Installation on Macs could use EFI booting instead of legacy BIOS
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
debian-installer (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
ubiquity (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (Trusty) on my Mac Mini 6,1 using the server installer. First I tried the "+mac" variant, which gave me a system that booted in legacy BIOS mode, and then then I tried the normal variant, which gave me an unbootable system.
I eventually got the EFI installation working, resulting in an Ubuntu installation that boots directly from the Mac bootloader firmware (ie. no rEFInd/rEFIt). The basic steps are to use an HFS+ filesystem instead of VFAT for the EFI partition, to "bless" the EFI boot image, and to create a couple of files that the Mac bootloader requires.
I wrote the full procedure up as a guide:
http://
While my guide only covers single-boot into Ubuntu on a Mac Mini, I hope there's enough detail there to illustrate what's needed for a more general case.
Note that grub-efi-amd64 already does the right thing (except for Debian bug #716927 [1]). The only tool that isn't already in the repos is the mactel-boot utility (aka. hfsbless), which I've made available in my PPA[2] (see also the Github repo[3], which has the Ubuntu packaging metadata in various branches, and is git-buildpackage friendly).
So it should be possible to install Ubuntu in EFI mode on Macs. This would reduce the options presented to a user when downloading the installer, and result in a more consistent experience for users across Windows and Mac.
[1] https:/
[2] https:/
[3] https:/
Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.