iPXE & MBP

[KingBonecrusher]

Hi!

Are there any known issues, that MacBooks (7,1 / 5,5 / 5,4 / 8,1) are not able to work with iPXE? I was able to set up an dhcpd to boot an ipxe64.efi file. Long way ;-) Thats works, but iPXE freezes direct after CTRL+B. Grub 2.02-beta2 works, but is not able to connect to the network.... At least apple crap, but it should work in any way :-(

[robinsmidsrod]

Have a look at the stickied post about EFI Mac boot where Pretzel discusses a lot of approaches to the problem and the challenges involved. Link here: http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=7323

As mentioned in that thread, booting ipxe.efi using chainloading is a bit tricky, and trying from USB might at least verify if iPXE is able to work in some capacity or not on your hardware.

If you still have problems I would suggest you come on IRC and discuss it further. UEFI support is still work-in-progress, and Mac support even more so.

[KingBonecrusher]

At least i am using grub2 2.02-beta2 from git and it works. If you have a ipxe.efi image with all debug options enabled, you can send it to me and i will give you feedback. I don`t know if it is chainloaded, because my macs are booting directly from network. There is no usb stick or any other stuff, directly powered on with "N" key.

With my setup i can boot 32 & 64 bit kernels. So i can boot clonezilla and nearly all live linux distros. It is not possible to boot something what needs bios calls like memtest86+ or memdisk. But that is normal because of EFI!

[robinsmidsrod]

The network-boot from Mac is exactly the error situation Pretzel was talking about in the other thread. As he also mentioned he had no problem if running iPXE directly from USB.

I think the best approach is to come on IRC and ask Pretzel directly what he did to make it work properly.