Re: GRUB booting Mac OS X (xnu)

[Chris Murphy]

On Oct 26, 2014, at 10:06 PM, Chris Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:

> OK I've got this working. The problem was user error. Explicitly setting root 
> is necessary, and I've updated the bug.
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?42954
> 
> So the approach of chainloading Apple's boot.efi is valid. What's needed is 
> to consider Recovery HD (Apple Boot partitiontype GUID) to be the partition 
> searched by os-prober, figure out its UUID so that set root can be done by 
> UUID.
> 
> The Apple Boot [1] is used by OS X 10.7 through 10.10, so it's a good start 
> point to search for OS X since it won't be anywhere else.
> 
> Going forward, any conventional HFS+ partition [2] isn't going to be OS X, 
> but instead will be any distribution using mactel boot, since putting 
> grubx64.efi on the FAT32 ESP is *not* picked up by Apple's firmware as a 
> legit bootloader. Only if there is an NVRAM entry for it, and bootcurrent has 
> it listed first, can it be used. By putting grubx64.efi on hfsplus, and 
> tricking the firmware into thinking it's an OS X bootloader, we get a 
> prettier user friendly linux boot experience on Macs.
> 
> 
> [1] partitiontype GUID 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
> [2] partitiontype GUID 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC


mactel-boot
http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/mactel-boot/


Chris Murphy