On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 11:49 AM Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> wrote: > On 2021-03-13 10:05 +0000, Pip Cet wrote: > > On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 9:30 AM Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> wrote: > > > so this is likely to be superseded > > > by the work Asahi Linux is doing within Linux mainline at some point. > > I hadn't realised there were two projects working on this. That is > good. But I agree with Paul that Corellium are goig to remain > irrelevant froma debian POV if they don't upstream their code (someone
I agree with that, too, but it's a big if. I think it's a bad idea to assume the worst. > else is welcome to try and do it for them, but if they don't engage > everyone will choose the Asahi stuff - I would too). Well, it's not clear to me whether Asahi is supposed to be a Linux distribution, in which case "choosing the Asahi stuff" means not choosing Debian. > > AIUI, the boot process does not involve macOS; installing a > > kernel/bootloader image is currently only possible from the recovery > > OS included with macOS, but that's not that unusual. It does mean an > > inconvenient extra step installing a bootloader for users, which I > > believe is precisely what Apple intended... > > I've not looked into this, and clearly it's progressed far enough that > I should. I have one of these machine and am very keen to see debian > on it so I can use the damn thing without having to learn macos. I agree, you should. I think I've got a reasonable good understanding of what's going on with the boot process, by now... > I'm happy to do some work on making debian work on this platform, > although tuits are always in short supply... If there's anything I can do to help, I'd love to! > > I'm admittedly unfamiliar with how Debian does these things. Any hints > > or pointers to relevant documentation would be appreciated. > > What we want is to be provided with the UEFI environment then we don't > have to do anything special for the platform and debian will boot and > 'just work' (insofar there is kernel support). The UEFI-a-like > environment that u-boot provides more-or-less does the job (there was > some issue with persistence of writeable variables IIRC) so if that's > what's provided then we are fairly happy too (and that is what the > Asahi linux people currently propose). That would be wonderful. I don't think it's going to happen unless there's a change of heart at Apple. > We do have the facility to do special things for a platform (via > flash-kernel) but it's much nicer not to have to: booting from a > standard platform interface is a good thing that separates firmware > development and distro development. I don't see any way to avoid telling people how to boot into 1TR, run bputil (which disables the "Trusted Computing" mode), run kmutil (which installs a kernel other than macOS), and then boot an environment which ultimately loads the right image of Linux. I do think we can make the rest of the process easier than it currently is. So the process is: - grab a USB image - flash it to a USB drive - boot your Mac and keep holding the power button for twenty seconds or so until "boot options" are being loaded - click on "options" - click (this doesn't work with the keyboard) the menu bar and select Utilities / Terminal - run a shell script off the USB drive - enter passwords and username at the prompt, repeatedly The other problem is that I do not think that we can repartition Apple file systems yet, which adds a "play around with the Apple repartitioning software until you finally have a linuxable partition" step (I did that, and it made me hate macOS)... Pip