[SOLVED] OSX installer: using bless on elilo

wowbaggerHU · 02-13-2017, 03:57 AM

Hello Everyone,

It might not have been the best idea to post this in the Slackware forum sub-section, but I primarily use Slackware, so that's the reason.

My problem is that I wanted to add an elilo boot entry on my Mac Mini, and I find it kind of hard to do.
I have to say at this point, that I use a standalone Slackware Linux installation on a late 2012 Mac Mini, in EFI mode.

The Slackware UEFI readme strongly suggest not to use efibootmgr for this purpose, as it might brick the Mac Mini's firmware.

My current boot list looks like this:

Code:

root@mac-mini:~# efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 5 seconds
BootOrder: 0080
Boot0080* Mac OS X      ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(2,64028,7456ce40,aee237d2-0eb7-4fe3-8f86-c166ebcbd205)
BootFFFF*       ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(3,69ac6d88,6400000,00001686-2f71-0000-952a-0000ec450000)File(\System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi)

I'm currently booting by placing the elilo boot loader into the default bootloader location on the ESP, and it works, but it takes 30 sec to a minute for the elilo prompt to appear.
I would like to shorten this interval, because I would normally expect it to happen much quicker.

My plan was to boot an OSX installer, and open a terminal there, and use bless, to install elilo as the a (possibly the default) boot entry.

After booting the installer from a USB stick, I first wanted to query the current settings, but I got the following errors:

Code:

# bless --device /dev/disk0 --getBoot
Could not interpret boot device as either network or disk
Can't interpret EFI boot device
# bless --device /dev/disk0 --info
Could not interpret boot device as either network or disk
Can't interpret EFI boot device
# bless --device /dev/disk0s1 --getBoot
Could not interpret boot device as either network or disk
Can't interpret EFI boot device
# bless --device /dev/disk0s1 --info
Could not interpret boot device as either network or disk
Can't interpret EFI boot device

I have two disks installed currently: a 256 GB Samsung SSD, and a WD Black 1 TB HDD.
The OS is installed on the SSB, on top of LVM.

Originally I created three GUID partitions:
1. 250 MB ESP (formatted from Linux: mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda2)
2. 500 MB Linux /boot on ext4
3. ~230 GB for LVM

After learning that elilo was unable to load the kernel from the /boot partition, I deleted the /boot partition, and extended the ESP to take up the space.

Currently, the OSX installer sees:
On the SSD:
/dev/disk0
/dev/disk0s1
/dev/disk0s3

On the HDD:
/dev/disk2
/dev/disk2s1

Originally I wanted to use the commands described in the "Macintosh Note" part on http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloa...tallation.html but I wanted to verify some things before doing so.

My current problem is, that I have no idea, what the problem with my ESP might be, that OSX and bless do not seem to recognize it as a valid ESP... (The machine nevertheless manages to boot from it...)

Thanks for your help!

wowbaggerHU · 02-13-2017, 04:15 PM

The solution was actually to mount the ESP from the installer first.
That way, the bless command succeeded:

Code:

#mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/ESP
#bless --mount /Volumes/ESP --setBoot --file /Volumes/ESP/EFI/Slackware/elilo.efi --shortform

After this, the updated boot entry looks as follows:

Code:

BootCurrent: 0080
Timeout: 5 seconds
BootOrder: 0080
Boot0080* Mac OS X      HD(1,800,177000,feb88bd0-22f5-4f9b-9a96-573f4a2df345)File(\EFI\Slackware\elilo.efi)
BootFFFF*       ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)03120a00000000000000HD(3,69ac6d88,6400000,00001686-2f71-0000-952a-0000ec450000)File(\System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi

After this, the loading of elilo is waaay faster, and thus the startup is much smoother!

khronosschoty · 02-13-2017, 11:18 PM

I think this is as close to an ideal solution as can be found with a Mac. It does suck that (apparently) one has to use OS X to do it.