How can we make F17 be able to boot on Macs (with or without reFit)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2011-12-05 at 19:16 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 10:49:39AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Sat, 2011-12-03 at 17:54 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 06:19:27PM +0100, Andreas Tunek wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Yes, and the question becomes, can we make this easier in F17?
> > > 
> > > Yes, we can do EFI installs.
> > 
> > We could also blacklist all Apples to use MS-DOS partitions if you do a
> > BIOS install. It's in fact trivially easy - given where the blacklist is
> > in anaconda's code, it naturally applies only to BIOS installs, not EFI
> > installs.
> 
> That would be a bad idea, given that Apples use GPT. You'd end up with 
> an inconsistent disklabel.

Well, it only applies when Fedora would be rewriting the disk label
anyway, and it only does *that* if you're formatting the entire disk. If
you're not formatting the entire disk, no matter what hardware you're
installing to or what any blacklists say or anything like that, anaconda
is not going to write a new disk label. It will just do its best to work
with whatever's already there. It only writes a new disk label (and
follows the logic paths to determine what type that disk label will be)
when you're entirely formatting the disk.

As discussed on IRC, though, if we think doing BIOS installs on Macs is
fundamentally a bad idea, we should just write anaconda to stop /
heavily discourage you from doing that instead.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net