Re: [PATCH] Add apple_set_os command

[SevenBits]

On Friday, January 3, 2014, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko  wrote:
> On 31.12.2013 00:11, SevenBits wrote:
>
> > On Monday, December 30, 2013, Andreas Heider wrote:
> >
> >     The EFI on current macbooks configures hardware differently depending
> >     on wether it is booting Mac OS X or a different os, for example
> >     disabling the internal GPU completely on some models.
> >
> >     Mac OS X identifies itself using a custom EFI protocol.
> >
> >     This adds a command that fakes the os identification, making all
> >     hardware accessible.
> >
> >
> > Just a question: I do a lot of booting Linux on MacBooks, and I
> > frequently suffer from this issue. How do we know that this code
> > actually works?
> Run on a mac with this code and without and compare results. The ship of
> "works by sane design" has long since sailed away. For most
> manufacturers it's somewhere in Moon orbit but for apple it has long
> since left solar system.

Believe me, I'm done quite a bit of work with Apple's EFI and it is certainly a pain in the neck once you start digging underneath the surface and doing anything more than really basic stuff. Some MacBooks for instance are still running EFI 1.x while some newer ones implement 2.x... It's quite a disaster considering those older machines are still in use.

I'll give the patch a try. Hopefully it will work. I'm personally fearful that it won't make any difference, but you never know. I love Apple products, I think they're great stuff, but the EFI implementation can drive you crazy and OS X boots in a roundabout way, which gives Linux fans like myself headaches when we try to boot Linux on the machines.

Anyway, I'll give it a go and report what I find.