mjg59 | Properly booting a Mac

This is mostly for my own reference, but since it might be useful to others:

By "Properly booting" I mean "Integrating into the boot system as well as Mac OS X does". The device should be visible from the boot picker menu and should be selectable as a startup disk. For this to happen the boot should be in HFS+ format and have the following files:

/mach_kernel (can be empty)
/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi (may be booted, if so should be a symlink to the actual bootloader)

/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist which should look something like

<xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
        <string></string>
        <key>ProductName</key>
        <string>Linux</string>
        <key>ProductVersion</key>
        <string>Fedora 16</string>
</dict>
</plist>

That's enough to get it to appear in the startup disk boot pane. Getting it in the boot picker requires it to be blessed. You probably also want a .VolumeIcon.icns in / in order to get an appropriate icon.

Now all I need is an aesthetically appealing boot loader.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Right now there's no automatic stuff to handle all this. With luck we'll be making things work properly in F17. The Apple boot picker menu ignores EFI boot variables - you need a blessed HFS+ partition to get that working.

Ok. Thanks. I'll wait for F17.

But for my own clarity... were my mounts correct from above? And this extra hfs+ partition should be mounted to /boot ? is that correct?

The extra HFS+ partition probably wants to be /boot/EFI, but we haven't figured that out for sure yet.

Properly booting a Mac

Re: What's your setup?

Re: What's your setup?

Re: What's your setup?