On Monday 24 March 2008, Charles Abdouch wrote: > The platform I am working on is not a MiniMac though very similar. > Basically if I could load an old BIOS on my MiniMac prior to them > including CSM, I would have the same setup as the machine I am working > on. As it is, when Debian Linux sees the CSM in the new MiniMac BIOS, it > installs as if it was on a Legacy machine so it isn't as useful for doing > UEFI work as I hoped when we bought one. OK. But that does mean that identifying such machines as */mac would not be correct and that logically the current identification method does not work, which immediately explains some of the behavior you see. We'll either need to work out a new way to identify them or change the code that currently depends on the mac subarch identification. Several solutions come to mind: - keep the mac subarch for Intel Macs and define a new subarch for your systems - drop the mac subarch and use a new subarch both for Intel Macs and your systems - drop the subarch altogether and rely entirely on a different identification method (such as the presence of /sys/firmware/efi) The use of a subarch has distinct advantages though, but the final choice depends on: - whether there is enough difference to warrant labeling it a different subarch - how the machines can be recognized, preferably as early as possible - how (technically) different Intel Macs are from your systems and whether distinguising between them is useful in other contexts (I would expect it is) See libdebian-installer/src/system/subarch-x86-linux.c for how Intel Macs are currently recognized (basically using info from dmidecode). That code is used from hw-detect/archdetect.c. This should be the first priority. The rest will follow from that. > Finally, the process works exceedingly well manually. In fact, we were > able to get Debian Linux working with our initial UEFI BIOS with a huge > amount of BIOS bugs and unconfigured hardware. Nice. That gives us a good starting point then. Tweaking existing stuff is generally relatively easy. > Thank you again Frans, You're welcome. Cheers, FJP P.S. For communication on the list it would be great if you could avoid "top-posting". For the reasons why, see for example: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_posting - http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html Bonus points for trimming unneeded text from the quoted post. Just leave what's needed for proper context of your reply.
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