State of affairs with Boot Camp

[chrisp]

A quick wrap-up of Boot Camp's impact on Linux:

- First of all, the main part of Boot Camp is actually in the updated firmware, so it affects all operating systems.

- elilo and an EFI-enabled kernel work as before.

- The current LiveCD from mactel-linux (http://www.mactel-linux.org/) will boot with the new firmware, but you'll get the kernel for standard PCs because of the legacy compatibility in the new firmware. AFAIK that means no full-screen framebuffer graphics.

Some more details on the Live CD: The current CD contains two kernels and boot loaders, one for standard PCs and one for the EFI-based Intel Macs. Unfortunately, the new firmware has changed El Torito handling, and the EFI-enabled loader and kernel are no longer accessible at all. We may have to revert to HFS+ for the Live CD, and wait for an mkisofs version that can build hybrid ISO/HFS+ disks to get universal PC/Mac booting back.

- rEFIt 0.4 still works, but it doesn't support legacy booting, and it throws a (harmless but annoying) error message when a legacy-booting partition or CD is present. The error message is fixed in the current development version, but legacy booting support will take some time. Also note that using "Startup Disk" will disable rEFIt and you'll need to run "enable.sh" again.

[thesman]

This is what I'm interested on. Get Triple-Booting back. The major problems I see now are: full-screen framebuffer graphics and getting the 3 OSes installed and having OSX bootloader recognizing them all.

Good that rEFIt still works.

[diamondsw]

Why do we need rEFIt? Shouldn't the goal be that a Linux partition shows up in the Apple disk selector like any other boot volume? Also, why would EFI support be needed for accelerated graphics, since Windows obviously does not require it?

(Pardon me if I'm missing something basic.)

[thesman]

Just wondering HOW to create the partitions... bootcamp needs a single OSX partition and then creates another for XP, if you try to spli that XP partition with parted or whatever, even versions that support GPT, when you try to install XP you'll see that windows will see only the full disk as available and use it as C:

[diamondsw]

Just wondering HOW to create the partitions... bootcamp needs a single OSX partition and then creates another for XP, if you try to spli that XP partition with parted or whatever, even versions that support GPT, when you try to install XP you'll see that windows will see only the full disk as available and use it as C:

Or, you just create your partitions beforehand with Disk Utility (which will set them all up properly) and choose the proper one in Windows setup. Why wouldn't that work? All of the "magic" is in the firmware, as far as I can tell.

[thesman]

I guess that could work... I'll try it on my macbook this evening an post my findings.

[diamondsw]

People interested in this will also likely find this MacGeekery post on resizing HFS+ volumes on the fly (http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/cli/nondestructively_resizing_volumes) rather useful.

[chrisp]

Why do we need rEFIt? Shouldn't the goal be that a Linux partition shows up in the Apple disk selector like any other boot volume? Also, why would EFI support be needed for accelerated graphics, since Windows obviously does not require it?

(Pardon me if I'm missing something basic.)
You do not need to use rEFIt if you don't like it. With the proper patches, elilo alone will do fine, it just won't look as nice.

To have Linux show up in the built-in volume chooser, you need a second small HFS+ volume right now, because the chooser will only display HFS+ volumes (and with the Boot Camp updates, partitions with legacy boot code, but those are automatically labeled "Windows").

EFI is required for graphics because there are no Linux drivers for the ATI X1600 yet, and the hacks to reuse the EFI framebuffer for fbdev do not work when you're booting in legacy mode.

[thesman]

To have Linux show up in the built-in volume chooser, you need a second small HFS+ volume right now, because the chooser will only display HFS+ volumes (and with the Boot Camp updates, partitions with legacy boot code, but those are automatically labeled "Windows").

I have 3 bootable partitions, OS X (sda2), Linux(sda3) and Windows XP (sda4). These last two were installed as "legacy" operating systems. XP was installed normally without any magic and Linux was almost from scratch and LILO was used to setup a boot sector on /dev/sda3.

Linux doesn't show up in the buil-tin volume chooser. For it to work I had to dump that sector with dd and add it to Windows's bootloader and it is working this way (nasty, I know, but it works).

I'm waiting for your progress chris, a nice bootloader as rEFIt would be much nicer than this.

Cheers.

[Betamax]

Just a quick FYI: X1600 linux drivers are now available on ati's website.