Re: macbook EFI experiences

[Isaac Dupree]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:42:02AM -0400, Isaac Dupree wrote:
> > okay, I just tried a few days ago's grub2 CVS without patches for i386 
> > efi, because presumably if that doesn't work for me then nothing else 
> > will either (though it's possible that a working x86-64 would work 
> > better for this particular EFI firmware, I suppose)
>
> Actually, I think it's better supported via grub-pc.  In BIOS we have a
> workaround for the keyboard bug.  Was there any other kind of trouble?

No it's not.  I can't use the keyboard on BIOS here, except sometimes 
for one single keystroke or more if I get lucky (true for linux CD 
booting, not just grub2); but the keyboard works fine on EFI and always 
has.  (Or was that workaround you mentioned in grub2 introduced sometime 
in the last year, in which case I should upgrade my grub2-bios 
installation?)

In any case I want to help debug grub2 efi to at least specify what 
still doesn't work, (if anything), even if the keyboard issue is fixed 
for bios.  Then the question becomes whether Ubuntu can survive being 
booted without the BIOS CSM enabled -- which I have yet to see, because 
I couldn't get elilo to work for me either.  But that's not the 
bootloader's problem, right? (although ideally it would be able to find 
a way to -- optionally -- enable the CSM, but I don't think a way has 
been found yet to enable it at all?)

> > The other thing I noticed is, while running grub2-efi, the fan goes on 
> > to max speed/noisyness.  (But grub2 isn't intended to be a huge fancy OS 
> > so there may be nothing reasonable to do about this.)
>
> Sounds like a firmware bug (busy polling for keyboard input).  Does this
> device have an AT keyboard?  Our keyboard driver has the same bug, too, but
> at least we can fix it ;-)

I have no idea what kind of keyboard it is... I know there's a built-in 
keyboard that I'm typing on, but I can't find it with `sudo lshw`, I 
can't think of anywhere more thorough to look, and Apple's specs don't 
seem to say <http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html>.  Plugging in an 
Apple USB keyboard was no better than the built-in one.

P.S. the bios-bootloader-keyboard failure is a well known Apple firmware 
bug that they claim to have fixed but it didn't seem fixed to me after I 
installed their firmware update


-Isaac