I've successfully booted smartos on a macbook-pro, using ReFit (at the time) ... i imagine it's still do-able today, with the current incarnation, "ReFind".
It's been probably 18 months since I played with it. My trick at the time was to use ReFit on the mac's hard disk boot blocks to boot a cdrom of the "plop boot manager" , burned from an iso. ( http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html ) ... THAT presented me with a menu that let me boot from a usb stick, containing smartos. So, ReFit might not be compatible with our boot mechanism, but you can jump into another boot manager that is. Plpbt (plop boot manager) .iso image is also handy for when you want to boot a vmware machine from a physical USB stick. On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Michele Codutti via smartos-discuss < smartos-discuss@lists.smartos.org> wrote: > I'm sorry to resurrect this post but I did my homework and tried what > Matthew said and some other things ... but without luck. > I did some exensive research on the subject before replying to this mail. > From what I understood I cannot boot directly smartos (or any illumos > kernel) from refit/refind are boot managers and not boot loaders (they can > only boot efi stubs and not kernels or ramdisks). > So I must return back to grub2 (that is a full fledged) boot loader. > The problem with grub2 is that when it boots in efi mode requires that the > (multiboot) kernel "handles" the console by itself (this is what I > undestood I don't pretend do explain anything of this complicated efi boot > problem). So the message "WARNING: the console will be unavailable to the > OS" is a diagnostic message that grub2 emits when the kernel loaded had not > this feature. > It seems also that this is not a problem that grub could sove by itself, > illumos needs to implement this "functionality" and I cannot gamble in any > way. > The problem is strictly a mac one because apple efi doesn't provide bios > boot compatibility to usb booting (and all recent macs doesn't have the > sata dvd unit an you must use an externale usb one). > Any suggestion? There is a development ongoing to pure illumos (u)efi > booting? > Thanks in advance as usual. > Michele. > > > > On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Matthew Frost <m.fr...@mattronix.nl> > wrote: > >> I have not tried it but i would say try with a USB key and if that >> doesent work try installing the refit bootloader on mac and then use that >> to try and boot your usb key and if you want to change the efi boot manager >> settings you can use an arch linux live cd to do that, thats how i >> installed linux on my mac mini and then removed the need for a mac >> partition or the refit boot loader. >> >> On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Michele Codutti via smartos-discuss < >> smartos-discuss@lists.smartos.org> wrote: >> >>> Hi all! Has everyone tried to boot SmartOS to a Mac Mini. >>> I have a mac mini 2011 (Macmini5,2) and I would like to run SmartOS on >>> it. >>> It is a i5 machine with a 16GB of RAM and a dedicated ATI Video chip. >>> Because of the lack of a integrated DVD-ROM I've tried to boot the CD >>> burned ISO image but without success. >>> Then I've tried a to boot il with grub2 (EFI mode) but it seems that the >>> multiboot directive is somehow incomplete and it warns that the console >>> will be unavailable (and it maintains the promise). >>> Then I've tried with iPXE CD but it not work for my Mac Mini but it >>> worked (but with a garbled console) for a 2010 Mac Mini (Macmini4,1 but has >>> a core2 duo processor so it will be a zone only machine). >>> I'm struggling to achieve this result. >>> As I've noticed, in the SmartOS community there are numerous Mac users >>> so one of them could be successful where I was not. >>> Thanks in advance. >>> Michele >>> *smartos-discuss* | Archives >>> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now> >>> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/26617859-103233bd> | >>> Modify <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription >>> <http://www.listbox.com> >>> >> >> > *smartos-discuss* | Archives > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/21482896-b87d2f10> | > Modify > <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> > Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
