-7eb9-4777-bf08-791fbd4db0c8)
Boot0081* Mac OS X ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(1,2 8,64000,000046fd-12b5-0000-5952-0000734b0000)File(\EFI\APPLE\FIRMWARE\SmcFlasher.e fi)-.w.v. .-.L.o.a.d.A.p.p. .e.f.i.-.a.p.p.l.e.-.p.a.y.l.o.a.d.0.-.d.a.t.a. .-.r.e.s.t.a.r.t...
Boot0082* ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(5,2 2b75f8,ee6b280,ab5b90a8-7eb9-4777-bf08-791fbd4db0c8)
BootFFFF* ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(2,6 4028,2538aa60,000016be-3506-0000-e82d-0000840b0000)File(\System\Library\CoreServices\boo t.efi)

If the second path actually points to an existing file, it would be Snow Leopard.

[chrismurphy]

I think this Mac is booted in CSM/BIOS mode. What's the result of

dmesg | grep -i efi

[SwissalpS]

$ dmesg | grep -i efi
[ 0.000000] EFI v1.10 by Apple
[ 0.000000] Kernel-defined memdesc doesn't match the one from EFI!
[ 0.000000] EFI: mem00: type=7, attr=0x80000000000000f, range=[0x0000000000000000-0x000000000008f000) (0MB)

.........shortened for post .....

[ 2.905192] efifb: probing for efifb
[ 2.905947] efifb: framebuffer at 0x90000000, mapped to 0xffffc9000ad00000, using 4032k, total 4032k
[ 2.905952] efifb: mode is 1280x800x32, linelength=5120, pages=1
[ 2.905955] efifb: scrolling: redraw
[ 2.905958] efifb: Truecolor: size=8:8:8:8, shift=24:16:8:0
[ 2.913216] fb0: EFI VGA frame buffer device
[ 3.101367] EFI Variables Facility v0.08 2004-May-17
[ 3.862029] Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 2294.790 MHz.
[ 4.461046] fb: conflicting fb hw usage inteldrmfb vs EFI VGA - removing generic driver

would that be why my audio is not working?

[chrismurphy]

OK you're booted EFI. When you startup, is your GRUB menu showing 0.97? or 1.99?

Also what's the result from

lspci

---------- Post added at 07:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:49 PM ----------

It's possible EFI boot doesn't have audio support, yet. I'm not sure because I haven't been able to get a functional EFI boot on my 8,2 which is why I'm using CSM/BIOS.

[SwissalpS]

$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:01.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Device 1c2c (rev 05)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b5)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Device 1c27 (rev 05)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10)
02:00.1 SD Host controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Memory Card Reader (rev 10)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4331 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 02)
04:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Agere Systems FW643 PCI Express1394b Controller (PHY/Link) (rev 08)

grub version is 1.99

[chrismurphy]

OK interesting. I take it you did not use yum to install GRUB2? What happens if you type

yum info grub2-efi