[9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[Brad Frank]

What kinds of modifications would be necessary to get plan9 booting on
intel macs? The latest releases don't seem to boot, they just hang.

Re: [9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2009/6/29 Brad Frank <brad.frank@gmail.com>:
> What kinds of modifications would be necessary to get plan9 booting on
> intel macs? The latest releases don't seem to boot, they just hang.

EFI, at a minimum.

Re: [9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[David Leimbach]

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On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Devon H. O'Dell <devon.odell@gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/6/29 Brad Frank <brad.frank@gmail.com>:
> > What kinds of modifications would be necessary to get plan9 booting on
> > intel macs? The latest releases don't seem to boot, they just hang.
>
> EFI, at a minimum.
>
>
What of rEFIt or Boot Camp?  They have BIOS support.

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Re: [9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2009/6/29 David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Devon H. O'Dell <devon.odell@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 2009/6/29 Brad Frank <brad.frank@gmail.com>:
>> > What kinds of modifications would be necessary to get plan9 booting on
>> > intel macs? The latest releases don't seem to boot, they just hang.
>>
>> EFI, at a minimum.
>>
>
> What of rEFIt or Boot Camp?  They have BIOS support.

They also demonstrate my negligence of Mac hardware. I might try
taking a look at it if I had one.

--dho

Re: [9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

I accidentally installed a FreeBSD drive in my MacBook. To my surprise,
it just worked. If you install a boot drive with the "usual" PC disk
partitioning the Macs will boot in what seems to be a fairly complete
BIOS emulation.

How far Plan9 gets is another story, but my guess is that even if it
sees the disk controllers properly, it's not going to like the NIC(s).

Don't even try to install it on a Mac. Instead, pull the drive and do
the install on a normal PC, then stick the drive back into the Mac. This
might give you a fighting chance, but it's inevitable you'll be doing
driver work before long.

Re: [9fans] Booting plan9 on intel macs

[J.R. Mauro]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg<lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> I accidentally installed a FreeBSD drive in my MacBook. To my surprise,
> it just worked. If you install a boot drive with the "usual" PC disk
> partitioning the Macs will boot in what seems to be a fairly complete
> BIOS emulation.
>
> How far Plan9 gets is another story, but my guess is that even if it
> sees the disk controllers properly, it's not going to like the NIC(s).
>
> Don't even try to install it on a Mac. Instead, pull the drive and do
> the install on a normal PC, then stick the drive back into the Mac. This
> might give you a fighting chance, but it's inevitable you'll be doing
> driver work before long.
>
>

Just installing rEFIt will be much easier than any of that, assuming
plan 9 can handle the hardware. But the intel macs use Broadcom NICs
and a weird platform chip for the ambient light sensors and
accelerometers, which you'd have to write a driver for. Looking for
'applesmc' would give some examples. I can't think of other weird
hardware they might use... aside from discrete video cards, they're
mostly intel hardware.