Posts made by Tom S

[quote=“fractal13, post: 34245, member: 24300”]Status update: Since my last post, we’ve been getting a lot of help from the iPXE developers. iPXE will now switch the Apple EFI to text mode, so that you can see something when the menus show up.

The error that Tom S posted above could have been scraped off of my screen, dozens of times.

There was an error in the Linux kernel that caused the launching of the kernel from iPXE fail. There are patches for it in the kernel for 3.16-rc6+, that fix this problem.

Then, there is another error/unspecified behavior in the difference between EFI 1.10 (Apple EFI) and the latest UEFI (2.4). We’ve found the assumption, and made a hacked solution, that allows me to actually boot the new linux kernel and load the fog initrd. Expect a patch into the mainstream iPXE within a couple of days that has a non-hacked solution.

I’ll followup in this thread when there’s more concrete news.

I’m curious if Tom S is imaging OS X only disks, or if BootCamp/Windows is involved on the image?[/quote]

I just started working on my “version” of fog a week ago so I have only tested os x only drives. But I have thousands of macs at work I can test with. So once the ipxe issue is resolved, nice going by the way, I can help test this out on a multitude of macs.

Thanks
TS

Hey everyone. So I have been looking to expand Fog to support Macs. I have made a few minor changes to fog.upload,fog.download and fog.checkin to support Macs. I also added the “OS X” OS type to the fog database. The imaging works great!! Both single deployment and multicast

As most people realize, you can boot an iPXE cd and get the whole thing working. But who wants to carry around dozens of cds or usb drives? So I decided to go through offering up a efi to the macbooks through isc dhcp. That works great too!! I first started with Grub2 efi and got that booting through netboot. I moved away from grub because it seemed only possible to work if I included the kernel and ram disk into the efi binary itself…not very scalable or compatible with fogs current logical flow. Then I realized that ipxe updated their site @ [url]https://rom-o-matic.eu[/url].

Here I selected the advanced settings and created both 32 and 64 bit efis. They both boot their perspective macs into iPxe and proceed to get the boot menu from fog. All seems great right? Almost. When iPXE loads the init.xz and bzimage we receive the ok message. Linux starts to boot and displays the followinf errors:
i8042: No controller found (web points to ps/2 keyboard driver…but this error is not on cd version of ipxe)
kernel panic – not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0)
Kernel offset: 0x0 from 0xffffffff8100000 (relocation range: …continues on
–[ end kernel panic - not syncing: VFS Unable to mount root on unknown-block91,0)]

none of these errors occur from the cd boot of iPxe. I tried removing root=/dev/ram0 from the boot arguments but alas, no prevail.

I have tried this on both 32 and 64 bit efi macs and the same error occurs. So to sum up this long and winded post: Mac support is very close but it looks like some tweaking to the kernel or ipx.efi is in order.

Tom Elliot you seem to be the maintainer of this post so I ask to you… is there anything you would like me try or possibly a nudge in the proper direction

Thanks
-TS